Consumer Research

Revealing the Invisible provides a front-row seat to the mind-blowing future, where businesses of the 21st century can read consumers’ minds and make informed decisions based on their behaviors and tendencies. The world is at the precipice of a disruptive new era in which the ability to track every behavior will predict our individual and collective futures. Using artificial intelligence to analyze trillions of once-invisible data (behaviors) across vast digital ecosystems, companies and governments now have unimagined insight into our every behavior.

Are we driving off a digital cliff and heading for disaster, unable to focus, maintain concentration, or form the human bonds that make life worth living? Are media and business doomed and about to be replaced by amateur hour? Both visionary and practical, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works captures the zeitgeist of an emerging age, providing the understanding of how a radically changed media world is influencing human behavior.

In this far-reaching examination of contemporary American culture, John Zogby, one of the nation's foremost pollsters, explores who today's Americans are, identifying patterns in our social makeup that hint at the way we'll be. Companies from multinational corporations down to family-owned small businesses can benefit from this detailed information about where we are and where we're going.

The beauty industry - which once revolved around creams and powders, subtle agents to enhance beauty - has become the anti-aging industry, overrun with steroids, human growth hormone injections, and bio-identical hormones, all promoted as cures for getting old. Acclaimed BusinessWeek science reporter Arlene Weintraub takes us inside this world, from the marketing departments of huge pharmaceutical companies to the backroom of your local pharmacy to celebrity enthusiasts like Oprah.

Based on three years of research and more than 300 firsthand interviews with experts, Your Best Health Care Now is your easy-to-follow, real-world guide to making today's health system work for you. You'll learn all the smart moves and timely tips to get better care and save hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars - no matter what your concerns may be. Whether you're trying to book a free checkup, negotiate with a surgeon, or worrying about high insurance deductibles and rising premiums, Your Best Health Care Now has the answers you need.

You've heard of amazing deals, online discounts, outlet shopping-but has anyone showed you how to shop for free? Meet Kathy Spencer-hot, hip mom of four who can whittle a $267.22 grocery bill down to one penny. One penny.

While millions of consumers carry on unaware, powerful companies are racing to gain more knowledge and data than anyone, including any government, has ever had. The goal is to understand consumer behavior and desires, from mundane matters to our most private and intimate affairs. This massive trove of data represents an immense prize for these companies. In economic terms it is one of the most valuable assets on the planet.

Plastic surgery has become the answer for many Americans, and in American Plastic sociologist Laurie Essig explores how we arrived at this particular solution. Over the last decade there has been a 465 percent increase in cosmetic work, and we now spend over $12 billion annually on procedures like liposuction, face-lifts, tummy tucks, and boob jobs.

Milton Friedman is one of the most famous economists in history. His writings and theories on everything from capitalism and freedom to deregulation and welfare have inspired movements, influenced government policies, and changed the course of America’s economic history. Now, acclaimed Friedman biographer Lanny Ebenstein brings together 20 of Friedman’s greatest essays in The Indispensable Milton Friedman: Essays on Politics and Economics.

How do people actually behave when confronted with economic choices? And remember, almost every choice we make is economic. While our desires are boundless, our resources are limited and tradeoffs confront us at every turn.

For millions, the daily shopping experience has devolved from the resonant personal ritual of our memories and dreams to the boring zombie-like process we wander through daily. We're wasting our time and money, at the cost of our patience, good will, and joie de vivre. The new entitlement of discount prices has driven out creative, customer-centric thinking, far more than is commonly believed.

Paco Underhill, the author of the hugely successful Why We Buy and Call of the Mall, reports on the growing importance of women in everybody’s marketplace - what makes a package, product, space, or service “female friendly”. Underhill offers a tour of the world’s marketplace - with shrewd observations and practical applications to help everybody adapt to the new realities.

The recent changes in our economic landscape have only exposed and intensified a phenomenon: an explosion in sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping. From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist to emerging sectors such as peer-to-peer lending (Zopa), "swap trading" (Swaptree), and car sharing (Zipcar), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not only what we consume but how we consume.

Fred Reichheld's 2006 book The Ultimate Question - that question being, "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" - challenged the conventional wisdom of customer satisfaction programs. It coined the terms "bad profits" and "good profits" and pointed to a faster, much more accurate way of gauging customers' real loyalty to a company. Richard Owen and Laura Brooks are co-developers, along with Reichheld, of the methodology behind answering the question.

Since founding Fixup, a pop-up repair shop, Sandra Goldmark has become a leader in the movement to demand better "stuff". She doesn't just want to help us clear clutter - she aims to move us away from throwaway culture, to teach us to reuse and repurpose more thoughtfully, and to urge companies to produce better stuff. Although her goal is ambitious, the solution to getting there is surprisingly simple and involves all of us: have good stuff, not too much, mostly reclaimed, care for it, and pass it on.

Behavior change is hard, but O’Mara shows that by adopting strategies that are well-founded in the science of brain and behavior, individuals and organizations can adapt to the demands of the modern world.

Today, more than ever, buyers are craving "human-to-human" contact and the meaningful connections that have been lost in the big wide world of overly curated social media and impersonal chat bots. This book is all about reclaiming that connection, by getting back to the basics of attracting and retaining loyal customers, being confident in your sales interactions, and creating a winning mindset.

Why do we do the things we do? The classical view of economics is that we are rational individuals, making decisions with the intention of maximizing our preferences. Behaviorists, on the other hand, see us as relying on mental shortcuts and conforming to preexisting biases. Richard Robb argues that neither explanation accounts for those things that we do for their own sake, and without understanding these sorts of actions, our picture of decision‑making is at best incomplete.

Disruption - the brutal roiling of markets, the decline of long-established brands and products, and the rise of new upstarts - drives business failure and success. Most people think technology causes disruption, but technology merely enables it. Changing customer needs cause disruptions, and too many businesses get caught unaware. Suman Sarkar offers proven strategies that will enable any business to stay radically close to its customers and address their evolving needs.

You will learn how design and innovation are being impacted by new and emerging technologies, societal demands, cultural shifts, and broader world issues. The Future of Design is practical, concise, and includes guidelines for building and supporting creative teams, advice and strategies for evaluating product concepts, and interviews with product designers, inventors, and innovators from around the world.