Consumer Behavior

Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who now trains some of the world's biggest companies and consulting firms, argues that the CCO would keep a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends, from sneakers to slow food to preppies, while developing a systematic understanding of the deep waves of culture in America and the world. The CCOs professionalism would allow the corporation to see coming changes, even when they only exist as the weakest of signals.

Today’s brands face an apparent choice between two evils: continue betting on their increasingly ineffective advertising or put blind faith in the supposedly mystical power of social media, where “likes” stand in for transactions and a mass audience is maddeningly elusive. There has to be a better way... As Lennon and McCartney wrote a half century ago, money can’t buy you love. But in today’s world, where people have become desensitized - even disillusioned - by ad campaigns and marketing slogans, that maxim needs an update: Money can’t even buy you like.

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.

Internet Reputation Management for Businesses is a new book by Guillermo "William" Rivas, co-founder of the first company to offer reputation management to businesses. The book cuts through the clutter and hype of reputation management and helps businesses understand the keys to a successful reputation-management campaign for a healthy social media presence online. This book on Internet reputation management looks into the passion and rewards of a healthy online image.

How businesses can harness the power of online consumer reviews. More than seventy percent of consumers now consult online reviews before making purchases, and they take those picks and pans very seriously. A disgruntled but ignorant customer on Yelp might have more clout than any expert guidebook, magazine article, or newspaper critic. No wonder many businesses feel terrified by the review-driven marketplace.

Delight Your Customers reveals three truths common to all exceptional customer service experiences and presents seven behaviors that, when demonstrated by employees, distinguish extraordinary customer service from the ordinary transactional customer service to which consumers have become accustomed. With real-world stories and many examples from a variety of industries, this audiobook is a resource that will help listeners everywhere take their customer service from ordinary to extraordinary!

Michael Hammer shows companies how to prosper in today’s world of slow growth, fierce competition, and enormously powerful customers. The winners in this extraordinarily difficult environment—companies like IBM, Duke Power, Progressive Insurance, and GE—succeed through superior operations. Their costs are lower and their quality higher than their competitors’; they get new products to market faster and they provide better customer service. How do they do it? Through near-fanatical attention to the basics of business, and by managing these basics in new and creative ways.

For years, marketers have held on to unwavering beliefs that have dictated how they market to their consumers. But the hard truth is that the changes we see in marketing and business are based on one undeniable factor - the size of the generations we are selling to. As each generation ages, what they buy and how much they buy will change.

Imagine if you could identify your business's most profitable customers, craft a better marketing strategy to communicate with them, and inspire them to buy more? Well now you can. And the best part is that you can do it using the data you already have. Today, everything we do creates data, and the volumes are enormous. Virtually every time someone views something online, enters search on Google, or even surfs the web on a smart phone, another chunk gets added to the trove of data.

Money Anxiety is a behavioral economics book exploring how financial anxiety impacts consumer behavior. The book explains why we make instinctive financial decisions, why we are more risk averse when stressed, and why we hate to lose more than we love to win.

While everyone was bemoaning their alleged laziness and self-absorption, the Millennial generation quietly grew up. Pragmatic, diverse, and digitally native, this massive cohort of 80 million are now entering their prime consumer years, having children of their own, and shifting priorities as they move solidly into adulthood. Millennials with Kids changes how we think about this new generation of parents and uncovers profound insights for marketers and brand strategists seeking to earn their loyalty.

In this book, Eric von Hippel, author of the influential Democratizing Innovation, integrates new theory and research findings into the framework of a "free innovation paradigm." Free innovation, as he defines it, involves innovations developed by consumers who are self-rewarded for their efforts, and who give their designs away "for free." It is an inherently simple grassroots innovation process, unencumbered by compensated transactions and intellectual property rights.

While everyone is talking about "big data", the truth is that understanding the "little data" - the stats that underlie newspaper headlines, stock reports, weather forecasts, and so on - is what helps you make smarter decisions at work, at home, and in every aspect of your life. The average person consumes approximately 30 gigabytes of data every single day but has no idea how to interpret it correctly. Everydata explains, through the eyes of an expert economist and statistician, how to decipher the small bytes of data we consume in a day.

Revealing the Invisible provides a front-row seat to the mind-blowing future, where businesses of the 21st century can read consumers’ minds and make informed decisions based on their behaviors and tendencies. The world is at the precipice of a disruptive new era in which the ability to track every behavior will predict our individual and collective futures. Using artificial intelligence to analyze trillions of once-invisible data (behaviors) across vast digital ecosystems, companies and governments now have unimagined insight into our every behavior.

As humans, we are greatly influenced by our relationships. We each enjoy being members of loyalty programs and networking groups that align with our goals. We have selected and continue to go to the same supermarkets, gas stations, banks, and purchase from only select companies. This happens because of an unspoken relationship that exists with these businesses and brands. They make us happy, we trust them, and their consistency is calming in a chaotic world with too many choices.

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.

Lee Eisenberg's The Number hit the New York Times best-seller list and became an instant classic with those wanting to learn more about retiring comfortably. Here he investigates the forces that compel Americans to shop till they drop. A timely exploration, Shoptimism takes a critical look at an often downplayed aspect of American economic prosperity.

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.

Big data - the enormous amount of data that is created as virtually every movement, transaction, and choice we make becomes digitized - is revolutionizing business. Offering real-world insight and explanations, this audiobook provides a roadmap for organizations looking to develop a profitable big data strategy...and reveals why it's not something they can leave to the I.T. department. Think Bigger is an essential resource for anyone who wants to ensure that their company isn't left in the dust.

Bestselling author and trend watcher Marc Ostrofsky is here to help. In this groundbreaking new audiobook, Ostrofsky reveals the ways that new technologies implant themselves in our daily lives and how we can easily take advantage of them to live, learn, buy, sell, work, play, communicate, and socialize better. Covering diverse topics from how the Internet affects our health to how we can become bargain-hunting pros, Ostrofsky's audiobook could come at no better time.