Colleagues note that McCarthy is a shrewd consumer of "O," or opposition research, on the rival candidates he's targeting, and that he hones his message using polls, focus groups, micro-targeting data, and "perception analyzers" — meters that evaluate viewers' split-second reactions to demo tapes.
But sometimes our perception of ourselves as shrewd consumers or demanding decision makers prompts us to make a huge effort to achieve certain ends — precisely because we assign value to the effort itself.
However, the shrewd consumers go right to the restaurants wine list section on the whites of Alsace or Loire or the reds of the Rhône Valley and Languedoc-Roussillon for the real secrets in value wines.
Curious to see if this new GENERATION of face-lifts was more than a public relations gimmick or a shrewd concession to consumer anxiety with little to show for it, I made my way to Dr. Trokel's offices in a brownstone on East 67th Street on the Wednesday afternoon before New Year's to watch a 45-year-old woman undergo a Y-Lift.
If you're a private-sector entrepreneur, participating in the edamame economy is shrewd: Growth in consumer spending has primarily been in the upper income groups.
Consumers are more shrewd about how few consumer goods actually are made in the United States, leaving companies less wiggle room about the origin of products.
It's a shrewd pitch, because the consumer craving for novelty, for the unique, the special, seems unquenchable.
Most, but by no means all, consumers are shrewd enough to be suspicious of e-mail requests for personal information.
That makes it a more exciting company to watch than Facebook, even if many of its hardware ideas seem to reflect an engineer's dreams rather than a marketing executive's shrewd appraisal of what consumers will buy.
Their success proves, if nothing else, that Russian consumers are as shrewd and sceptical as any other country's consumers: they are not arbitrarily prejudiced against Russian manufactured goods, but they demand international standards of performance and reliability from the products they buy.
The surge in savings suggests that consumers are being shrewd with their money.
