Showing results by publisher "Highbridge Audio" in Marketing & Sales

The success of Starbucks is one of the most remarkable business stories in decades. Since 1987, the coffee merchant has grown from a single retail store on Seattle's waterfront to a company with more than 1,000 stores nationwide and a new one opening somewhere every business day. According to Fortune magazine, Starbucks "has changed everything...from our tastes to our language to the face of Main Street."

Best-selling author Steve Chandler delivers over 50 powerful ideas guaranteed to stimulate fantastic sales success. Drawing on his extensive experience in the field, and using the most up-to-date psychological tools available, Chandler illustrates ways for both the novice and the seasoned pro to reach new heights of business prosperity.

The curtain is about to rise, say Pine and Gilmore, on the Experience Economy, a new economic era in which every business is a stage, and companies must design memorable events for which they charge admission. With The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore explore how successful companies, using goods as props and services as the stage, create experiences that engage customers in an inherently personal way.

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.

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.

Seth Godin, one of today's most influential business thinkers, writes best-selling books like Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars. And in between those annual books, he delivers a daily stream of ideas on one of the world's most popular blogs.

New Marketing, whose tools include things like MySpace, You Tube, Web sites, permission marketing, cable TV, and viral techniques, is reshaping our world. But many companies try to use the tools without first getting their organization and products in sync with them. The result: what Seth Godin calls a "meatball sundae". A big, ineffective mess.

Today's most successful businesses are storydoers. They create products and services that, from the very beginning, are manifestations of an authentic and meaningful story - one told primarily through action, not advertising. In True Story, creative executive Ty Montague argues that any business, regardless of size or industry, can embrace the principles of storydoing. Indeed, our best-run companie - from small start-ups to global conglomerates - organize around a coherent narrative that is then broadcast through every action they take (from product design to customer service to marketing).

Hiroshi Mikitani, founder of e-commerce giant Rakuten, has seen the next battleground in the fight for the future of the Internet. Today's major e-commerce players are quietly building borderless platforms that are overturning the global brick-and-mortar model, and changing the way local businesses think about their customers. But is this good or bad? Rejecting the zero-sum model practiced by some global retailers, who view the Internet purely as a facilitator of speed and profit, Mikitani argues for an alternate model....

Most organizations have the same weakness. There is a gap between their careful plans and what happens at the point where the sales force meets the customer. In his 25 years combating profit-killers for Fortune 500 companies, Gregg Crawford has seen this again and again. Companies have almost everything they need to succeed. All that's missing is one final connection: the last link.

The digital revolution poses a mortal threat to the major creative industries - music, publishing, television, and the movies. The ease with which digital files can be copied and distributed has unleashed a wave of piracy with disastrous effects on revenue. Cheap, easy self-publishing is eroding the position of these gatekeepers and guardians of culture. Does this revolution herald the collapse of culture, as some claim? In Digital Renaissance, Joel Waldfogel argues that digital technology is enabling a new golden age of popular culture, a veritable digital renaissance.

Household Finance: An Introduction to Individual Financial Behavior speaks to both how people should and how people actually do make financial decisions, and how these financial decisions contribute to and detract from their well-being.