Market-research

This is truly a fine investigation into the design, construction, and experience of sales environments -- not just in the physical world, but also in the virtual worlds of TV, radio, print media, and the Internet. Sherry is an anthropologist who, together with the other contributors, paints a complex portrait of what it means to create a sales environment, what it means to experience one, and how the two processes relate. No marketing ace or designer can afford to do without Sevicescapes!

I've tried several books on technical analysis and only this one is so intriguing that I read it from cover to cover. The author is a verteran in stock and commodity markets who is able to make profits for himself, which is important. The book provides insights, comments, numbers on technical analysis right from seasonal trading experience. It is not dry. It makes rules easily understood. Meanwhile, it s not shallow book. Very well written.

This report from Packaged Facts provides great information about the Gen X market and the brands that have become household names because of the spending habits of this group. This report was useful to me (I work for a research firm), and, as always, the quality of the PDF was second-to-none. Packaged Facts must employ a group of artisans to make PDF's that are so readable, navigable and aesthetically pleasing.

In 1990 this book was revolutionary. Today, it is mostly interesting as the first book on the subject. Nobody in todays (business) world can have missed out on the concept that time is (or can be) a competitive advantage.

If you have missed this basic fact, do read this book, it explains in rather boring terms why it is so.

Personally I think they put to much emphasis on time as a competitive advantage, and tend to disregard other factors, equally important. A more relevant reading would in my opinion be D'Aveni's Hypercompetition, that takes the concept to its logical conclusion, which Hoult and Stalk misses.

Unfortunately, neither of the authors are very entertaining writers, especially as this book is usually mandatory/recommended reading in most MBA classes on strategy.

In conclusion, good, once revolutionary, but today mostly over-rated.

Today's readers will think that this book is simply stating the obvious. That shows how much influence the book has had. Prior to the book's publication, most people felt that "getting things right" was more important than speed. This book points out that speed can actually be helpful in getting things right by encouraging you to improve your management processes so you do things right the first time.

Many companies have had trouble implementing this concept in the way it is articulated. They simplify their process, but may not improve it. This may mean that new products arrive in the market that are not really ready for the customers. That can be all right if you can quickly fine-tune the products in beta tests and the customers have that expectation because you are giving them so much benefit anyway. If you do this with me-too products that don't work, the results can be disastrous in terms of damage to your company's reputation and customer relationships.

The authors do not spend enough time on helping people understand how to improve their processes, and how to create more speed without killing stress on the people involved. For many companies, this book can be dangerous. I think this book could use a new edition that would address these two areas in more detail.

On the other hand, if you have any doubts about the potential benefits from speedier action, you should read this book. It will change your mind using excellent examples.

Have a speedy read!

Simply put, an oustanding book that has all the nuts and bolts needed to allow a company to transition to a time based focus from a cost based one. Easy to read, the logic is perfect. A must buy to have on your shelf (better yet ... on your desk). I read it first when I received my MBA ... read it again this last week .... and gave copies to top management I know around the country.

Consumer research is a $6 billion business. But the ROI on research expenditures is being questioned as never before. This is ironic given that advances in information technology has vastly expanded analytic capabilities and increased customer data by an order of magnitude.

Jerry Zaltman's 'How Customers Think' offers fresh insights into why companies are increasingly frustrated by consumer research. Drawing on contemporary brain research, he exposes fatal flaws in the hallowed premise in traditional consumer research that asking customers about their motivations is the best way to get clues about their future behavior.

Zaltman points out that surveys, questionnaires and focus groups fail to get behind the curtains of consciousness. This can prove fatal for a marketing program because at least 90% of mental activity that leads to perceptions, thinking and decisions takes place outside the conscious mind.

However, traditional research and marketing largely ignores the contents of the unconscious mind. Why is this so, when contemporary brain research has learned that this is where motivations as well as perceptions and decisions originate? Because lacking an understanding of how minds work, researchers and marketers must depend by default on consumers' conscious rational responses. However, disconnects between what consumers consciously think and what they feel at deeper levels often lead to marketplace failure.

