Consumer Research

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization - until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, health care has finally gone digital.