Consumer Research

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.

In Winning Her Business, Bridget Brennan, advisor to some of the world’s biggest brands and businesses, provides a road map for selling in a world dominated by the rise of women’s economic power.

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.

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.

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.

Wilber Winkle was called a "national treasure" by no less than TV's Larry King, and his book was dubbed the funniest in decades by American Bookseller. What does Mr. Winkle do? Without fear, he writes letters to the massive corporations responsible for popular consumer products, demanding satisfaction and complaining about even the most minor of flaws. And miraculously, the corporations answer.

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.

On the ten-year anniversary of the release of Joe Public Doesn't Care About Your Hospital, Chris Bevolo and Revive have set their sights a decade in the future with Joe Public 2030: Five Potent Predictions Reshaping How Consumers Engage Healthcare. The book explores five key ways consumer health engagement may change over the coming decade, covering everything from AI and personal monitoring to consumerism, new competition, the politicization of healthcare, and growing health disparities. The purpose of the book is to spark conversation about the future of healthcare.

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.

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.

This newly launched report argues that development policies based on new insights into how people actually think and make decisions will help governments and civil society more readily tackle such challenges as increasing productivity, breaking the cycle of poverty from one generation to the next, and acting on climate change.

An introduction for everyone. In this rich, fascinating—surprisingly accessible—introduction, leading expert Eric Siegel reveals how predictive analytics (aka machine learning) works, and how it affects everyone every day. Rather than a "how to" for hands-on techies, the book serves lay listeners and experts alike by covering new case studies and the latest state-of-the-art techniques.

The greatest threat to privacy today is not the NSA, but good-old American companies. Internet giants, leading retailers, and other firms are voraciously gathering data with little oversight from anyone. In Las Vegas, no company knows the value of data better than Caesars Entertainment. Many thousands of enthusiastic clients pour through the ever-open doors of their casinos. The secret to the company’s success lies in their one unrivaled asset: they know their clients intimately by tracking the activities of the overwhelming majority of gamblers.

What if your customers had a vested interest in guiding your company toward greater success? What if your employees had a personal as well as professional commitment to elevating your organization? Imagine how different your results would be if investors, vendors, and even analysts treasured the relationships they have built with you. Most important...is your company capable of setting aside a bit of its own self-interest to become part of dramatically more rewarding collaborative effort?