Zaltman reconnects the emotional, feeling dimension of consumers' minds (right brain as it were) with the perceiving, thinking (left brain) dimension of their minds to yield a holistic picture of customers' minds.

Marketing often fails expectations because undue attention is given the contents of the rational left brain that respondents disgorge in traditional consumer research. Zaltman observes that researchers and marketers widely ignore the deep shadowy realm of motivating emotions because it is easier to record, process and analyze what consumers say directly about their needs and motivations.

Zaltman observes that recent brain research shows that emotional arousal is essential to the generation of sustained interest in a matter. Brain patients whose emotional capabilities have been destroyed while still having normal reasoning powers cannot determine whether one brand or another is best for them. Brand loyalty, it seems, is determined more by emotional responses than by rational analysis.

Zaltman shows how to get better guidance than direct questioning of them yields about what will stir consumers' emotions. In doing this he addresses one of the most curious defects in traditional research and marketing: decisions are more often determined by the rules of statistical math than by tenets of behavior science. However, this should not be surprising because few marketers have grounding in how minds work. After all, a person can earn an MBA in marketing without a single course in behavior.

If the primary functional purpose of marketing is getting the attention of minds and influencing them to action, then it should follow that a deeper understanding of how minds work will make marketers more effective in doing that. However, with Zaltman's book in hand, one needs not go back to school for a degree in psychology to gain a practical understanding of how customers' minds work.

A word of caution, however: This book is to be studied, not scanned. It does not offer the simple, sound bite-sized solutions that are so commonplace in marketing books and that make them quickly forgettable. Zaltman's book will not be forgettable to any person who makes a study of his book because he/she will experience a quantum leap in understanding how customers think.

In recent months, I have read a number of excellent books on the general subject of marketing or on the more specific subject of branding/brand management. I think each of them would be invaluable, not only to those entrusted with marketing responsibilities but to all other decision-makers within any organization, regardless of size of nature. For example, Jeff Fox's How to Become a Marketing Superstar and Seth Godin's Purple Cow.

This book is certainly outstanding but I recommend it only to those who are (a) corporate marketing managers, (b) principals, account supervisors, and account managers in advertising agencies, and (c) students enrolled in MBA programs, preferably if read in combination with Joseph Murphy's The Powers of Your Subconscious Mind. Zaltman makes significant demands on his reader as he explores with meticulous care how all people (not only customers) function both on the conscious and subconscious level. He identifies and applies a number of key terms such as cognitive unconscious, metaphor elicitation, response latency, and neuroimagining. He explains the Metaphor-Elicitation process, how to use a Consensus Map, and memory's "fragile power." For me, some of the most interesting and most valuable material is provided in Chapter Nine ("Memory, Metaphor, and Stories") and Chapter Ten ("Stories and Brands"), in part because I am especially interested in organizational symbols, rituals, and traditions. Zaltman shifts his and his reader's attention to "Crowbars for Creative Thinking" (a terrific chapter title) following by the final two chapters in which he (somehow) reviews and then integrates all of his key concepts while explaining how and why "Quality Questions Beget Quality Answers" and how to launch a "New Mind-Set."

I hope you have noted my frequent use of "how to" while briefly reviewing the range of subjects embraced by Zaltman's own intellect as he takes a "frank" look at the state of marketing today, introduces and analyses a "new paradigm" through examples of "how companies today apply the paradigm's principles, with remarkable results," and (in Part III) expands the perspective beyond customers' and consumers' thinking. Specifically, Zaltman shows managers ten ways to "break out of the box" when thinking about consumers and marketing -- and how they can help their colleagues to do the same. In Chapter 12, he suggests that new ways of thinking begin with better ways of asking questions and offers eight guidelines. Then in Chapter 13, Zaltman offers a word of caution about regressing into "business as usual" attitudes and practices, to what Jim O'Toole has characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." Zaltman views his book as a "starting point" for better representing (and understanding) the "mind of the market," which is to say both the conscious and subconscious mind of the given customer or consumer.

