Consumer Research

Forget everything you've been taught about selling: forget the hard sell, forget negotiation strategies, forget those closing techniques. In The Inner Game of Selling, Ron Willingham debunks the familiar myths about "sales skills", showing that those tired methods are too shallow and manipulative to do anything but alienate potential customers and drain you of energy and dignity.

The person you sell to needs to know you understand what their problem or issue is. As human beings, we need to feel validated, understood, and cared for. Addressing this in your sales copy or your sales script will help it become much more effective, resulting in more conversions and a distinct advantage over your competitors.

Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of Paddy Power, is the largest gambling business in the world. The evidence of that success is visible everywhere, from shop fronts and bus shelters to sporting arenas and smartphone screens. The company’s rise to this point has been rapid, but like any gambler worth their salt, Paddy Power has always succeeded in finding an edge.

One man's mistake is another man's lesson. Don't let Scott Miller's success story fool you. He has made and learned from many mistakes in his career. Marketing Mess to Brand Success shares a career's worth of horrifying mistakes, missteps, and lessons learned. Whether you're starting a new company, a brand manager figuring out the best brand strategy or brand positioning for a niche market, or trying to land your first job as a marketing manager or brand manager, this book is designed to prepare you for many of the inevitable challenges that you will encounter.

Marketing executives and consumer advocates alike predict a future of brand-proof consumers, armed with technology and a sophisticated understanding of marketing techniques, who can effectively tune out ad campaigns. But as Rob Walker demonstrates, this widely accepted misconception has eclipsed the real changes in the way modern consumers relate to their brands of choice. Combine this with marketers' new ability to blur the line between advertising, entertainment, and public space, and you have dramatically altered the relationship between consumer and consumed.

China's Super Consumers explores the extraordinary birth of consumerism in China and explains who these super consumers are. China's Super Consumers offers an in-depth explanation of what's inside the minds of Chinese consumers and explores what they buy, where they buy, how they buy, and most importantly, why they buy. The audiobook is filled with real-world stories of the foreign and domestic companies, leading brands, and top executives who have succeeded in selling to this burgeoning marketplace.

America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.

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.

We are in the midst of a massive media revolution. For the first time in history, ordinary people around the world have the ability to create, distribute, and consume content instantly, from anywhere, using connected devices. The massive increase in media "noise" created by these consumers and devices creates an entirely new situation that makes conventional marketing models obsolete. And yet countless companies and marketing organizations continue to rely on traditional models, assuming that their "campaigns" will sway customers. They couldn't be more wrong.

Bypassed is your how-to business guide to adopt the brand-building tactics that work in today’s real estate market. In this action-oriented playbook, you’ll learn how to build vital brand visibility online to generate influence in your community; why just having a Facebook business page isn’t enough and how to harness the power of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, so you don’t miss a lead; the 10-step checklist you need to get more quality online reviews; how to become a legendary lead master; and the entire road map on how to create an unforgettable customer experience.

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.

Now that 75 percent of screen time is spent on connected devices, digital strategies have moved front and center of most marketing plans. But what if that's not enough? What if most people ignore company messages? What if consumer engagement never goes further than the "like" button? A sobering reality is hitting marketers. Technology hasn't just reshaped mass media, it's altering behavior as well. And getting through to customers will take some radical rethinking.

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.

How much information is too much? Do we need to know how many calories are in the giant vat of popcorn that we bought at the movie theater? Do we want to know if we are genetically predisposed to a certain disease? Can we do anything useful with next week's weather forecast for Paris if we are not in Paris? In Too Much Information, Cass Sunstein examines the effects of information on our lives. Policymakers emphasize "the right to know", but Sunstein takes a different perspective, arguing that the focus should be on human well-being and what information contributes to it.

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.

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.

Companies who define success through business outcomes and put customers at the center of their business realize sustainable, continuous growth. Customer experience is a key driver of technical innovation and business success - Customer Obsessed teaches companies how to leverage it across all levels of their organizations to sustain competitive advantage in the digital era. Customer Obsessed provides a comprehensive road map to help you build a better, more innovative business.

An introduction for everyone. In this rich, fascinating—surprisingly accessible—introduction, leading expert Eric Siegel reveals how predictive analytics (aka machine learning) works, and how it affects everyone every day. Rather than a "how to" for hands-on techies, the book serves lay listeners and experts alike by covering new case studies and the latest state-of-the-art techniques.

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.

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".