Industry Research

From bargains in the Big Apple to the bustling bazaars of Istanbul, from in-store to interactive and online to mobile, neuromarketing pioneer Dr. David Lewis goes behind the scenes of the "persuasion industry" to reveal the powerful tools, techniques, technologies, and psychologies seeking to stimulate us all to buy more - often without us consciously realizing it.

The wisdom from Sun Tzu's world-famous book, The Art of War, has been widely applied by many top-class CEOs to drive their businesses to success. One of the quotes from his book reads, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” That translates to business as, “If you know yourself, your customers, and your competitors, you need not fear about your business anymore.” But how can entrepreneurs and business owners do that? The answer is market research.

What was a Buddhist monk doing at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos lecturing the world's leaders on mindfulness? Why do many successful corporations have a chief happiness officer? What can the chemical composition of your brain tell a potential employer about you? In the past decade, governments and corporations have become increasingly interested in measuring the way people feel: the Happiness index, Gross National Happiness, well-being and positive psychology have come to dominate the way we live our lives.

Former bookseller, longtime publisher, and author Jon M. Sweeney shows—with history and anecdotes centering around books such as Thoreau's Journal, Tagore's Gitanjali, Martin Buber's Hasidic Tales, and Tolstoy's Twenty-three Tales—what it means to be carried by a book. He explores the discovery that once accompanied finding books, and books finding us. He ponders the smell of an old volume, its heft, and why bibliophiles carry them around even without reading them. He demonstrates how and why there is magic and enchantment that takes place between people and books.

We are just witnessing the start of the radical changes in retail that will revolutionize shopping in every way. As Amazon and other disruptors continue to offer ever-greater value, customers' expectations will continue to ratchet up, making winning (and keeping) those customers all the more challenging. In The Shopping Revolution, Barbara E. Kahn, a foremost retail expert and professor at the Wharton School, examines the companies that have been most successful during this wave of change and offers fresh insights into what we can learn from their ascendance.

Deaths resulting from interactions with the US criminal legal system are a public health emergency, but the scope of this issue is intentionally ignored by the very systems that are supposed to be tracking these fatalities. In order to make a real difference and address this human rights problem, researchers and policy makers need reliable data.