Product Description: The creation and management of customer relationships is fundamental to the practice of marketing. Marketers have long maintained a keen interest in relationships: what they are, why they are formed, what effects they have on consumers and the marketplace, how they can be measured and when and how they evolve and decline...read more

Product Description: The first generation that has grown up in a digital world is now in our university classrooms. They, their teachers and their parents have been fundamentally affected by the digitization of text, images, sound, objects and signals...read more

Product Description: This book seeks to explain the global financial crisis and its wider economic, political, and social repercussions, arguing that the 2007-9 meltdown was in fact a systemic crisis of the capitalist system. The volume makes these points through the exploration of several key questions: What kind of institutional political economy is appropriate to explain crisis periods and failures of crisis-management? Are different varieties of capitalism more or less crisis-prone, and can the global financial crisis can be attributed to one variety more than others? What is the interaction between the labour market and the financialization process? The book argues that each variety of capitalism has its own specific crisis-tendencies, and that the uneven global character of the crisis is related to the current forms of integration of the world market...read more

What do Howard Hughes and 50 Cent have in common, and what do they tell us about Americans and our desires? Why did Sean Connery stop wearing a toupee, and what does this tell us about American customers for any product? What one thing did the Beatles, Malcolm Gladwell and Nike all notice about Americans that helped them win us over? Which uniquely American traits may explain the plights of Krispy Kreme, Ford, and GM, and the risks faced by Starbuck's? Why, after every other plea failed, did "Click It or Ticket" get people to buy the idea of fastening their seat belts? To paraphrase Don Draper's character on the hit show Mad Men, "What do people want?" What is the new American psyche, and how do America's shrewdest marketers tap it? Drawing from dozens of disciplines, the internationally acclaimed marketing expert Harry Beckwith answers these questions with some surprising, even startling, truths and discoveries about what motivates us.

Product Description: Are there potentials in central city revitalization? What role will the federal government play in determining future retail locational choices? Shopping center development has never been more popular—or more hazardous than it is today...read more

Product Description: In recent years, remarkable progress has been made in behavioral research on a wide variety of topics, from behavioral finance, labor contracts, philanthropy, and the analysis of savings and poverty, to eyewitness identification and sentencing decisions, racism, sexism, health behaviors, and voting...read more

Product Description: Today, information travels at the speed of light, the 24-hour news cycle turns even small blunders into massive public relations catastrophes, and longstanding reputations are precarious at best. The new prevalence of social and mobile media makes even the most vaunted brands vulnerable to attack--by disgruntled customers, rivals, and even internal sources...read more

Product Description: The Global Financial Crisis reminds us that banks are at the centre of the creation and destruction of national welfare. It serves to highlight that governments everywhere should regard what drives bank behaviour as special. Why were banking sectors in 'liberal' and 'coordinated' market economies with similar financial systems, operating under the same set of global rules, more resilient than others during the Global Financial Crisis? Building on the most important insights offered in institutional analysis and comparative public policy/political economy fields, this book offers an important insight to bank behaviour...read more

Product Description: Branding has become ubiquitous, with new brands becoming word-of-mouth successes literally overnight, and many welcome the easy familiarity they bring to daily life. But now brand proliferation is threatening not only to stifle true choice in the marketplace, but to render hard-won brand identities -- some decades in the making -- meaningless...read more

Americans toss out 140 million cell phones every year. We discard 2 million plastic bottles every five minutes. And our total credit-card debt as of July 2011 is $793 billion. Plus, credit cards can make you fat. The American Dream was founded on the belief that anyone dedicated to thrift and hard work could create opportunities and achieve a better life. Now that dream has been reduced to a hyperquantified desire for fancier clothes, sleeker cars, and larger homes. We’ve lost our way, but James Roberts argues that it’s not too late to find it again. In Shiny Objects, he offers us an opportunity to examine our day-to-day habits, and once again strive for lives of quality over quantity. Mining his years of research into the psychology of consumer behavior, Roberts gets to the heart of the often-surprising ways we make our purchasing decisions. What he and other researchers in his field have found is that no matter what our income level, Americans believe that we need more to live a good life. But as our standard of living has climbed over the past forty years, our self-reported “happiness levels” have flatlined. Roberts isn’t merely concerned with the GDP or big-ticket purchases—damaging spending habits play out countless times a day, in ways big and small: he demonstrates that even the amount we spend at our favorite fast-food joint increases anywhere from 60 to 100 percent when we use a credit card instead of cash. Every time we watch TV or turn on a radio we’re exposed to marketing messages (experts estimate up to 3,000 of them daily). Consumption is king, and its toll is not just a financial one: relationships are suffering, too, as materialism encroaches on the time and value we give the people around us. By shedding much-needed light on the science of spending, Roberts empowers readers to make smart changes, improve self-control, and curtail spending. The American Dream is still ours for the taking, and Shiny Objects is ultimately a hopeful statement about the power we each hold to redefine the pursuit of happiness.

Product Description: The Italian Banking System proved more resilient to the first wave of the financial crisis. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the structure and characteristics of one of the most important EU banking systems, which proved to be an asset until 2010, when the worsening of the economic prospects and the sovereign debt crisis dramatically changed the markets' evaluation of banks' risk levels...read more

Product Description: If this were 1923, this book would have been called "Why Radio Is Going to Change the Game" . . . If it were 1995, it would be "Why Amazon Is Going to Take Over the Retailing World" . . . The Thank You Economy is about something big, something greater than any single revolutionary platform...read more

Product Description: In mainstream economics, and particularly in New Keynesian macroeconomics, the booms and busts that characterize capitalism arise because of large external shocks. The combination of these shocks and the slow adjustments of wages and prices by rational agents leads to cyclical movements...read more

Product Description: Consumer culture is synonymous with westernised societies. How did this particular ethic come to achieve so much success? This book argues that one reason is the seductive way in which it is promoted through the media. To demonstrate this, the book provides a detailed analysis of the case study of consumer magazine covers and argues that the ways magazines are displayed and sold in retail spaces, the literal glossiness of the texts, and the intertwined messages about sexiness, commodities and self-identity communicated by them combine to create a powerful and seductive advertisement for consumer culture...read more

Product Description: Breaking new ground in the study of Chinese urban society, this book applies a critical discourse analysis to ethnographic data gathered in Anshan City, a third-tier city and market in northeast China. The book confronts the – still widespread – notion that Chinese consumers are not "real" individuals, and in doing so represents an ambitious attempt to give a new twist to the structure versus agency debates in social theory...read more