Zaltman's reference to a "starting point" can be interpreted in quite different ways. Some may conclude that he is suggesting that his book offers an appropriate "starting point" for those in need of books about marketing. In m y opinion, that is not his intention. (My own recommendations would be Theodore Levitt's The Marketing Imagination, Ries and Trout's Positioning, and Harvard Business Review on Marketing. After a careful reading of those two volumes, Zaltman's book will be much more accessible.) Rather, I think Zaltman's use of the term "starting point" has quite a different purpose: To suggest (and I agree) that mankind's efforts to understand what the mind is, how it works, etc. have only just begun...especially with regard to efforts to understand how and why customers think. Our "voyage from the familiar" has only begun.

This is one of several books I felt obliged to re-read at least once before attempting to formulate a review of it. (Others include Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and Pinker's How the Mind Works.) Earlier, I suggested that this brilliant but challenging book would be of greatest value to those who are (a) corporate marketing managers, (b) principals, account supervisors, and account managers in advertising agencies, and (c) students enrolled in MBA programs. I'll go with that, taking this opportunity to thank Gerald Zaltman for a uniquely thought-provoking as well as informative intellectual experience. How well I apply what I think I have learned from him has yet to be determined. Frankly, my own journey of discovery is only at its "starting point."

With the advances made in the last 15 years on brain research and understanding, creating advertising is a whole new ballgame.

Consumers conscious thoughts are only 5% of their thinking, so it is often that most research doesn't address the incredibly important 95%. Zaltman explains how to do it and how to do it effectively, of course plugging his own firm here and there.

Being in a big ad agency, I know that most work isn't produced with solid research behind it, but instead for a client who has "dictated" what the advertising needs to do or how it should appeal to consumers. The best account planners and managers can take the knowledge from this book and guide their clients to understanding the benefits of this type of research (through ROI) and ultimately achieve better results.

The author finds that the direct involvement of corporations with the primary and secondary schools of America hardly enhances the education of students. The rhetoric of "win-win" and of "choice" in school-business partnerships and in privatized schools is empty, misleading sloganeering.

Every school-business partnership described in the book shows that the primary interest is in promoting products and corporate images whether in the form of product giveaways, the plastering of corporate logos on school property, or the penetration of the school day by private television networks advertising products appealing to students. In some cases, there is clear intent in creating interest on the part of students in entry-level clerical or service jobs such as those found in grocery stores or in the fast-food business. One grocery chain hires teachers for summer work expressly to persuade them to help in recruitment efforts among student populations.

The motive for privatization, or corporate-managed or -owned schools, is purely one of profit. Privatization is promoted as enhancing "choice." But providing choices for, say, special students or those interested in extra-curricular activities is costly. Privatized schools invariably reduce curriculum choices and require teachers to closely follow course blueprints with the primary goal being one of inculcating facts useful for scoring high on standardized tests. High test-scores bolster the product, that is, the school, that the corporation is selling. Broader and more nebulous educational goals are shoved aside because they are viewed as a drain on the bottom line. An additional consequence of private school choice is the inevitable segmentation of student bodies along racial and class lines as the ability to pay excludes some from having actual "choice."

In addition to specific corporate involvement in schools, the author is concerned with the predominance of business thinking in the broader culture and its impact on our school systems. It has become a standard view among political and business elites that the essential purpose of schools is to train future employees. According to them, the primary focus of schools should be on teaching "skills" to students that are directly useful in work places. In this line of thinking schools are not the locus for wide-ranging intellectual endeavor. Teachers as intellectuals are not needed. Instead, they are seen as essentially education clerks, as employees, that follow management's direction in producing a product. Students are said to get an education, a product, closing the circle on the commodification of education. In another vein of corporate determination, the textbook industry sanitizes book content to ensure greater book sales which is contrary to the spirit of open inquiry.

