Market Research

If you've ever used ZipCar, Amazon Prime, Spotify, NetFlix, Groupon, Weight Watchers, SurveyMonkey, United Mileage Plus, Pinterest, or Twitter, you are part of The Membership Economy, an increasingly popular model that author Robbie Kellman Baxter sees as the inevitable result of technological advancements, social trends, and a generation in transition. The Membership Economy argues that we are now moving away from ownership, but we still want the benefits that come with access.

Inspired by the number one bestseller Good to Great, market intelligence expert Jared Schrieber has gone a step further to explore the factors that distinguish breakout brands from those that lag behind. He studied twenty-five thousand brands over five years by tracking the day-to-day purchasing decisions of more than one million consumers, analyzing the advertising that influenced them, and creating a practical guide for growing brands, no matter their industry or size.

It takes a special kind of magic for a challenger brand to achieve seemingly impossible customer-centric results. It’s that magic that makes Australian telecommunications company Macquarie Technology world leaders in award-winning customer experience. Joseph A. Michelli—the bestselling author of books about brands renowned for their stellar service and outstanding growth, such as The Ritz-Carlton, Mercedes-Benz, and Starbucks—was so impressed by Macquarie’s ability to deliver transformative customer experiences that he felt compelled to share this book.

Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments - also known as randomized controlled trials - designed to test the impact of different online experiences. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world.

Booze, Babe, and the Little Black Dress retells the epic stories of the decade that addicted all of us to the shopping experience. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Or something in between? Listen and choose for yourself.

Business Ethics for Better Behavior concisely answers the three most pressing ethical questions business professionals face: What makes business practices right or wrong? Why do normal, decent businesspeople of good will sometimes do the wrong thing? And how can we use the answer to these questions to get ourselves, our coworkers, our bosses, and our employees to behave better?

All of us want to live a life of financial freedom. But getting rich overnight isn’t going to happen. If you want to get rich, the best way is to do the things that made rich people rich. This book gives you a proven plan to make more money and to get rich over time. If you are looking for a way to do nothing, change nothing, and still get rich, this book isn’t for you. But if you want to learn the real secrets of the wealthy and are willing to work hard and make changes to your outlook and your life, anyone can get rich slowly.

From the bestselling author of Buyology comes a shocking insider’s look at how today’s global giants conspire to obscure the truth and manipulate our minds, all in service of persuading us to buy. Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars.

Persuasion is a technique that you use on a daily basis, but how persuasive are you? Are you getting what you are seeking when attempting to persuade others? If not, it is time to start working on your ability to persuade. It is often thought that persuasion, and the techniques that fall under it, is only used for selfish reasons, but this is not true. In fact, being good at persuasion is needed to get ahead at work, form friendships, and even when interacting with strangers.

Strategy consultant Robbie Kellman Baxter has been helping companies excel in this business environment for more than a decade. Now, in The Forever Transaction, she reveals all her secrets. Whatever industry you're in, Baxter provides the inspiration, tools, and insight you need to build and execute a business model that will leave your competition in the dust.

Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception.

Trend forecaster James Wallman reveals the world's growing sense of stuffocation – and how we can move away from it. We have more stuff than we could ever need - clothes we don't wear, kit we don't use, and toys we don't play with. But having everything we thought we wanted isn't making us happier. It's bad for the planet. It's cluttering up our homes. It's making us feel 'stuffocated' and stressed - and it might even be killing us.

In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.

The members of a massive and growing customer group are highly engaged with one subject: changing their own behavior to be healthier, wealthier, and wiser. Unlike the average consumer, these people are eager and excited to connect with businesses - if they'll help them make these very difficult changes. Nelson calls these people "transformational consumers".

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.

No one in America has done more observing of more people than Dr. Frank I. Luntz. From Bill O'Reilly to Bill Maher, America's leading pundits, prognosticators, and CEOs turn to Luntz to explain the present and to predict the future. With all the upheavals of recent events, the plans and priorities of the American people have undergone a seismic shift.

Our world is being transformed by the Internet and the near limitless choice that it provides to consumers; tomorrow's markets belong to those who can take advantage of this. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance, an entirely new model for business that is just starting to show its power as unlimited selection reveals new truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it.

Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that tricks Harvard philosophers? And why do billionaires work so hard - only to give their hard-earned money away? When it comes to making decisions, the classic view is that humans are eminently rational. But growing evidence suggests instead that our choices are often irrational, biased, and occasionally even moronic. Which view is right - or is there another possibility?

In order to be successful both today and in the future, you need to separate yourself from the competition by practicing the breakthrough principle of adaptive innovation. How? By delivering an experience that the competition either cannot or will not attempt to copy. This is literally impossible if you stick to what is already familiar to you because whatever is familiar to you and your customers is likely to be familiar to your competition. You must create a new experience that is unique to you and that fosters a powerful emotional attachment with your target customer.

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.