Buyology, Martin Lindstrom

Based on the single largest neuromarketing study ever conducted, Buyology reveals surprising truths about what attracts our attention and captures our dollars.

Buyology unveils the results of marketing guru Martin Lindstrom's pioneering three-year, $7 million dollar study that used the latest in brain scan technology to peer into the minds of over 2,000 people from around the world. The shocking results will reveal why so much of what we thought we knew about why we buy is wrong. Buyology rewrites the rules of marketing and advertising.

Among the long-held assumptions and myths Buyology confronts:

• Sex doesn't sell - people in skimpy clothing and provocative poses don't persuade us to buy products.

• Despite government bans, subliminal advertising is ubiquitous — from bars to supermarkets to highway billboards.

• Color can be so iconic that the sight of the robin's egg blue of a certain famous jewelry brand significantly raises women's heart rates.

• Companies shamelessly borrow from religion and ritual — like the ritual, made up by a bored American bartender, of drinking a Corona with a lime — to seduce our interest.

• "Cool" brands, like iPods, trigger our mating instincts.

The fact is, so much of what we thought we knew about why we buy is wrong. Lindstrom's revelations will captivate anyone who's been seduced —or turned off— by marketers relentless efforts to win our loyalty, our money and our minds.

Packed with entertaining stories about how we respond to such well-known products and companies as Marlboro, Calvin Klein, Ford, and American Idol, Buyology is a fascinating tour into the mind of today's consumer.

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Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
By Martin Lindstrom, Paco Underhill, Don Leslie
Contributor Paco Underhill, Don Leslie
Published by RANDOM HOUSE, 2008
ISBN 0739376012, 9780739376010

Jump Point, Tom Hayes

Plug into the nonstop global economy of billion-selling products and trillion-dollar markets

The Web 3.0 world of "pandemic economics" is a new economy that will function outside the traditional laws of commerce, free from today's impediments to business growth, and in a world where every person is connected to each other. Jump Point is the powerful guide that will help you to challenge old assumptions, rethink your business models, and take advantage of this fast-moving, unfettered, and fiercely competitive environment.

Silicon Valley guru Tom Hayes explores how the new economy will arrive at a single jump point by 2011, bringing with it virulent market trends. Only those prepared for the new marketplace dynamics will be left standing amidst unfamiliar players, shape-shifting consumers, and wealth-evaporating forces. This forward-thinking book examines

• The implications of collaborative behavior on the global market
• The human drive behind the "agency" impulse, which spawns social media communities, multiplayer online games, and crowdsourcing sites
• How to act on and react to real-time external events
• The pitfalls of "response latency," and why too much information can kill a company
• How to create a "virion," or marketmaking product, by tapping the power of person-to-person viral dynamics

Don't get left holding yesterday's toolkit. Rethink your business in terms of the global network, and take it from the jump point into exponential growth.

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Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business
By Tom Hayes
Published by McGraw-Hill Professional, 2008
ISBN 007154562X, 9780071545624
240 pages

Good To Great, Jim Collins

Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness - why some companies make the leap and others don't.

The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results.
• Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

"Some of the key concepts discerned in the study," comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people."

Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
By James Charles Collins, Jim Collins
Published by HarperBusiness, 2001
ISBN 0066620996, 9780066620992
300 pages