In the face such reductionistic and regimented thinking, the author pushes throughout the book for the spread of "critical transitivity" in our schools whereby a critical and flexible approach by both teachers and students is taken in acquiring broad knowledge. He is concerned with what finds as the oligopolistic nature of the United States. He sees schools as being centers for the education of democratic practice and where critiques of our culture, capitalism, and social injustice are mounted.

While the author seems to be on solid ground to decry the move to quantify schools by simplified, standardized testing and the de-professionalization of teaching, it is worrisome to see what amounts to a social agenda being proposed as a replacement. Children and teenagers are not equipped to engage in social critique; they simply do not have enough worldly experience to have informed, independent opinions. One would hope that the author is not suggesting that the influencing of young minds with the social agenda of teachers has more merit than business-imposed thinking. It is for adult citizens to make democracy a reality in the political process, in workplaces, and in the broader culture including schools. Meanwhile, there is much for students to learn beyond workplace "skills" long before they become agents for social change.

The book seems to be grabbing for too much. It details actual corporate involvement in schools; it is concerned with the dominance of business thought; and it wants schools themselves to be the agents to change all of that. And those topics get intermixed. Also, at times the book can get a little overloaded with academic jargon as the author sprinkles in talk about techno-rationality, non-propositional versus propositional knowledge, consumer materialism, and intransitivity versus critical transitivity, etc. But for the most part the author's points are on the money. Our school systems have gotten derailed by some very dubious thinking. This book contributes to understanding the situation.

A school teacher, I never even thought that our school-business partnerships could be anything but "good." We were told they were "win-win" situations, and we seemed to benefit. Boyles' book, however, points out many shortcomings that aren't so obvious. It's in the third chapter when he provides example after example of business partnerships and then proceeds to reveal the errors and the major issues that teachers and students should know...but just don't really pay attention (in my case, anyway). I got a paperback version of the book for $22, and it was worth every penny. I'm going into my classes this fall armed with information about grocery store gimmicks and corporate "donations" that I intend to pose to my students...which is the author's real point. It's a great read...a little academic at times, but humorous and compelling.

Somewhat similar to Wood and Wollenberg. Not nearly as detailed or rigorous as the other, but more "modern", i.e., market-oriented. 200 pages on using neural nets in price forecasting (probably useful if you believe in nets). Interesting for me were sections on ancillaries, comittment/dispatch and congestion management. For those, authors provide a good introduction: mostly narrative with some formulas to show exactly what they mean.

This was one of the best books I read on the subject of power market.

I enjoyed this book. Overall it was quite good with a very thorough coverage of the foundations of multicultural marketing used as the basis for later parts of the book that address specific cultural groups.

However, some of what is being passed off as multicultural seems more like "protected classes", i.e. minorities, gays, disabled, mature Americans et al.

As such I was somewhat disappointed that the non-minority ethnic marketing treatment was a bit thin. To wit: Native Americans, Italians, Jews, Irish and Arab Americans warranted all of 5 pages in +350 page book! And there was little or no coverage of Polish, German, Aremenian, Croatian, Bohemian, Swedish, Greek, Ukranian, Lithuanian and non-Hispanic Spanish/Portuguese.

Hopefully the next book will cover these groups in more detail...

This book is a very good overview of multi-cultural marketing and why different cultures create different types of consumers. Sadly, it seems that many colleges are paying too little attention to this area of consumer research. It's nice to read Tharp's book and see that someone has recognized the importance of examining these issues in a rapidly-changing America.

It starts with a simple headache. Then maybe you get a nosebleed. After a few days, you know you are extremely sick. The lining of your stomach and the top layer of your tongue literally fall off. Your organs turn into mush. Excessive bleeding from every natural opening in your body occurs. And since your blood can't clot, the bleeding won't stop. Black vomit mixed with blood gushes from your mouth. Then, you die painfully with a mask-like expression on your face.

