Business Research

What is it that made Starbucks an overnight sensation and separated it from other coffee house companies? Why do many products with great product innovation, perfect locations, terrific customer experiences, even breakthrough advertising, fail to get the same visceral traction in the marketplace as brands like Apple and Nike?

Yes, it’s possible to build a business around your expertise, ideas, message, and personality. But first you need to realize - you are the brand. It’s no secret that more people than ever before are building thriving businesses around their personal brands. But why do some create six- or even seven-figure businesses while so many others strive to make a consistent income? In You Are the Brand, Mike Kim shares his proven eight-step blueprint that has helped build the brands for some of today’s most influential thought leaders - as well as his own personal brand.

When CEOs think about the supply chain, it's usually to cut costs. But the smartest leaders see supply chain and sourcing for what they can be: hidden tools for outperforming the competition. Steve Jobs, upon returning to Apple in 1997, focused on transforming the supply chain. He hired Tim Cook - and the company sped up the development of new products, getting them into consumers' hands faster. The rest is history.

Do you work and live with people who are hard to convince? Who dismiss ideas before even thinking about them? Do you want to know how to influence people, without being manipulative? Want to find out how people get motivated, make decisions, how to be more persuasive with everyone? Shelle Rose Charvet, best-selling author, shows you how to match your language to people around you (in your work, with your colleagues, your boss and your clients, and at home, with your partner, family and other relationships).

Why are people named Kim, Kelly, and Ken more likely to donate to Hurricane Katrina victims than to Hurricane Rita victims? Are you really more likely to solve puzzles if you watch a light bulb illuminate? How did installing blue lights along a Japanese railway line halt rising crime and suicide rates? Can decorating your walls with the right artwork make you more honest? The human brain is fantastically complex, having engineered space travel and liberated nuclear energy, so it's no wonder that we resist the idea that we're deeply influenced by our surroundings.

A newly revised and updated edition of the influential guide that explores one of the most powerful ways to attract attention and influence behavior - fascination - and how businesses, products, and ideas can become irresistible to consumers. In an oversaturated culture defined by limited time and focus, how do we draw attention to our messages, our ideas, and our products when we have only seconds to compete?

In this widely acclaimed memoir ("Riveting, moving...a wonderful book" The New York Times Book Review), Katharine Graham tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling.

How can we create and market creative works that achieve longevity? Holiday explores this mystery by drawing on his extensive experience working with businesses and creators such as Google, American Apparel, and the author John Grisham as well as his interviews with the minds behind some of the greatest perennial sellers of our time.

It's not easy for an entrepreneur to get a bank loan, find investors, and make it to the top of your industry. Many business owners find themselves overwhelmed in their business planning process, or even worse, they outsource the planning to an unqualified professional.

When it comes to creating ideas, we hold ourselves back. Thats because inside each of us is an internal editor whose job is to forever polish our thoughts, so we sound smart and in control, and so that we fit into society. But what happens when we encounter problems for which such conventional thinking fails us? How do we get unstuck? For Mark Levy, the answer is freewriting....

Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed.

In this groundbreaking audiobook, Pauline Brown, a former leader of the world’s top luxury goods company and a pioneer in identifying the role of aesthetics in business, shows executives, entrepreneurs, and other professionals how to harness the power of the senses to create products, services, and experiences that stand out, resonate with their customers, and create long-term value for their businesses. The power is rooted in Aesthetic Intelligence - or "the other AI", as Brown refers to it.

Smart and accessible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the definitive text on branding, pairing anecdotes about some of the best brands in the world, like Rolex, Volvo, and Heineken, with the signature savvy of marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries. Combining The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding, this book proclaims that the only way to stand out in today’s marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand - and provides the step-by-step instructions you need to do so.

In this thought-provoking and entertaining book, Tom Asacker, author of Sandbox Wisdom and A Clear Eye for Branding, pulls back the curtain on the workings of the mind and reveals the hidden logic to motivating behavior, both in ourselves and in others.

An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world.

Journalists today are inundated with data about which stories attract the most clicks, likes, comments, and shares. These metrics influence what stories are written, how news is promoted, and even which journalists get hired and fired. Do metrics make journalists more accountable to the public? Or are these data tools the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch wielded by a factory boss, worsening newsroom working conditions and journalism quality?

Using principles from cognitive psychology, Nick Kolenda developed a unique way to subconsciously influence people's thoughts. He developed a "mind reading" stage show depicting that phenomenon, and his demonstrations have been seen by over a million people across the globe. Methods of Persuasion reveals that secret for the first time. You'll learn how to use those principles to influence people's thoughts in your own life.

Everyone has a sensitive side, but nearly one in three people have the genes to be more sensitive than others—both physically and emotionally. These are the people who pause before speaking and think before acting; they tune in to subtle details and make connections that others miss. Whether introverted or extroverted, they tend to be bighearted, creative, and wired to go deep, yet society tells them to hide the very sensitivity that makes them this way. These are the world’s “highly sensitive people,” and Sensitive is the book that champions them.

Secrets the world's best salespeople don't want you to know...finally revealed by Robert Moore, so that you can triple your sales - in any market! Quick question: Imagine yourself closing more deals and making more sales, faster and easier than ever before. How does it feel? Well, that's exactly the purpose of this audiobook: to give you a series of ideas, methods, strategies, and techniques that you can use immediately to make more money.

The lifeblood of your business is repeat customers. But customers can be fickle, markets shift, and competitors are ruthless. So how do you ensure a steady flow of repeat business? The secret--no matter what industry you're in--is finding and keeping automatic customers. These days virtually anything you need can be purchased through a subscription, with more convenience than ever before.