Taking the themes of entrepreneurship, start-ups, innovation and collaboration, this book seeks to answer the urgent question of how countries and companies can stay competitive in an ever-changing digital environment. The authors determine which entrepreneurial processes will work for whom and under what circumstances, presenting methodological implications for business research, start-ups and policy making. Examining the success of Germany as an innovation powerhouse, and comparing this with the USA, this edited collection provides valuable ideas for improving practice, facilitating start-up activity, and ultimately ensuring a country's competitive edge.

In the wake of the profound upheavals that our society has been facing, the business world is undergoing change. Values such as trust, well-being, sustainability, and respect for human beings and their deeper ambitions are becoming increasingly important. Corporations and professionals can achieve and maintain success only if they can bring their relationship with their customers to a new, higher level. The condition that links the two is very similar to that created when we fall in love. The organizational models and marketing approaches based on the metaphor of war, and the inherent rhetoric of "command and control", are no longer valid; to form such a bond we need love. The authors are aware of this. Since 2013, in collaboration with international scholars, they have been studying the new market dynamics and the fundamental role of ethics in gaining commercial results. While their previous book Sales Ethics (2015) helped to set up and manage customer relationships based on trust and fairness, this new book will support you in building your business strategy and designing marketing tools (from customer analysis, to the definition of your offer and the style of communication, up to the positioning of prices and the management of resources) in the light of a new model, the Loving Business Model, which aims to make the customer fall in love with you, and you with your work. This book, like its predecessor, is the result of independent research conducted between Italy and the United States combined with the authors' many years of professional experience. It contains the most up-to-date and effective techniques available in the modern marketing landscape, supported by case studies, concrete examples and activities, which will guide you to put your newly acquired knowledge into practice.

Today more and more businesses seek to get closer to their customers. While many books urge a customer focus, few offer much in the way of specific advice. This book emphasizes the importance of sending cross-functional teams to visit customers at their workplace and explains how this approach can assist new product development and the improvement of customer satisfaction. Drawing on best practices found at leading technology firms, Customer Visits, Second Edition offers a complete guide to all aspects of planning and executing a program of customer visits. A wealth of specific advice is offered on topics such as the right and wrong kinds of objective, how many customers to visit, how to prepare a discussion guide, how to coordinate visits with the sales force, how to build rapport, effective and ineffective questions to ask customers, and traps and pitfalls in the analysis of data from visit programs. The author?'s years of experience teaching seminars for leading firms insure that the advice offered in this book is practical and actionable. Managers and engineers engaged in new product development will discover a wealth of suggestions for finding out what customers really want. Executives will discover a practical and cost-effective approach to motivating employees to focus on customer satisfaction. New in the second edition: + Expanded coverage of ad hoc visits + More examples of good and bad procedures + Expanded section on how to analyze visit data + Expanded coverage of questions to ask customers + Better integration with other market research tools

Practice theories of our equipped and situated tacit construction of participatory narrative meaning are evident in multiple disciplines from architectural to communication study, consumer, marketing and media research, organisational, psychological and social insight. Their hermeneutic focus is on customarily little reflected upon, recurrent but required, practices of embodied, habituated knowing how-from choosing 'flaw-free' fruit in a market to celebrating Chinese New Year Reunion Dining, caring for patients to social media 'voice'. In ready-to-hand practices, we attend to the purpose and not to the process, to the goal rather than its generating. Yet familiar practices both presume and put in place fundamental understanding. Listening to Asian and Western consumers reflecting-not only subsequent to but also within practices-this book considers activity emplacing core perceptions from a liminal moment in a massive mall to health psychology research. Institutions configure practices-in-practices cohering or conflicting within their material horizons and space accessible to social analysis. Practices theory construes routine as minimally self-monitored, nonetheless considering it as being embodied narrative. In research output, such generic 'storied' activity is seen as (in)formed, shaped from a shifting hierarchy of 'horizons' or perspectives-from habituated to reflective-rather than a single seamless unfolding. Taking a communication practices route disentangles and avoids conflating tacit and transformative construction of identities in qualitative research. Practices research crosses discipline. Ubiquitous media use by managers and visitors throughout a shopping mall responds to investigating not only with digital tracking expertise but also from an interpretive marketing viewpoint. Visiting a practice perspective's hermeneutic underwriting, spatio-temporal metaphorical concepts become available and appropriate to the analysis of communication as a process across disciplines. In repeated practices, 'horizons of understanding' are solidified. Emphasising our understanding of a material environment as 'equipment', practices theory enables correlation of use and demographic variable in quantitative study extending interpretive behavioural and haptic qualitative research. Consumption, Psychology and Practice Theories: A Hermeneutic Perspective addresses academics and researchers in communication studies, marketing, psychology and social theory, as well as university methodology courses, recognising philosophy guides a discipline's investigative insight.

