THE CONSUMER CONFIDENCE REPORT – A TOOL FOR
    DEVELOPING MARKETING STRATEGIES DESIGNED FOR THE
                  ONLINE ENVIRONMENT

                                          Mircea Fuciu
                                         Luigi Dumitrescu


        ABSTRACT: The consumers are the backbone of all marketing strategies, decisions and
actions, but at the same time, it has become extremely important to gain and keep the consumers
happy and close to your company, brand or product. Our paper aims to present an important
marketing tools that the companies and their management teams can use to develop marketing
strategies designed for the online environment of the 21st Century: the consumer confidence
report. We are presenting the main tools developed for creating such a report: Consumer
Confidence Index (CCI) and The Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (MCSI), their advantages
and disadvantages. We will present the manner in which we can use the consumer confidence
report to develop new marketing strategies for the next period of time. The paper also underlines
a statistical analysis of the consumer confidence reports for eastern and south-eastern European
countries for the 2010 – 2016 timeframe. We point out the main reasons for the differences
between the figures and these countries considering their demographical profile.

       Keywords: consumers, confidence report, index, strategies, marketing

       JEL Classification: G00, C10, M30, M31