This doesn't even sound like it could exist, does it? Well it does. It is death by a virus known as Ebola. It is especially contagious in monkeys and can jump species over to humans.

The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, describes outbreaks of this and other "hot" viruses in locations around the world, including a city near Washington, D.C. Virus experts in the Army need to unravel the Ebola mystery and try to protect the public from this vicious disease.

Preston has taken a true story and unveiled its horror. I couldn't believe how descriptive his writing is. If you want to read a true modern day thriller, then this is an awesome pick. I highly recommend it and am looking forward to reading more from Richard Preston.

Preston's true-story accounts of lethal viruses that spread like wildfire, invade, infect, and liquefy the guts of their human hosts read unbelievably--like sci-fi. But it is non-fiction, and is based on his in-depth interviews with characters named in the book. Let the reader be warned: Grisly descriptions of the effects of the viruses Marburg and Ebola on humans are graphic. I was repulsed by some passages, yet totally riveted--I simply could not put the book down. The information is timely, since the federal public health agencies recently told public health agencies to be on the alert for "unusual disease patterns associated with today's events", and our nation has been put on bio-alert. This book will undoubtedly increase your anxiety index, but it will also expand your awareness of the nature of lethal viruses and make you realize how vulnerable, helpless, and underprepared we are to deal with agents for which there are no vaccines and no cure, agents that mutate, jump species, replicate, and spread around the world, burning hot in their host--the human population.

This was the best book I've ever read...Robert Preston pulls you in and traps you from the first chapter all the way till the end. It is verry suspence full. I read it for a biology report on Ebola and found it verry help full as well as fun to read. I strongly recomend it. The scaryest thing about the story is that it is all real and a true story. Another good book on this subject is "Level 4 virus hunters of the CDC" by Jmes P. McCormick. Everybody should read both of these books.

Edward McQuarrie is clearly skilled in the practical use of customer visits (on-site interviews) as a qualitative data collection tool, particularly for B2B products. His frequent citations of real-world studies that support investment in primary customer research are both useful and validating for industry practitioners engaged in new product definition. I gave this book 4 stars rather than 5 because it falls short in several areas that are important to prospective readers who may be working professionals looking for "a better way" to characterize customer needs.

Customer requirements are only one (although arguably the most important) data point that influences new product definition. McQuarrie doesn't really position the customer visit method very well in the context of the other variables that drive overall product definition. Secondly, while the book does an excellent job describing how to go about planning and conducting customer visits, it fails to provide more than a cursory treatment of how to use the information collected to develop appropriate, useful, prioritized new product requirements in a resource-constrained environment.

Other than these few items (which may be outside the focus of the text anyway), I would highly recommend this book. It provides valuable insight to understanding VOC (voice of the customer) and should be included in any serious product development professional's personal library.

I found this book to be quite easy to read and also make many useful, hands on types of suggestions of how to set up, conduct and debrief customer interviews. More than that, it also gives you a recipe for starting from scratch if you need it - that is, identifying what your purpose is, who you're going to interview, who should be doing the interviewing from your side (e.g. the Company's 'team'), how to conduct the interview and what to do once you've completed it. For those of you who are already familiar (or even comfortable) with Customer Visits, this book will still give you interesting and useful pointers - such as how to go about getting agreement from the customer to tape an interview and why this could prove invaluable to you in the future. In short, it's not a 'tour de force' for Customer Visit/Marketing junkies, but will surely give even those folks some good information that you can use. For the rest of us, it's quite a useful 'how to' book to start out with.

McQuarrie obviously speaks from experience. His book is very practical, easy to navigate. Though, the most important attribute is that it is realistic. The author realizes the realities of the corporate environment and allows the reader to progress towards perfection rather that achieve perfection first time out.

Ideal book for development teams. Many "how to" ideas and a logical progression.