This book provides an insight in the phenomenon of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), including the various forms of corporate restructuring. It highlights the importance of M&A as a strategy for faster growth in the corporate. The book provides an enriched experience of the art of valuation with detailed description of M&A process, deal structuring and financing. The book also provides the broader perspective of Accounting and Regulatory aspects of M&A. While covering the conceptual underpinnings of M&A, the book supplements it with real life examples on each sub-topic with various numeric examples. Thus the judicious blend of theory and practical aspects, through numerical as well as real life case-studies, make the book a source of vast knowledge in the complicated and dynamic world of M&A.

CHOICE MAGAZINE Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 "In addition to discussing relevant content, the various contributors to the book are excellent communicators. Sentences are clear, paragraphs are coherent, and chapters fulfill the promise of their introductions, and readers will benefit from the diagrams, figures, and charts that are used to enhance the text. I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it highly. This book will be of particular interest to advanced students, academics, and practitioners. Although statistical background is necessary to comprehend the advanced analytical techniques, most readers are likely to benefit from the overviews provided in this well-written book." -Guldem Gokcek, JOURNAL OF MARKETING The Handbook of Marketing Research: Uses, Misuses, and Future Advances comprehensively explores the approaches for delivering market insights for fact-based decision making in a market-oriented firm. Divided into four parts, the Handbook addresses (1) the different nuances of delivering insights; (2) quantitative, qualitative, and online data gathering techniques; (3) basic and advanced data analysis methods; and (4) the substantial marketing issues that clients are interested in resolving through marketing research. Key Features: Appeals to users as well as suppliers of marketing research: Comprehensive topics in marketing research (such as philosophy, techniques, and applications) are delivered in a reader-friendly, applications-oriented, and non-mathematical fashion. Covers many cutting-edge techniques of data collection and analysis: Traditional quantitative techniques, innovative qualitative techniques, and emerging online methods are presented. Provides a broad range of current ideas and applications: The contributors address models of the impact of marketing mix variables, segmentation, brand equity, satisfaction, customer lifetime value, and marketing ROI. Chapters on international marketing research and marketing management support systems are also included.

Daily existence is more interconnected to consumer behaviors than ever before, encompassing many issues of well-being. Problems include unhealthy eating; credit card mismanagement; alcohol, tobacco, pornography, and gambling abuse; marketplace discrimination; and ecological deterioration; as well as at-risk groups who are impoverished, impaired, or elderly. Opportunities for well-being via consumer behaviors include empowerment via the Internet, product sharing, leisure pursuits, family consumption, and pro-environmental activities, among others. In 2005 the Association for Consumer Research launched Transformative Consumer Research (TCR). Its mission is to foster research on quality of life that is both rigorous and applied for better assisting consumers, their caregivers, policy administrators, and executives. This edited volume includes 33 chapters on a wide range of topics by expert international authors. All royalties from sales of this book are donated to the Association to support TCR grants.

Ed McQuarrie has been a leading light among sociological consumer researchers for a long time, his research devoted to deep and interdisciplinary exploration. This book is a much-needed development of the vast new terrain of consumers' online behaviors. From megaphone effects to soapbox imperatives, from Bourdieu to Goffman, cultural capital to trust, McQuarrie builds on his prior work to provide exciting new thinking to help us understand the radical and important changes that the Internet continues to spur. Highly recommended!' - Robert Kozinets, York University, CanadaIt's a new world online, where consumers can publish their writing and gain a public presence, even a mass audience. This book links together blogging, writing reviews for Yelp, and creating pinboards for Pinterest, all of which provide ordinary people the opportunity to display their tastes to strangers. Edward McQuarrie shows how the operation of taste in consumption has been changed by the Internet and offers a fresh perspective on why websites like Yelp and Pinterest have become so successful. Drawing on Bourdieu and Campbell to support his thesis, Edward McQuarrie uncovers what is new online by: - presenting a sociological perspective on what consumers do online and contrasting it to more familiar economic, psychological and ethnographic views - reinterpreting Bourdieu s idea of cultural capital to understand the success of fashion bloggers - showing how the meaning of taste and what it means to dress fashionably have changed with the Web - explaining why online reviews cannot be considered word-of-mouth and therefore cannot be understood using that idea - examining why Pinterest is so attractive to female consumers while relating Pinterest to Walter Benjamin's ideas about how mechanical reproduction changes the meaning of art. This book will be valuable to students and scholars interested in consumer research, marketing, and sociology, specifically those who seek an alternative to purely psychological and economic explanations for what consumers do online.

