Consumer Research

The Compass and the Nail presents an unconventional perspective of how particular organizations create rabid fan bases, in turn making them more successful and more profitable. Written by Patagonia's former lead strategist for consumer marketing, and advisor to such iconic brands as Seventh Generation and Burton Snowboards, Craig Wilson outlines game-changing insights for providers of any product or service who desire fiercely loyal behavior.

With the explosion of social media, the competition for attention - and customers - is more intense than ever before. Standing out is not only more challenging than ever, it now has less of an impact on sustained growth. To be a lasting company, leader, or brand on a positive trajectory today, one must become iconic. Award-winning author and speaker Scott McKain examines what an iconic organization or leader is and helps you attain and retain that rare status. If your company has slipped in its standing, McKain teaches you how you can regain your position.

Martin Lindstrom, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, harnesses the power of "small data" in his quest to discover the next big thing. Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year in strangers' homes, carefully observing every detail in order to uncover their hidden desires and, ultimately, the clues to a multimillion-dollar product.

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?

Cool isn't just a state of mind, a celebrity fad, or an American obsession, it's a business. In boardrooms across America, product managers are examining vodka bottles and candy bars, tissue boxes and hamburgers, wondering, "How do we make this thing cool? How do we make this gadget into the iPod of our industry? How do we do what Nike did? How do we get what Target got? How do we infuse this product with that very desirable, nearly unattainable it factor?"

Change is coming: Nearly everywhere in the world, people over sixty will become the dominant population. Longevity presents an opportunity for which companies need to develop a strategy. Estimates put the global market for this demographic at $21 trillion across every industry you can think of. Stage (Not Age) is the concise guide to helping companies understand and serve this burgeoning market by focusing on life stage, not age, and identifying the deep diversity of needs within the demographic.

As much as 95% of our decisions are made by the subconscious mind. As a result, the world's largest and most sophisticated companies are applying the latest advances in neuroscience to create brands, products, package designs, marketing campaigns, store environments, and much more, that are designed to appeal directly and powerfully to our brains.

Are you making it difficult for your potential customers to buy from you? Today's buyers are overloaded - overwhelmed by too much information and suffering from decision fatigue. Across industries, customers are delaying purchasing decisions or even choosing to stick with the status quo so they can avoid the dreaded "sales process". In response, many sales professionals are overcompensating with behaviors that are either too accommodating or that create high pressure - and alienating potential buyers in the process.

An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world.

For the last 10 years, psychologist Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves. By exploring our private worlds (desks, bedrooms, even our clothes and our cars), he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected - and unplanned - ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, communicate it to others, and interpret the world around us.

This book is for a very small percentage of business people. You see, most people in business are not trying to use Category Design to create a new category that changes the future and generates exponential new value. Instead, many people in business are trying to “not get fired.” Many people want to go to work, make a contribution, and go home.

How do people actually behave when confronted with economic choices? And remember, almost every choice we make is economic. While our desires are boundless, our resources are limited and tradeoffs confront us at every turn.

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.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Bruce Barton was a household name in America - a hugely successful advertising man who revolutionized his industry by treating customers like people, not like sheep to be fleeced. He created some of the most memorable and long-lived advertising slogans and campaigns in history. He understood how to succeed in business and advertising, and he set down his principles for success in best-selling books that put his name on everyone's lips.

Cheap fashion has fundamentally changed the way most Americans dress. Stores ranging from discounters like Target to fast fashion chains like H&M now offer the newest trends at unprecedentedly low prices. Retailers are producing clothes at enormous volumes in order to drive prices down and profits up, and they've turned clothing into a disposable good.

The Art of Manipulation offers you a framework to master powerful and practical ways to influence and control people’s behavior, negotiate better, make your pitch, and manipulate others to get what you want. The Art of Manipulation will reshape the way you think about influencing people and getting what you want. You will get tools and effective strategies - not mere theories, but real practical strategies and how-to’s to start transforming your thinking and behavior, influencing people, and thus, get desired results faster.

A new fundamental economic shift is emerging: an economy based on transformative experiences that guide people to change, achieve their aspirations, and become who they want to be. Welcome to the Transformation Economy. Creating transformative experiences offers businesses the largest opportunity for creating economic value today, particularly as goods and services become increasingly commoditized. Enterprises can create no greater value than to help customers achieve their aspirations—whether improving health, increasing wealth, developing wisdom, or finding purpose.

For centuries, economics was dominated by the idea that we are rational individuals who optimize our own “utility”. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists demonstrated that the reality is a lot messier. We don’t really know what our utility is, and we care about people other than ourselves. We are susceptible to external nudges. And far from being perfectly rational, we are prone to “cognitive biases” with complex effects on decision-making, such as forgetting to prepare for retirement.

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.

Demographics not only define who we are, where we live, and how our numbers change. For those who can read beyond the raw figures, they open up hidden business opportunities that lie ahead. What will happen when retiring Boomers free up jobs? How will Generation Y alter supermarkets? Which states will have the most dynamic workforces? Will American manufacturing rebound as Asia's population declines? Upside puts this powerful yet little-understood science to work finding answers.