Why does American business seem to sputter along where it ought to thrive? What is the source of the current plague of downsizing, disappearing companies, dot-com crashes, and here-today-gone-tomorrow advertising campaigns? Why do more products flop than ever before? Marketing experts Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Krieg have the answers.In Counterintuitive Marketing, Clancy and Krieg trace the high rate of business failure back to bad marketing strategy, and the even worse i...

Innovation remains an arduous and painful process for many companies, doing untold damage to brands, profitability, and careers. Some have used line extensions to mitigate risk, but all too often they have ended up extending the core brand into oblivion. Others have used test markets to help gauge opinion before a national rollout, only to have competitors snatch ideas and undermine results. Given the problems with conventional approaches, it's not surprising that 90% of new products and s...

Competitive advantage. The value chain. Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost. If you want to understand how companies achieve and sustain competitive success, Michael Porter’s frameworks are the foundation. But while everyone in business may know Porter’s name, many managers misunderstand and misuse his concepts.Understanding Michael Porter sets the record straight, providing the first concise, accessible summary of Porter’s revolutionar...

Be a Network Marketing Superstar provides a proven 26-step program designed to help business leaders quickly become stars in this fast-growing and profitable industry.As far as career opportunities go, network marketing is hard to beat. It costs almost nothing to start, allows for flexible hours, and paves the way for financial independence. Network marketing -- also known as direct selling and multi-level marketing -- has turned millions of people into su...

If you’re starting a new business or planning your business’s future, there are plenty of things you should take into account. Strategic Planning For Dummies covers everything you need to know to develop a plan for building and maintaining a competitive advantage — no matter what business you’re in.Written by Erica Olsen, founder and President of a business development firm that helps entrepreneurial-minded businesses plan for a successful future, this handy guide covers a...

How do you keep your customers coming back-and get them to bring others?If you need the best practices and ideas for making your customers loyal and profitable--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are nine inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place.This collection of HBR articles will help you:- Turn angry customers into loyal advocates- Get more people to recommend you- Boost customer satisfaction by satisfying your...

In this long-awaited book from the world's premier brand expert and author of the seminal work Building Strong Brands, David Aaker shows managers how to construct a brand portfolio strategy that will support a company's business strategy and create relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity. Building on case studies of world-class brands such as Dell, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Dove, Intel, CitiGroup, and PowerBar, Aaker demonstrates how powerful, cohesive brand strat...

Excellence in customer service is the hallmark of success in service industries and among manufacturers of products that require reliable service. But what exactly is excellent service? It is the ability to deliver what you promise, say the authors, but first you must determine what you can promise. Building on seven years of research on service quality, they construct a model that, by balancing a customer's perceptions of the value of a particular service with the custom...

What is different about the careers of people like Lou Gerstner, the acclaimed, recently retired chairman and CEO of IBM? Or Senator Elizabeth Dole, Yahoo! COO Dan Rosensweig, and Tom Freston, chairman and CEO of MTV Networks?Why did they ascend to the top and prosper—why did they have extraordinary careers—while others equally talented never reached their potential or aspirations?Jim Citrin and Rick Smith of Spencer Stuart, the world’s most influential executive search fir...

Don't be daunted by a challenging economy and fierce competition. Even in the toughest environment, innovative, highly profitable businesses abound and yours can be one of them.Bestselling business authority Mark Thompson and international success expert Brian Tracy join forces to show you how great leadership, great people, and great products are the key to building a phenomenally successful business.In Now, Build a Great Business!, you'll learn h...

Know if you'll hit your targets before pulling the trigger on any marketing planMore than sixty five percent of new products are commercial failures, and if you compound this with a recession, now more than ever you can't afford to be wrong. In If You Build It Will They Come, business professor and strategy consultant Rob Adams shows you how to make sure you hit your target market before you spend a lot of money. He shows you the fast, systematic and proven approa...

A year’s worth of management wisdom, all in one place.We’ve examined the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to bring you the latest, most significant thinking driving business today. With authors from Marcus Buckingham to Herminia Ibarra and company examples from Google to Deloitte, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations to your fingertips.This book will insp...