The concept of value has been at the heart of marketing thought and practice. Marketers strive to develop a unique value proposition to satisfy the needs of customers in order to create a differentiated offering to targeted customers, be they end consumers or business users. It is the unique value delivered by products and services that defines firm's competitive market positioning. Recent advances in marketing theory have enhanced the interpretation of value in terms of its types, manifestations and determinants. Value in marketing is delivered to customers, stakeholders, shareholders, ecosystems and society. While the literature has been unanimously emphasizing the economic interpretation of value, measured in money terms, marketing has been at the forefront of critical thinking bringing to the fore new meanings and interpretations of value that have unlocked the psychological, emotional, social and ecological value of products and services to customers. It is the marketing thought that has extended the understanding of value-in-use and has indisputably positioned value in context. Marketing has developed the notion of value delivered by intangible assets that can create much greater value than the tangible product and/or service. Marketing has unravelled the multi-layered nature of value to the customer and thus augmented the meanings and interpretations, as well as the analytical and practical potential of this notion. Consequently, we see the need to revisit the concept of value in marketing in order to address its complexity. This book sets to provide an insight in the concept of value in marketing in its contemporary interpretation and level of development. The aim is to offer an overview of debates and developments in our understanding of value in marketing that can raise the awareness of the scholarly and business communities of its pivotal importance for businesses and consumers. Value in Marketing presents reflections and analysis of value in marketing by consecutive generations of scholars who have made theoretical contribution to the contemporary understanding of the concept, its interpretations, dimensions and importance. The chapters address various issues including: customer value development, implications, and trajectories; intra-variable and inter-variable perspectives of value; the importance of the value concept in the international marketing context; value developed in networks that is intrinsically associated with knowledge creation in the internationalization, meanings and interpretations of value in diverse contexts that help us develop further the dimensions of the concept. We trust the book will be of interest to researchers, scholars and students in the fields of marketing management and international business, and to people who wish to have a better understand what marketing really brings to consumers.

Diplomacy is transforming and expanding its role as the method of interstate relations to a general instrument of communication among globalized societies. Adapting to globalization the practice of diplomacy is shared by non-state participants, thus becoming privatized and popularized.

With the strife for common values, the finality of international interactions moves beyond national interest towards communitarianism. International law governing foreign relations can be strengthened through judicial review by national courts.

Working on the interface of diplomacy and academia, this practitioner s perspective combines an insider view into innovation and change of the diplomatic process with a concise interdisciplinary academic analysis."

This textbook is an introduction to game theory, which is the systematic analysis of decision-making in interactive settings. Game theory can be of great value to business managers. The ability to correctly anticipate countermove by rival firms in competitive and cooperative settings enables managers to make more effective marketing, advertising, pricing, and other business decisions to optimally achieve the firm's objectives. Game theory does not always accurately predict how rivals will act in strategic situations, but does identify a decision maker's best response to situations involving move and countermove. As Nobel Prize winner Thomas Shelling noted: "We may wish to understand how participants actually do conduct themselves in conflict situations; an understanding of the 'correct' play may give us a bench mark for the study of actual behavior." The concise and axiomatic approach to the material presented in this textbook is easily accessible to students with a background in the principles of microeconomics and college mathematics. The selection and organizations of topics makes the textbook appropriate for use in a wide range of curricula by students with different backgrounds.

Social values are central to people's lives, guiding behaviors, and judgments, and defining who we are. This book advances understanding of consumer social values and their roles in the global marketplace by refining and directing existing knowledge of consumer behaviors. With a diverse set of contributors from different parts of the world, this engaging collection provides a unique examination of social values through cross-cultural research. It incorporates input from researchers with varying academic backgrounds from marketing to psychology and philosophy, and also focuses on a range of methodological approaches including surveys, ethnography, interviews, semantic analysis, and neuroscience. The book introduces innovative concepts and provides comprehensive coverage of several specialized areas, to offer an important contribution to values research and discussion. Key topics include values and choice; means-end chains; relations among goals; motives; religion and personality; value measurement and values related to specific services and industries. Consumer Social Values is an essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners of consumer psychology and marketing communications.

