Consumer Behavior

What type of business should you start? For the past 10 years, Inc. 500 CEO and number-one national best-selling author, Ryan Levesque - featured for his work in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Entrepreneur - has guided thousands of entrepreneurs through the journey of answering this question. One of the biggest reasons why so many new businesses fail is because in the quest to decide what business to start, most of the conventional wisdom is wrong.

One of Michiko Kakutani's (New York Times) top 10 books of 2016. A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again.

Persuasion is a technique that you use on a daily basis, but how persuasive are you? Are you getting what you are seeking when attempting to persuade others? If not, it is time to start working on your ability to persuade. It is often thought that persuasion, and the techniques that fall under it, is only used for selfish reasons, but this is not true. In fact, being good at persuasion is needed to get ahead at work, form friendships, and even when interacting with strangers.

Succeeding as a sales professional is like being a professional athlete. Whether you're already the top salesperson at your company, or you're simply working hard to reach the next level of success, in order to keep up in a fast-paced, increasingly crowded marketplace - one in which meaningful product differentiation has all but disappeared - you must constantly push yourself to improve, open more doors, and break through the noise to attract and retain the attention of busy and distracted customers.

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.

Learn the secret of what really drives sales - and how to give people what they need so they want to buy from you.

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.

We are just witnessing the start of the radical changes in retail that will revolutionize shopping in every way. As Amazon and other disruptors continue to offer ever-greater value, customers' expectations will continue to ratchet up, making winning (and keeping) those customers all the more challenging. In The Shopping Revolution, Barbara E. Kahn, a foremost retail expert and professor at the Wharton School, examines the companies that have been most successful during this wave of change and offers fresh insights into what we can learn from their ascendance.

If you've ever used ZipCar, Amazon Prime, Spotify, NetFlix, Groupon, Weight Watchers, SurveyMonkey, United Mileage Plus, Pinterest, or Twitter, you are part of The Membership Economy, an increasingly popular model that author Robbie Kellman Baxter sees as the inevitable result of technological advancements, social trends, and a generation in transition. The Membership Economy argues that we are now moving away from ownership, but we still want the benefits that come with access.

Demographics not only define who we are, where we live, and how our numbers change. For those who can read beyond the raw figures, they open up hidden business opportunities that lie ahead. What will happen when retiring Boomers free up jobs? How will Generation Y alter supermarkets? Which states will have the most dynamic workforces? Will American manufacturing rebound as Asia's population declines? Upside puts this powerful yet little-understood science to work finding answers.

Lifescale is a journey of self-discovery and growth. It's about getting back into balance and remastering our destinies. Author Brian Solis knows firsthand. He struggled with distraction and all of its ill effects. To get his life back, he developed a set of techniques, exercises, and thought experiments designed to tame the chaos, and positively and productively navigate our day-to-day lives. Instead of falling victim to the never-ending cycle of newsfeeds, Likes, addictive apps, and boredom scrolling, we can learn to manage our time and inspire our own lives.

For the next 20 years, roughly 10,000 citizens will hit medicare eligibility each and every day. Understanding their attitudes, interests, spending patterns, buying preferences and the emerging opportunities for profiting by targeted development and marketing of products and services to them is vital to the forward thinking entrepreneur and marketing executive.

Competition is tougher than ever these days and competing on price or product just doesn’t work as well anymore. So how can companies stand out in a crowded marketplace that is constantly evolving? The answer is customer experience, and the best part about customer experience is that it's delivered by human beings who are unique to a company. The Experience Maker helps managers and executives focus on customers who are already spending money with their company rather than spending more money on marketing new customers.

Four innovation experts from the startup world, large enterprises, nonprofits, and academia come together to reveal the secret of uncovering authentic demand to build successful innovations. Books on innovation mostly focus on how to nurture innovative cultures and brainstorm ideas. The Heart of Innovation is the first popular book to concretely delve into what innovations really are and how to create them.

The Millennial Consumer Revolution: Adapting to Changing Behaviours is a comprehensive guide for consumer business owners looking to stay ahead in the constantly evolving market. Divided into six chapters, the book provides a thorough understanding of the millennial generation and their impact on the business world. The book examines the economic power of millennials, the changing workplace culture, and the consumer behaviour of millennials, including the shift towards digital and social media platforms, conscious consumerism, and brand purpose.

For many marketing professionals, "science" is a four-letter word. They see brand-building as an unteachable art guided by their intuition and experience. But at its core, marketing aims to seed ideas into people's minds, make them feel a certain way, and, ultimately, get them to act. In Brand Seduction, Daryl reveals the latest psychological and neuroscientific discoveries about how our minds process brand information and make decisions, and the important roles our emotions and unconscious play in our selections.

All of us want to live a life of financial freedom. But getting rich overnight isn’t going to happen. If you want to get rich, the best way is to do the things that made rich people rich. This book gives you a proven plan to make more money and to get rich over time. If you are looking for a way to do nothing, change nothing, and still get rich, this book isn’t for you. But if you want to learn the real secrets of the wealthy and are willing to work hard and make changes to your outlook and your life, anyone can get rich slowly.

Good works are no longer optional. For many businesses, success comes in unexpected ways. Toms grew into a $600-million company by giving away 35 million pair of shoes. Patagonia's profits have climbed year after year even as it funnels heavy investments into sustainability. And it's not just millennials rewarding companies with causes. In every age group, people commit to brands that show good citizenship.

In order to be successful both today and in the future, you need to separate yourself from the competition by practicing the breakthrough principle of adaptive innovation. How? By delivering an experience that the competition either cannot or will not attempt to copy. This is literally impossible if you stick to what is already familiar to you because whatever is familiar to you and your customers is likely to be familiar to your competition. You must create a new experience that is unique to you and that fosters a powerful emotional attachment with your target customer.

We live in an era of tribalism, polarization, and intense social division - separating people along lines of religion, political conviction, race, ethnicity, and sometimes gender. How did this happen? In Conformity, Cass R. Sunstein argues that the key to making sense of living in this fractured world lies in understanding the idea of conformity - what it is and how it works - as well as the countervailing force of dissent.