Consumer Research

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

Digital technology has profoundly altered the competitive landscape for retailers. Although the shutdown of 2020 didn’t cause this trend, it has dramatically accelerated it, collapsing retailers’ transformation timeline into a matter of months, not years. In Remarkable Retail, industry thought leader Steve Dennis argues that it’s no longer enough merely to offer convenience, decent prices, or an okay shopping experience. Even very good is no longer good enough. To win and keep customers today, retailers must be nothing short of remarkable.

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 Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life.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.

In All We Want, award-winning author Michael Harris dismantles our untenable consumer culture and delivers surprising, heartwarming alternatives. Drawing on the wisdom of philosophers, scientists, and artists, Harris uncovers three realms where humans have always found deeper meaning: the worlds of Craft, the Sublime, and Care.

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.

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.

Cheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. Stores ranging from discounters like Target to fast fashion chains like H&M now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. Retailers are producing clothes at enormous volumes in order to drive prices down and profits up, and they've turned clothing into a disposable good.

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.

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.

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.

Whether you're a manager, owner, or employee, Customer Service Training 101 gets you up to speed fast. The completely revised and updated third edition addresses every aspect of face-to-face, phone, online, social media, and self-service interactions. Using scenarios, guidelines, and practice exercises, this inspiring training manual explains what to say and do, what to avoid, and why interactions go astray.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Citizens" opens up a new way of understanding ourselves and shows us what we must do to survive and thrive – as individuals, as organisations, as nations, even as a species. Jon Alexander's consultancy, the New Citizenship Project, has helped revitalise some of Britain's biggest organisations such as the Co-op, The Guardian and the National Trust. Here, with the New York Times bestselling writer Ariane Conrad, he shows how human history has moved from the Subject Story of kings and empires to the current Consumer Story.

Word of mouth is directly responsible for 19 percent of all purchases, and influences as much as 90 percent. Every human on Earth relies on word of mouth to make buying decisions. Yet even today, fewer than 1 percent of companies have an actual strategy for generating these crucial customer conversations. Talk Triggers provides that strategy in a compelling, relevant, timely book that can be put into practice immediately, by any business.

In The Advertising Effect, respected advertising insider, Adam Ferrier, reveals the ten techniques used by some of the best-known brands across the globe. These techniques are grounded in psychological theory with award winning real world examples and explore how the most effective way to change behaviour is through action rather than the conventional advertising practices (emotional or rational persuasion).

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.

User experience doesn’t happen on a screen; it happens in the mind, and the experience is multidimensional and multisensory. This practical book will help you uncover critical insights about how your customers think so you can create products or services with an exceptional experience. Corporate leaders, marketers, product owners, and designers will learn how cognitive processes from different brain regions form what we perceive as a singular experience. Author John Whalen shows you how anyone on your team can conduct "contextual interviews" to unlock insights.