Business Research

Digital technology has profoundly altered the competitive landscape for retailers. Although the shutdown of 2020 didn’t cause this trend, it has dramatically accelerated it, collapsing retailers’ transformation timeline into a matter of months, not years. In Remarkable Retail, industry thought leader Steve Dennis argues that it’s no longer enough merely to offer convenience, decent prices, or an okay shopping experience. Even very good is no longer good enough. To win and keep customers today, retailers must be nothing short of remarkable.

Decorated gaming and social media research and marketing executive Jonathan Stringfield delivers a roadmap to understanding and navigating marketing and business integrations into the gaming ecosystem: who plays games (and why), how modern games are created and oriented around the world of esports, and where brands can get involved with games. Perfect for marketing strategists, brand managers, and chief marketing officers, Get in the Game will also earn a place in the libraries of executives seeking to connect with the misunderstood yet largest segment in consumer entertainment.

Sidestep the marketing books, courses, and even TED talks that offer hypothetical explanations that sound sensible and embrace the proven systematic approach of R.E.D. Marketing, which the recent CEO and current CMO of Yum! Brands applied to lead Taco Bell and KFC to double digit growth. This book, filled with simple frameworks and engaging stories, will help everyone in your company understand what really works for driving sustainable brand growth and business success.

The business marketing genius at the forefront of today's entertainment marketing revolution helps corporate America get hip to today's new consumer - the tan generation. When Fortune 500 companies need to reenergize or reinvent a lagging brand, they call Steve Stoute. In addition to marrying cultural icons with blue-chip marketers, Stoute has helped identify and activate a new generation of consumers. He traces how the "tanning" phenomenon raised a generation of black, Hispanic, white, and Asian consumers who have the same "mental complexion".

Start at the End offers a new framework for design, grounded in behavioral science. Technology executive and behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert argues that the purpose of everything is behavior change. By starting with outcomes instead of processes, the most effective companies understand what people want to do and why they aren't already doing it, then build products and services to bridge the gap. Wallaert underscores with clarity and humor how this approach can improve the way we work and live.

Slow Down, Sell Faster! does this by introducing a simple yet powerful method for buyer-focused selling that is practical, repeatable, and easily customizable. This buyer-focused approach extends to proposals and presentations, loyalty and retention, and, of course, cultivating more business. Each step in the book corresponds to a role you should adopt to meet customers’ needs at each stage of the buying process. Increasing sales is not just about learning more sales techniques; it’s about understanding the buying process - from your customer’s point of view.

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.

We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms - big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself.

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

The Psychology of Advertising offers a comprehensive exploration of theory and research in (consumer) psychology on how advertising impacts the thoughts, emotions, and actions of consumers. It links psychological theories and empirical research findings to real-life industry examples, showing how scientific research can inform marketing practice.

As a small-business owner, entrepreneur, or marketer, are you absolutely certain that you know what your customer wants? And even if you know what your customer wants, are you sure that you are able to clearly communicate that you offer the exact thing that they are seeking? In this best-selling book, Ryan Levesque lays out his proven, repeatable, yet slightly counterintuitive, methodology for understanding the core wants and motivations of your customer.

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

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.

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.

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.

Learn the secret of what really drives sales - and how to give people what they need so they want to buy from you.

Prepare for this new generation, prepare for the Afripolitan Generation. A revolution is taking place in the great marketplaces of the informal sector and it contains an unquantified scale and power as an economic engine and a way of life for the majority of our low-income populations. The KasiNomic Revolution may still be a murmur in the streets, a grassroots economic groundswell, but it is the future of African economic activity.

What type of business should you start? For the past 10 years, Inc. 500 CEO and number-one national best-selling author, Ryan Levesque - featured for his work in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Entrepreneur - has guided thousands of entrepreneurs through the journey of answering this question. One of the biggest reasons why so many new businesses fail is because in the quest to decide what business to start, most of the conventional wisdom is wrong.

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.

Corporations are broken, reflecting no purpose deeper than profit. But the tools we are relying on to fix them - corporate social responsibility, divestment, impact investing, and government control - risk making our problems worse. With lively storytelling and careful analysis, O’Leary and Valdmanis cut through the tired dogma of current economic thinking to reveal a hopeful truth: If we can make our corporations accountable to a deeper purpose, we can make capitalism both prosperous and good.