This book examines modern consumption, focusing on concepts of autonomy and rationality. In recent years, conventional ideas of 'free will' have come under attack in the context of consumer choice and similarly, postmodernists have sabotaged the very notion of consumer rationality. O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy adopt a moderating perspective, reviewing and critiquing these attacks in order to work towards a more nuanced view of the consumer: neither entirely autonomous nor perfectly rational. While the first part of this book concentrates on assailing critiques of 'free-will', the second part takes issue with the postmodernist emphasis on the non-rational. The authors situate these critiques in the context of key academic debate, examining the logic and empirical bases for their claims thus leading to a deeper understanding of 'bounded' rationality and the potential of the adaptive unconscious to affect consumer choice.

The digital age has transformed the very nature of marketing. Armed with smartphones, tablets, PCs and smart TVs, consumers are increasingly hanging out on the internet. Cyberspace has changed the way they communicate, and the way they shop and buy. This fluid, de-centralized and multidirectional medium is changing the way brands engage with consumers.At the same time, technology and innovation, coupled with the explosion of business data, has fundamentally altered the manner we collect, process, analyse and disseminate market intelligence. The increased volume, variety and velocity of information enables marketers to respond with much greater speed, to changes in the marketplace. Market intelligence is timelier, less expensive, and more accurate and actionable.Anchored in this age of transformations, Marketing Analytics is a practitioner's guide to marketing management in the 21st century. The text devotes considerable attention to the way market analytic techniques and market research processes are being refined and re-engineered. Written by a marketing veteran, it is intended to guide marketers as they craft market strategies, and execute their day to day tasks.

Practice theories of our equipped and situated tacit construction of participatory narrative meaning are evident in multiple disciplines from architectural to communication study, consumer, marketing and media research, organisational, psychological and social insight. Their hermeneutic focus is on customarily little reflected upon, recurrent but required, practices of embodied, habituated knowing how-from choosing 'flaw-free' fruit in a market to celebrating Chinese New Year Reunion Dining, caring for patients to social media 'voice'. In ready-to-hand practices, we attend to the purpose and not to the process, to the goal rather than its generating. Yet familiar practices both presume and put in place fundamental understanding. Listening to Asian and Western consumers reflecting-not only subsequent to but also within practices-this book considers activity emplacing core perceptions from a liminal moment in a massive mall to health psychology research. Institutions configure practices-in-practices cohering or conflicting within their material horizons and space accessible to social analysis. Practices theory construes routine as minimally self-monitored, nonetheless considering it as being embodied narrative. In research output, such generic 'storied' activity is seen as (in)formed, shaped from a shifting hierarchy of 'horizons' or perspectives-from habituated to reflective-rather than a single seamless unfolding. Taking a communication practices route disentangles and avoids conflating tacit and transformative construction of identities in qualitative research. Practices research crosses discipline. Ubiquitous media use by managers and visitors throughout a shopping mall responds to investigating not only with digital tracking expertise but also from an interpretive marketing viewpoint. Visiting a practice perspective's hermeneutic underwriting, spatio-temporal metaphorical concepts become available and appropriate to the analysis of communication as a process across disciplines. In repeated practices, 'horizons of understanding' are solidified. Emphasising our understanding of a material environment as 'equipment', practices theory enables correlation of use and demographic variable in quantitative study extending interpretive behavioural and haptic qualitative research. Consumption, Psychology and Practice Theories: A Hermeneutic Perspective addresses academics and researchers in communication studies, marketing, psychology and social theory, as well as university methodology courses, recognising philosophy guides a discipline's investigative insight.

This book is an honor to the many important contributions of Herbert Krugman, past president of APA, The Division of Consumer Psychology and The Association for Public Opinions Research. This reader contains his selected works in Consumer Behavior and Advertising which combine insights from Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology and Survey Methodology. William Wells, University of Minnesota, has provided the foreword and section overviews for the book which will help it appeal to all academics and students of consumer research.

Anticipating that marketing will experience a strategic change in the new normal post COVID-19, this book sets out to capture interesting insights from researchers and practitioners through in-depth research on the myriad aspects of industrial transformation. It discusses the facets in which markets can be reached sustainably delivering value to people, planet and create prosperity. Sustainable Marketing and Customer Value establishes an overview and framework for major ideas that connect marketing, consumption and sustainability. It addresses dominant areas of research of sustainability from the marketing perspective, the origin of interest in sustainability, as well as the practice of deprioritising sustainability ideas in pursuit of short-term business goals. Research scholars and business students will find this book of primary relevance, but it is also written for marketing academics and professionals, especially those in large corporations.

