Consumer Behavior

What Retirees Want presents the culmination of 30 years of research by world-famous "Age Wave" expert Ken Dychtwald, PhD, and author and consultant Robert Morison. This entertaining, thought-provoking, and wide-ranging book explains how individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and governments can best prepare for a new era - where the needs and demands of the "Third Age" will set the lifestyle, health, social, marketplace, and political priorities of generations to come.

If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female. If the business world had a sex, it would be male. And therein lies the pickle. Women are the engine of the global economy, driving nearly 80 percent of consumer household spending in the United States alone. They hold the purse strings, and when they've got a tight grip on them as they do now, companies must be shrewder than ever to win them over.

Booze, Babe, and the Little Black Dress retells the epic stories of the decade that addicted all of us to the shopping experience. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Or something in between? Listen and choose for yourself.

The business marketing genius at the forefront of today's entertainment marketing revolution helps corporate America get hip to today's new consumer - the tan generation. When Fortune 500 companies need to reenergize or reinvent a lagging brand, they call Steve Stoute. In addition to marrying cultural icons with blue-chip marketers, Stoute has helped identify and activate a new generation of consumers. He traces how the "tanning" phenomenon raised a generation of black, Hispanic, white, and Asian consumers who have the same "mental complexion".

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.

Martin Lindstrom, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, harnesses the power of "small data" in his quest to discover the next big thing. Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year in strangers' homes, carefully observing every detail in order to uncover their hidden desires and, ultimately, the clues to a multimillion-dollar product.

The Psychology of Advertising offers a comprehensive exploration of theory and research in (consumer) psychology on how advertising impacts the thoughts, emotions, and actions of consumers. It links psychological theories and empirical research findings to real-life industry examples, showing how scientific research can inform marketing practice.

Big data - the enormous amount of data that is created as virtually every movement, transaction, and choice we make becomes digitized - is revolutionizing business. Offering real-world insight and explanations, this audiobook provides a roadmap for organizations looking to develop a profitable big data strategy...and reveals why it's not something they can leave to the I.T. department. Think Bigger is an essential resource for anyone who wants to ensure that their company isn't left in the dust.

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.

Could you lose weight if you put $20,000 at risk? Would you finally set up your billing software if it meant that your favorite charity would earn a new contribution? If you’ve ever tried to meet a goal and came up short, the problem may not have been that the goal was too difficult or that you lacked the discipline to succeed. From giving up cigarettes to increasing your productivity at work, you may simply have neglected to give yourself the proper incentives.

Following the success of his best-selling book, How to Launch a Brand, acclaimed brand strategist Fabian Geyrhalter is back with an enlightening new book that digs deep into today's new world of brand creation. Bigger Than This challenges companies - from startups to Fortune 100s - to (re)discover their spark and connect with today's consumers on a deeper level. In Bigger Than This, Geyrhalter analyzes brands that are based on commodity products - watches, socks, shoes, fish - yet they quickly turn into beloved brands. He emphasizes the importance of storytelling.

Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception.

Quantum Marketing is for all business people who seek to understand how rapidly marketing is evolving, what marketers are doing to get ready for this shift, and what the new world will look like for companies, consumers, and society as the race to develop revolutionary marketing strategies reaches a whole new level.

If you don’t offer great customer experience, your main competitors will take away 50% of your business. Period. Gone are the days in which businesses could simply offer an "OK" experience and get away with it. In today’s hypercompetitive environment, companies can no longer be just B2C or B2B. They must become B2Me—more personal, more relevant.

Our food system is undergoing a total transformation that impacts how we produce, get, and consume our food. Market researcher and bestselling author Paco Underhill—hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a Sherlock Holmes for retailers”—reveals where our eating and drinking lives are heading in his “delectable” (Michael Gross, New York Times bestselling author of 740 Park) book, How We Eat.

Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments - also known as randomized controlled trials - designed to test the impact of different online experiences. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world.

What does our desire for certainty and control have to do with our decision-making? According to behavioral economics pioneer Peter Atwater, the answer is simple: everything. In The Confidence Map, Atwater explores the hidden role of confidence in the choices we make, and why events described as being unprecedented are often entirely predictable—if we know what to look for. Using compelling stories from the past and present, Atwater shows listeners how to apply the same tools he teaches to help them make sense of complex situations and optimize strategy.

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.

The Robert Collier Letter Book is by far the top book on writing sales letters. But it goes beyond that. As every great copywriter knows, these techniques are directly transferable to the Internet, whether through web copy or email or whatever. This book earned Robert Collier the distinction of being one of the greatest marketing minds in history. Robert Collier's sales letters were successful because he wrote to his audience's needs.

Black Ops Advertising dissects this rapid rise of "sponsored content," a strategy whereby advertisers have become publishers and publishers create advertising - all under the guise of unbiased information. Covert selling, mostly in the form of native advertising and content marketing, has so blurred the lines between editorial content and marketing message that it is next to impossible to tell real news from paid endorsements.