We try to keep your reading appetite filled at the Wise Marketer and going into the holidays, we know you’ll have some extra time on your hands. As you might agree, a well-rounded education on the nuances of Loyalty Marketing and Customer Experience cannot be learned from one resource; the best type of education is gained by sampling a variety of resources and experiences. So, we’ve put together a list of our latest top six best marketing books to read as 2019 comes to a close.
As you sit under the glow of Christmas lights, and if you’re lucky, near a bonfire with marshmallows, we hope you’ll enjoy these reads and come away with added knowledge as you head into a new year of opportunity.
Driving Loyalty in Convenience Retail, by Paula Thomas
For convenience retailers, driving customer loyalty has never been more important, and yet this is the first book dedicated to the art and science of loyalty marketing in the convenience retail industry. Turning casual customer visits in to connected and trusted relationships is uniquely challenging in an industry where time and attention are the most difficult yet the most critical assets to nurture. Whether you already run a structured loyalty programme, or you are at just beginning to plan your customer loyalty strategy, this book is the definitive source of insights and ideas for marketers focused on building world-class loyalty marketing and customer connection programmes.
The author, Paula Thomas, has almost a decade of experience as a loyalty marketing consultant, combined with a first class MBA in business. In this book of articles, she deconstructs loyalty strategy, operations and insights from some of the world’s best programmes. The book features case studies from all over the world, dedicated to helping you build exceptional loyalty with your customer base. From Starbucks and Domino’s in the USA, to Shell and BP in the UK, to Repsol in Spain and 7-Eleven in Asia, Paula shares what’s working, for whom and why and showcases the latest innovations in retail technology as well as some fascinating facts driving success for the world’s greatest convenience brands. This book is destined to educate, inspire and transform your ideas about how to drive your customer’s loyalty by learning from the best in the business.
How Customers Think: Essential Insights in the Mind of the Market, by Gerald Zaltman
How to unlock the hidden 95 per cent of the customer's mind that traditional marketing methods have never reached. This title provides practical synthesis of the cognitive sciences. Drawing heavily on psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and linguistics, Zaltman combines academic rigor with real-world results to offer highly accessible insights, based on his years of research and consulting work with large clients like Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble.
An all-new tool kit: Zaltman provides research tools - metaphor elicitation, response latency, and implicit association techniques, to name a few - that will be all-new to marketers and demonstrates how innovators can use these tools to get clues from the subconscious when developing new products and finding new solutions, long before competitors do.
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Corporate executives struggle to harness the power of social technologies. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube are where customers discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals but how do you integrate these activities into your broader marketing efforts? It's an unstoppable groundswell that affects every industry -- yet it's still utterly foreign to most companies running things now.
When consumers you've never met are rating your company's products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.
In this updated and expanded edition of Groundswell, featuring an all new introduction and chapters on Twitter and social media integration, you'll learn to:
· Evaluate new social technologies as they emerge
· Determine how different groups of consumers are participating in social technology arenas
· Apply a four-step process for formulating your future strategy
· Build social technologies into your business
Groundswell has been established as required reading for executives seeking to protect and strengthen their company's public image.
The Experience Economy, by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore
In 1999, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore offered this idea to readers as a new way to think about connecting with customers and securing their loyalty. As a result, their marketing book The Experience Economy is now one of the best classics, embraced by readers and companies worldwide and read in more than a dozen languages.
And though the world has changed in many ways since then, the way to a customer's heart has not. In fact, the idea of staging experiences to leave a memorable—and lucrative—impression is now more relevant than ever. With an ongoing torrent of brands attacking consumers from all sides, how do you make yours stand out?
Welcome to the new Experience Economy. With this fully updated edition of the book, Pine and Gilmore make an even stronger case that experience is the missing link between a company and its potential audience. It offers new rich examples—including the U.S. Army, Heineken Experience, Autostadt, Vinopolis, American Girl Place, and others—to show fresh approaches to scripting and staging compelling experiences, while staying true to the very real economic conditions of the day.
Crafting the Customer Experience for People Not Like You: How to Delight and Engage the Customers Your Competitors Don't Understand, by Kelly McDonald
Deliver a better business experience, for every kind of customer
A "one-size fits all" approach to customer service is no longer viable. Businesses competing on service need to understand and cater to customers' racial, ethnic, religious, generational, and geographic differences in order to meet or exceed customers' service expectations. Crafting the Customer Experience to People Not Like You shows how companies, brands, and products struggling to differentiate themselves in a sea of sameness can foster long-term loyalty and brand preference with exceptional and customized customer service.
A detailed guide to core customer groups including women, the five generations (matures, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z), racial and ethnic segments, such as Hispanics and African-Americans, as well as those who are defined by key lifestyle and life-stage attributes
Includes consumer insights that will help business leaders deliver a better business experience with every customer
You cannot control the economy, the stock market or the costs of goods and labor. But you can control your organization's customer service. It's an empowering thought. Customer service is 100% in your control at all times and it's more important than ever.
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shapes Our Decisions, by Dr. Dan Ariely
Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup? When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?
In this expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.