Contagious: Why Things Catch On

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Mukti Khaire

Art and business are often described as worlds apart, even diametric opposites. And yet, these realms are close cousins in creative industries where firms bring cultural goods to market, attaching price tags to music, paintings, theater, literature, film, and fashion. Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, Culture and Commerce details the processes by which artistic worth is decoded, translated, and converted to economic value. Case studies of firms from Chanel and Penguin to tastemakers like the Sundance Institute and the Pritzker Prize illuminate how creative entrepreneurs influence our sense of value, shifting consumer behavior and our culture in deep, surprising ways.

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Hy Mariampolski

"Ethnography for Marketers is designed as a standard training and reference resource to help corporate managers and marketers design and implement ethnographic studies. It is a textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying ethnography or research methods in a variety of programs including business, sociology, anthropology, and education."--Jacket.

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Martin Lindstrom

"Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year overseas, closely observing people in their homes. His goal: to uncover their hidden desires and turn them into breakthrough products for the world's leading brands. In a world besotted by the power of Big Data, he works like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, accumulating small clues to help solve a stunningly diverse array of challenges. In Switzerland, a stuffed teddy bear in a teenage girl's bedroom helped revolutionize 1,000 stores, spread across twenty countries, for one of Europe's largest fashion retailers. In Dubai, a bracelet strung with pearls helped Jenny Craig offset its declining membership in the United States and increase loyalty by 159 percent in only a year. And in China, the look of a car dashboard led to the design of the Roomba vacuum - a great American success story. How? Lindstrom connects the dots in this globetrotting narrative that will fascinate not only marketers and brand managers, but anyone interested in the infinite variations of human behavior. The Desire Hunter combines armchair travel with forensic psychology into an interlocking series of international clue-gathering detective stories. It presents a rare behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create global brands; and along the way, reveals surprising and counter-intuitive truths about what connects us all as humans"--

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Douglas Van Praet

"For too long marketers have been asking the wrong question. If consumers make decisions unconsciously, why do we persist in asking them directly through traditional marketing research why they do what they do? They simply can't tell us because they don't really know. Before marketers develop strategies, they need to recognize that consumers have strategies too...human strategies, not consumer strategies. We need to go beyond asking why, and begin to ask how, behavior change occurs. Here, author Douglas Van Praet takes the most brilliant and revolutionary concepts from cognitive science and applies them to how we market, advertise, and consume in the modern digital age. Van Praet simplifies the most complex object in the known universe - the human brain - into seven codified actionable steps to behavior change. These steps are illustrated using real world examples from advertising, marketing, media and business to consciously unravel what brilliant marketers and ad practitioners have long done intuitively, deconstructing the real story behind some of the greatest marketing and business successes in recent history, such as Nike's "Just Do It" campaign; "Got Milk?"; Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" ; and the infamous Volkswagen "Punch Buggy" launch as well as their beloved "The Force" (Mini Darth Vader) Super Bowl commercial"--