The conventional view is that consumers are fickle and inconsistent, hard to understand and predict, and therefore unmanageable. In fact, they are perfectly consistent, perfectly understandable, and quite predictable.

Analyst Insight: Consumer products companies are making far greater use of alternative sales channels than ever before. They are proactively reaching out to customers, whether in B2B or B2C environments, to gain share of mind and increase sales. Consumer products companies have also become much more active using their own websites and utilizing marketplaces as a means to increase their product's visibility and availability to potential customers. – Bruce Tompkins, Executive Director, Tompkins Supply Chain Consortium

From "What Happened?" to "What's Coming?"

The Ebola crisis in West Africa has helped push cocoa prices up by 10 percent since August to more than £1,000 ($1,617) per tonne, and this despite rising production.