Consumer Research

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.

Luck is a four-letter-word in business circles. But the truth is that fortune plays a part in every success story - and every failure. In Go Luck Yourself, one of the world’s leading brand strategists explains how a hunting trip led to the invention of VELCRO®. How a little mermaid inspired a famous campaign for Amazon. How a stolen rabbit spurred on Walt Disney. And more importantly, how you can stack the odds in your brand’s favour.

A Wharton professor and tech entrepreneur examines how algorithms and artificial intelligence are starting to run every aspect of our lives and how we can shape the way they impact us.

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.

Italian brands are known to create some of the most premium, sought-after products in the world. Learn to compete in the modern marketplace using the proven business principles that Italian brands have been employing for generations.

Learn how frictionless organizations cut costs, grow revenue, and create loyal fans by creating products and services that work so well, their customers never have to contact them for the wrong reasons. This audiobook will help any customer-facing organization deliver better customer experiences, save money, and increase revenue. Veteran customer service experts Bill Price and David Jaffe, coauthors of the best seller The Best Service Is No Service, explain how organizations can design products, sales, and support so that customer effort is reduced or, better still, removed.

Social media connected the world - and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. Now a leading researcher at MIT draws on 20 years of research to show how these trends threaten our political, economic, and emotional health in this eye-opening exploration of the dark side of technological progress.

In Branding Is Sex, brand dominatrix Deb Gabor explains how proper brand positioning gets your customers in the mood. In just seven short and sweet chapters, Deb covers these juicy topics and more: how the most successful brands in the world get their customers laid; how to never fail the Bullshit Test; and who your brand should hop in the sack with (and it’s not who you think).

Pork dorks. Craftsters. American Girl fans. Despite their different tastes, these eclectic diehards have a lot in common: they're obsessed about a specific brand, product, or category. They pursue their passions with fervor, and they're extremely knowledgeable about the things they love. They aren't average consumers - they're superconsumers. Although small in number, superconsumers can have an outsized impact on a company's bottom line.

How do you build a business that thrives during good times and bad? Is there a strategy that can set up your company up for success, no matter what curveballs the world may throw your way? There is: Turn customers into repeat customers, and turn repeat customers into loyal customers. Renowned customer service and experience expert Shep Hyken maintains that delivering an amazing customer service experience that keeps customers coming back for more is everyone’s job.

The Welcomer Edge provides practical recommendations and strategies so that any company - regardless of industry or size - can maximize the quality of its customer service and the quantity of its loyal customers. The principles outlined in The Welcomer Edge are universal for all sales and service environments. It describes four distinct categories of service professionals - the people that will make any customer service/sales function or department a success.

Social scientists have adopted the practices of more traditional scientists in the past few decades - using randomized trials to design policies aimed at improving educational levels, lowering crime rates, elevating employment rates, and improving living standards among the poor. Andrew Leigh and P.J. Ochlan bring the lives of these radical researchers to life as their experiments to overturn conventional wisdom lead to breakthroughs like finding the cure for scurvy and discovering what policies really improve literacy rates.

We evolved for a particular environment, but our rapid social advances and mushrooming populations have created a bewildering new world. On the timescale of this dizzying change, evolution has effectively stopped, and we must rely on what has gotten us this far. By retracing the path that our distant ancestors took to get here, we can understand the stunning abilities and glaring weaknesses which we have inherited.

Jay Baer's Youtility offers a new approach that cuts through the clutter: marketing that is truly, inherently useful. If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life. Drawing from real examples of companies who are practicing Youtility as well as his experience helping more than 700 brands improve their marketing strategy, Baer provides a groundbreaking plan for using information and helpfulness to transform the relationship between companies and customers.

How much time have you spent reflecting on the fact that revenues are generated by actual customers—the people who pull out their wallets and pay for your products and services? In The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity, experts Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross start you on the path toward really getting to understand your customers' buying behavior as well as the health of your overall customer base.

Discover the 24 reasons people are leaving you for competitors and how to win them back. In Why Customers Leave, popular customer experience and marketing speaker David Avrin makes a compelling case for customer experience as a bankable differentiator in an era of vast marketplace choices. The book lays out the reasons for the recent shift in customer mindset and expectation, illustrates the myriad ways that companies inadvertently drive customers and prospects to competitors, and offers a multitude of creative strategies and tactics to attract and retain new prospects.

A compelling argument - masterfully researched and brilliantly articulated - that despite increasing prosperity for most of Earth’s inhabitants and an explosion of goods overall, consumption of natural resources such as metals, water, and timber has begun to decline. Best-selling author and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Andrew McAfee says there’s a new reason for optimism: We’re past the point of "peak stuff" - from here on out, it'll take fewer resources to make things and fewer dollars to lead a comfortable life.

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.

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.

Featuring instructional case studies from companies including Panasonic, Hilton, Merck, and Honeywell, this evidence-based book provides listeners with a proven methodology for driving success before, during, and after every sale. Embracing the entire customer life cycle, Beyond the Sales Process reveals twelve essential strategies including: Study your customer. Give them compelling reasons to engage. Build a vision for them of their own success....