Consumer Behavior

We evolved for a particular environment, but our rapid social advances and mushrooming populations have created a bewildering new world. On the timescale of this dizzying change, evolution has effectively stopped, and we must rely on what has gotten us this far. By retracing the path that our distant ancestors took to get here, we can understand the stunning abilities and glaring weaknesses which we have inherited.

Cheap. It's a dirty word laden with negative meanings. It is also the story of Lauren Weber's life. As a child, she resented her father for keeping the heat at 50 degrees through the frigid winters and rarely using his car's turn signals - to keep them from burning out. But as an adult, she found herself walking 30 blocks to save $2 on subway fare. In Cheap We Trust teases out the meanings of cheapness and examines the wisdom and pleasures of not spending every last penny.

Slow Down, Sell Faster! does this by introducing a simple yet powerful method for buyer-focused selling that is practical, repeatable, and easily customizable. This buyer-focused approach extends to proposals and presentations, loyalty and retention, and, of course, cultivating more business. Each step in the book corresponds to a role you should adopt to meet customers’ needs at each stage of the buying process. Increasing sales is not just about learning more sales techniques; it’s about understanding the buying process - from your customer’s point of view.

Jay Baer's Youtility offers a new approach that cuts through the clutter: marketing that is truly, inherently useful. If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life. Drawing from real examples of companies who are practicing Youtility as well as his experience helping more than 700 brands improve their marketing strategy, Baer provides a groundbreaking plan for using information and helpfulness to transform the relationship between companies and customers.

Pork dorks. Craftsters. American Girl fans. Despite their different tastes, these eclectic diehards have a lot in common: they're obsessed about a specific brand, product, or category. They pursue their passions with fervor, and they're extremely knowledgeable about the things they love. They aren't average consumers - they're superconsumers. Although small in number, superconsumers can have an outsized impact on a company's bottom line.

How do you build a business that thrives during good times and bad? Is there a strategy that can set up your company up for success, no matter what curveballs the world may throw your way? There is: Turn customers into repeat customers, and turn repeat customers into loyal customers. Renowned customer service and experience expert Shep Hyken maintains that delivering an amazing customer service experience that keeps customers coming back for more is everyone’s job.

The New Frugality amounts to a paradigm shift in the way we spend and save. The good news is that a frugal lifestyle is one of less waste, lower environmental impact, greater peace of mind, and, over the long run, deeper satisfaction.

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization - until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, health care has finally gone digital.

Do you know how your customers experience your brand today? Do you know how they really feel? Do you know what they say when you're not around? Without defining experiences, brands will become victim to whatever people feel and share. In an always-on world where everyone is connected to information and also one another, customer experience is your brand.

Traditional customer feedback methods ignore two essential sources of insight: context and behavior. These reveal the why behind the what, eliminating the ambiguity of open-ended customer feedback—and this requires a different approach. In What to Ask, author Andrea Belk Olson, CEO of applied behavioral science consulting firm Pragmadik, and head of the University of Iowa JPEC startup incubator, delivers a unique, cognitive method for discovering hidden customer needs, converting them quickly into differentiators, and avoiding the pitfalls of traditional research.

Discover the 24 reasons people are leaving you for competitors and how to win them back. In Why Customers Leave, popular customer experience and marketing speaker David Avrin makes a compelling case for customer experience as a bankable differentiator in an era of vast marketplace choices. The book lays out the reasons for the recent shift in customer mindset and expectation, illustrates the myriad ways that companies inadvertently drive customers and prospects to competitors, and offers a multitude of creative strategies and tactics to attract and retain new prospects.

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

A compelling argument - masterfully researched and brilliantly articulated - that despite increasing prosperity for most of Earth’s inhabitants and an explosion of goods overall, consumption of natural resources such as metals, water, and timber has begun to decline. Best-selling author and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Andrew McAfee says there’s a new reason for optimism: We’re past the point of "peak stuff" - from here on out, it'll take fewer resources to make things and fewer dollars to lead a comfortable life.

Best-selling authors and business experts Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O'Connell contend that most companies, both digital and brick-and-mortar, B2B or B2C, are not designed for service - to provide an experience that matches a customer's expectations with every interaction and serves the company's needs. When customers have more choices than ever before, study after study reveals that it's the experience that makes the difference.

Featuring instructional case studies from companies including Panasonic, Hilton, Merck, and Honeywell, this evidence-based book provides listeners with a proven methodology for driving success before, during, and after every sale. Embracing the entire customer life cycle, Beyond the Sales Process reveals twelve essential strategies including: Study your customer. Give them compelling reasons to engage. Build a vision for them of their own success....

In Winning Her Business, Bridget Brennan, advisor to some of the world’s biggest brands and businesses, provides a road map for selling in a world dominated by the rise of women’s economic power.

Innovation requires solving big problems from a new perspective, but many struggle to successfully innovate in their work or personal life when faced with a problem that requires innovative thinking. Author and researcher April Bell has zeroed in on the power of empathy and the ability to embrace risk when solving big problems in the unknown. In her book, The Fire Starter: Igniting Innovation with Empathy, Bell combines engaging personal stories with research to provide listeners with a simple framework helping them connect to greater human truths to solve big problems.

After enjoying my best-selling book, How to Publish a Book on Amazon, people have sent me scores of emails asking me to write a follow-up book about how to market a book on Amazon. Many of them say that although they wrote a great book, the sales just aren't coming in. They are discouraged because they put so much work into their book. They are desperate for an answer to one burning question: How can I get the word out about my book and start making sales? I’ll give you an easy-to-follow, step-by-step launch and maintenance plan for your book’s success.

What was a Buddhist monk doing at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos lecturing the world's leaders on mindfulness? Why do many successful corporations have a chief happiness officer? What can the chemical composition of your brain tell a potential employer about you? In the past decade, governments and corporations have become increasingly interested in measuring the way people feel: the Happiness index, Gross National Happiness, well-being and positive psychology have come to dominate the way we live our lives.

Scientific research has found that your ability to resist the damaging effects of stress - your hardiness - can reduce stress-related illness and strengthen your ability to thrive under pressure. Hardiness, written by respected clinical and research psychologists, will help develop your psychological hardiness which, in turn, enables you to enjoy more of life's rewards. Mastering the 3 C's of hardiness - commitment, control, and challenge - is essential to increasing hardiness and responding effectively to stressful situations.