Marketing Psychology

Customers everywhere describe their interactions with companies in a deeply personal way: We hate our banks, love our smartphones, and think the cable company is out to get us. What is actually going through our brains when we make these judgments? Customer loyalty expert Chris Malone and top social psychologist Susan Fiske have discovered that our perceptions arise from spontaneous judgments on warmth and competence, the same two factors that also determine our impressions of people.

Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics - we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us”.

In a post-pandemic, up or down economy, it's harder than ever to meet highly complex and ever-changing customer expectations. The top-selling Marketing For Dummies covers basics like sales strategy, channel selection and development, pricing, and advertising. We also teach you complex elements like personalization, customer behavior, purchasing trends, ESG ratings, and market influences. With this complete guide, you can build a business that not only competes in a challenging market, but wins.

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.

Gravity affects every aspect of our physical being, but there’s a psychological force just as powerful - yet almost nobody has heard of it. It’s responsible for bringing groups of people together and pulling them apart, making certain goals attractive to some and not to others, and fueling cycles of anxiety and conflict. In Wanting, Luke Burgis draws on the work of French polymath René Girard to bring this hidden force to light and reveals how it shapes our lives and societies.

Another extraordinary business fable from the New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni. This new book in the popular Lencioni series shows what it takes to gain a real and lasting competitive edge.

There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.

The Age of Persuasion is for those who say "advertising doesn't work on me" as well as those who want to understand how this industry has become inseparable from modern culture. Using their popular CBC Radio series as a starting point, Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant tell the fascinating story of how modern marketing came of age - from the early players to the Mad Men of the 1960s and beyond.

Why do managers usually fail when it comes to motivating employees, in particular salespeople? What should they do instead? In answering those questions, author Mike Crandall recommends many innovative strategies inspired by the work of David Sandler, creator of the Sandler Selling System. To get the most from your organization, you need to understand why people show up for work and tie that reason to your company's mission. Crandall's book is about motivating yourself, your team, and your company at optimum levels.

Whether you are in advertising, marketing, management, on sales, or just curious about how to be more influential in everyday life, Yes! shows how making small, scientifically proven changes to your approach can have a dramatic effect on your persuasive powers.

One of the biggest myths that plagues the business world today is that our ability to network depends on having the “gift-of-gab”. You don’t have to be outgoing to be successful at networking. You don’t have to become a relentless self-promoter. In fact, you don’t have to act like an extrovert at all. Matthew Pollard, an introvert himself, draws on over a decade of research and real-world examples to provide an actionable blueprint for introverted networking.

Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets - whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up or that housing prices never fall. Whether true or false, stories like these - transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media - drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that.

We made some incorrect assumptions about work, and those assumptions are killing us. We allowed a narrative that is solely about earnings to replace what we know to be true about human motivation. Human beings are hardwired to seek purpose, but according to data, most people don't feel a sense of purpose in their work. Work has become a grind, an endless series of tasks that lack meaning.

Drawing on insights from across the social, behavioral, and natural sciences, Michelle Baddeley explores contexts in which behavior is driven by the herd. She analyzes the rational vs nonrational and cognitive vs emotional forces involved, and she investigates why herding only sometimes works out well. With new perspectives on followers, leaders, and the pros and cons of herd behavior, Baddeley shines vivid light on human behavior in the context of our ever-more-connected world.

Fact: Your brain is being controlled - and you don't even know it. Because if you think the ads you're seeing today are just pretty pictures with nice, creative copy, you're mistaken. Truth is, you are being powerfully influenced by dozens of proven scientific principles of advertising psychology...little-known techniques of consumer persuasion that go completely unnoticed by the buying public.

Behavior change is hard, but O’Mara shows that by adopting strategies that are well-founded in the science of brain and behavior, individuals and organizations can adapt to the demands of the modern world.

A newly revised and updated edition of the influential guide that explores one of the most powerful ways to attract attention and influence behavior - fascination - and how businesses, products, and ideas can become irresistible to consumers. In an oversaturated culture defined by limited time and focus, how do we draw attention to our messages, our ideas, and our products when we have only seconds to compete?

You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, to follow the rules, to wait your turn, to not make waves. Award-winning Yale professor Zoe Chance will show you how to rediscover the superpower that brings great ideas to life. Influence doesn’t work the way you think because you don’t think the way you think. Move past common misconceptions—such as the idea that asking for more will make people dislike you—and understand why your go-to negotiation strategies are probably making you less influential.

Combining the basics of marketing with cutting-edge concepts in mind control, Vitale shows how salespeople can put customers in a special mental state in which they are more suggestible and pliant. During this "buying trance" the salesperson can help frame and position the way the customer perceives the product, leading to more sales. For daring salespeople who want to make the sale every time, these cutting-edge techniques in persuasion offer the key to incredible success.

People don’t make decisions with their conscious mind, but on instinct. In The Power of Instinct, marketing consultant and behavioral science expert Leslie Zane shows that to grow a brand, business, or even a social movement, traditional persuasion tactics fall short. Instead, you must connect to the instinctive mind. And to do this, you need to understand the science of consumer choice and employ techniques that work with a person’s brain, not against it.