Between January, 2000 and May of this year (2007), the price of an average gallon of “regular” rose from $1.33 to $3.08. Each month during this period, Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, a Chicago research firm, measured the number of U.S. households that said they were cutting back on driving. While these cutbacks generally related to the price of gasoline, the relationship goes off track at numerous points during the price rise of gasoline. These distortions signal both accommodation and resistance to the escalating price of gas.

You can tell a lot about the general media usage of a middle-class Chinese person by looking at how and where they use the Internet. That’s what we are learning from our first Leo J. Shapiro & Associates national poll of China, conducted in March, 2006.

Alexander Graham Bell would be surprised to see pedestrian traffic walking and talking on their cell phones. When Bell invented the telephone, it was to enable people to speak to each other when face-to-face communication was not possible. Bell would be amazed at the growth in “important” messages that people now convey to each other. He did not imagine that the telephone would become a social instrument that displaces personal contact between people. Bell would be surprised that boredom, isolation, and loneliness could drive people to choose electronic over face to face conversation. Moreover, Bell never would have imagined the sheer volume of talk that the cell phone has generated, that there are now people in our society who are doing more talking on their cell phone than they are in face-to-face conversation.

It’s no secret (HINT: the smell of $$$) why so many Fortune 500 companies – IBM, Dell, GM, Motorola, Toyota, and dozens of others – are rushing to participate in Second Life (SL), the increasingly popular online virtual reality game that lets people do whatever they want to do, be whoever they want to be, and sell whatever they want to sell. The knottier mystery is why millions of people are coughing up $10 a month to spend up to fifty hours a week playing a game that gives them the opportunity to spend even more money on things that aren’t real.

China has a preponderance of consumers whose income is growing more rapidly than their propensity to spend. Marketers have an enormous opportunity to stimulate consumer spending in China, as they did in the USA following World War II.