'the wanted ads Retail' is a UK-wide quantitative research project which aims to give a snapshot of shopping habits and behaviour during these challenging economic times. Conducted on behalf of the Newspaper Society by Continental Research, the research findings show just how people are tightening their belts and illustrates the real impact it has on the relative importance of different factors when choosing where to shop.

To provide insight across eight retail sectors - Groceries, Household Goods, Opticians, Entertainment and Leisure, Clothing, Toys, DIY/Gardening and Furniture as we hit a downturn. Six broad topics covered - Frequency of shopping - Where to shop - Attitudes to shopping - Distance travelled to shop - Sources of information - Media usage. 'the wanted ads Retail' builds upon our recent projects (the wanted ads and Local Matters) which further demonstrates the connection and effectiveness of local media.

Whilst a one-off project can never give all of the answers, 'the wanted ads Retail' does provide a number of clear and actionable themes. In total 1268 interviews were carried out across all regions of the UK. 918 were carried out online, 350 on the telephone. The telephone interviews allowed us to carry out the weighting of the online interviews to correct demographic and media bias

Cost and value for money are the number one priority for belt-tighteners, but they are not prepared to trade-off factors e.g. ethical and environmental considerations. Locality remains one of the most important considerations, perhaps driven by escalating fuel costs and growth of more localised opportunities and they are more cautious in decision-making, pre-planning trips. Local media are consistently at the highest level of delivering valuable communications such as highlighting promotions, special offers, vouchers and coupons.

Importantly, local media proved to deliver consistently against all other key communications stages, being particularly efficient at the final stages of promoting special offers. The core media across all stages of influence on the purchase decision are heavily emphasised in local media as well as national newspapers, magazines and television, with over a quarter finding local media useful to learn about new products