How can marketers navigate the growing array of marketing specialties, media options, and data sources? How can they provide consumers with seamless experiences of value across channels that overcome behavioral barriers and actually deliver results? In The Activation Imperative, William Rosen and Laurence Minsky provide a straightforward guide for marketers to move beyond building brands to activating them-from simply projecting what a brand is to optimizing what it does-to move people closer to transaction. Drawing on years of research and experience with the world's most sophisticated brands, Rosen and Minsky share a unifying cross-discipline marketing approach designed to impact critical behaviors and more effectively drive business results. With actionable advice and best-in-class examples, Rosen and Minsky offer marketers a road map to manage today's increasingly fragmented marketing landscape to more efficiently build their brands and their business.

How can marketers navigate the growing array of marketing specialties, multiplying media options and data sources, and increasing content saturation to improve effectiveness and return on investment? How can they provide consumers with seamless experiences of value across channels that overcome behavioral barriers and actually deliver results? In The Activation Imperative, William Rosen and Laurence Minsky provide a straightforward guide for marketers to move beyond building brands to activating them-from simply projecting what a brand is to optimizing what it does-to move people closer to transaction. Drawing on years of research and experience with the world's most sophisticated brands, Rosen and Minsky share a unifying cross-discipline marketing approach designed to impact critical behaviors and more effectively drive business results. They reveal how today's more personalized and trackable communications illuminate tremendous diversity in paths-to-purchase and explain how to leverage this data to develop more effective strategies and creative targeted to individual inflection points. With actionable advice and best-in-class examples, Rosen and Minsky offer marketers a road map to manage today's increasingly fragmented marketing landscape to more effectively and efficiently build brands and business.

Hardly a week passes without some high-profile court case that features intellectual property at its center. But how did the belief that one could own an idea come about? And how did that belief change the way humankind lives and works? William Rosen, author of Justinian's Flea, seeks to answer these questions and more with The Most Powerful Idea in the World. A lively and passionate study of the engineering and scientific breakthroughs that led to the steam engine, this book argues that the very notion of intellectual property drove not only the invention of the steam engine but also the entire Industrial Revolution: history's first sustained era of economic improvement. To do so, Rosen conjures up an eccentric cast of characters, including the legal philosophers who enabled most the inventive society in millennia, and the scientists and inventors--Thomas Newcomen, Robert Boyle, and James Watt--who helped to create and perfect the steam engine over the centuries. With wit and wide-ranging curiosity, Rosen explores the power of creativity, capital, and collaboration in the brilliant engineering of the steam engine and how this power source, which fueled factories, ships, and railroads, changed human history. Deeply informative and never dull, Rosen's account of one of the most important inventions made by humans is a rollicking ride through history, with careful scholarship and fast-paced prose in equal measure.

The incredible true story of how a cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history--years before the Black Death, from the author of Justinian's Flea and the forthcoming Miracle Cure In May 1315, it started to rain. For the seven disastrous years that followed, Europeans would be visited by a series of curses unseen since the third book of Exodus: floods, ice, failures of crops and cattle, and epidemics not just of disease, but of pike, sword, and spear. All told, six million lives--one-eighth of Europe's total population--would be lost. With a category-defying knowledge of science and history, William Rosen tells the stunning story of the oft-overlooked Great Famine with wit and drama and demonstrates what it all means for today's discussions of climate change.