This book proposes that organizational policies are what ensure the institutionalization and sustainability of futures thinking in organizations. It presents several case studies from corporations and other institutions that describe effective use of foresight methods and internal policies to respond to rapid change. The case studies address changing trends in technology, globalization and/or workforce diversity, and the impact on the economic and political well-being of the organization. The editors also develop an organizational capability maturity model for futures thinking as well as providing questions for discussion that promote critical review of each case chapter. This book will inform scholars and organizational leaders how best to utilize foresight methodologies and organizational policies to sustain successful management strategies within futures thinking organizations. Chapter 9 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

An accessible, unintimidating introduction to the focus group research project. For students in research methods or market research courses within mass media, communication studies, marketing, advertising, and public relations programs.

An unusually understandable survey of the forces or perception and feeling that determine the purchases we make; the roles played by fashion, fads, and status; and the psychological needs that they fulfill. The book discusses how children become consumers and how they change as they age. Research based throughout, it shows how ads use classical conditioning, harnessing psychological motivation to create image and sell products.

Canonical Authors in Consumption Theory is the first work to compile the contributions of the greatest social thinkers in the global conversation about consumption and consumer culture. A prestigious reference work, it offers original chapters by the world's most prominent thought leaders and surveys how the work of historical theorists has influenced and shaped consumption theory, both through history and at the cutting edge of research. Consumption is at the core of contemporary lifestyles, of political successes and failures and of discussions around sustainability and environmental change. Contemporary consumer culture shapes modern identities, and is the engine of the globalizing capitalist economy. Still, most social theorizations over the last century and a half have addressed production processes rather than consumption processes. This is about to change. Studies of consumption play an increasing role as a topic and a domain of study in marketing, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. Currently, there is no single compilation that systematically links scholarly work published by the greatest social thinkers of the last 150 years to the understanding of contemporary consumer society. This book provides a solid framework for understanding the relevance of these canonical authors in social theory to facilitate analysis of consumer culture, and to act as a comprehensive reference point for consumer researchers, doctoral students and practitioners.

The study and teaching of marketing as a university subject is generally understood to have originated in America during the early 20th century emerging as an applied branch of economics. This book tells a different story describing the influence of the German Historical School on institutional economists and economic historians who pioneered the study of marketing in America and Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing from archival materials at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard Business School, and the University of Birmingham, this book documents the early intellectual genealogy of marketing science and traces the ideas that early American and British economists borrowed from German scholars to study and teach marketing. Early marketing scholars both in America and Britain openly credited the German School, and its ideology based on social welfare and distributive justice was a strong motivation for many institutional economists who studied marketing in America, predating the modern macro-marketing school by many decades. Challenging many traditional beliefs, this book provides an authoritative new narrative of the origins of marketing thought. It will be of great interest to educators, scholars and advanced students with an interest in marketing theory and history, and in the history of economic thought.

This book explores the workplace experiences, opportunities, and challenges that emerge from the nuances of diversity and inclusion dynamics in Latin American and Caribbean countries. While the first part of the book addresses emerging frameworks on diversity and inclusion in Latin America by examining the effects of history, traditions, and cultural differences, the second part offers case studies of country-specific actualities. The authors highlight that despite the many shared cultural aspects of the region, it is not homogeneous and there are significant differences from place to place. It follows then that a variety of cultural differences implies a variety of approaches to workplace values, and more specifically, to the understanding of diversity and inclusion. Examining topics such as gender identity, disability, and racial gaps in countries throughout the region, this book offers scholars a fresh perspective on an emerging region.

Canonical Authors in Consumption Theory is the first reference work to compile the contributions of the greatest social thinkers to the global conversation about consumption and consumer culture. A prestige reference work, it offers original chapters by the world's most prominent thought leaders. It introduces the works of historical theorists and surveys how their work has influenced and shaped consumption theory, both through history and at the cutting edge of research. Consumption is at core of contemporary lifestyles, of political successes and failures, and with discussions of sustainability and environmental change. Contemporary consumer culture shapes modern identities, and is the engine of the globalizing capitalist economy. Still, the majority of social theorizations over the last century and a half have been addressing production processes rather than consumption processes. This is about to change. Studies of consumption play an increasing role as a topic and a domain of study in marketing, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. Currently, there is no single compilation that systematically links scholarly work published by the greatest social thinkers of the last century and a half to the understanding of contemporary consumer society. This book provides a solid framework for understanding the relevance of these canonical authors in social theory to facilitate analysis of consumer culture, and to act as a comprehensive reference point for consumer researchers, doctoral students and practitioners.