The biggest ingredient to success is timing, yet everyone ignores it. Surge is a step by step guide to position your business directly in front of surging customer demand. You can time the market, after all.
Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Lively and informed, "Scroogenomics" illustrates how consumer spending generates vast amounts of economic waste. Economist Waldfogel provides solid explanations to show why it's time to stop the madness and think twice before buying gifts for the holidays.
Extract: Domestic population growth and greater use of processed eggs over the past three decades offset the decline in per-capita shell egg use and left total egg consumption for domestic food purposes averaging about 5 billion dozen a year. This paper analyzes effects of prices, income, and household characteristics on the demand for eggs. Evidence from a complete demand system indicates that eggs are more price inelastic than either red meat or poultry. The own-price elasticity for eggs was found to be -0.1429. The income elasticity for eggs, derived from an analysis of the 1977-78 USDA Nationwide Food Consumption Survey, was estimated to be approximately -0.05. Region of household residence, season, race, age, and household size also influence egg consumption and expenditures.
This is the book that market strategists have been waiting for to position themselves in global markets and take advantage of the opportunities that demographic bonuses and deficits offer to them and their products. It is also a book for teachers and students of consumer behaviour to grasp the importance of the life cycle as a framework that shapes the demand for goods and services determined by changes in social, economic and physical functioning. It gives insights into gendered consumer behaviour and cohort effects. It presents a range of views on consumer behaviour and how demographic perspectives enhance these perspectives. The book offers conceptual and analytical tools that can be used in the assessment of population characteristics as determinants of market size, composition and potential for a variety of products. It offers organising frameworks as well as empirical evidence of consumer behaviour in clusters of markets, with different rates of population growth and age distribution that affect consumers’ priorities and demand for basic and progressive commodities. The book shows commonalities as well as differences in consumer behaviour arising from different cultures and social customs. It uses analytical tools that are explained and accessible to readers with a range of competences. It is a book that can give a better understanding of consumer behaviour and market opportunities to the practitioner. It can also be used for the instruction of students in demography, consumer behaviour and marketing.
Each year Americans start one million new businesses, nearly 80 percent of which fail within the first five years. Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of “sell it—do it, sell it—do it” that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try. This is the exact situation Mike Michalowicz found himself in when he was trying to grow his first company. Although it was making steady money, there was never very much left over and he was chasing customers left and right, putting in twenty-eight-hour days, eight days a week. The punishing grind never let up. His company was alive but stunted, and he was barely breathing. That’s when he discovered an unlikely source of inspiration—pumpkin farmers. After reading an article about a local farmer who had dedicated his life to growing giant pumpkins, Michalowicz realized the same process could apply to growing a business. He tested the Pumpkin Plan on his own company and transformed it into a remarkable, multimillion-dollar industry leader. First he did it for himself. Then for others. And now you. So what is the Pumpkin Plan? Plant the right seeds: Don’t waste time doing a bunch of different things just to please your customers. Instead, identify the thing you do better than anyone else and focus all of your attention, money, and time on figuring out how to grow your company doing it. Weed out the losers: In a pumpkin patch small, rotten pumpkins stunt the growth of the robust, healthy ones. The same is true of customers. Figure out which customers add the most value and provide the best opportunities for sustained growth. Then ditch the worst of the worst. Nurture the winners: Once you figure out who your best customers are, blow their minds with care. Discover their unfulfilled needs, innovate to make their wishes come true, and overdeliver on every single promise. Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconventional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.
The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.
This accessible and comprehensive textbook explores the role of advertising in the marketplace. It investigates how firms’ advertising strategies are informative, persuasive or add value to the product advertised. The book explains in detail empirical methodologies used to identify the impact of advertising on consumer demand and on market structure and reviews some recent empirical findings. It concludes with an in-depth exploration of digital advertising and auctions along with a framework for current antitrust investigations into two-sided platforms (Google, Facebook) that are funded by advertising revenues.
The goal for consumer oriented business should be to make a profit and to do it without costing the Earth. Yet exactly how to satisfy the needs and wants of consumers without contributing to environmental degradation is proving to be the essential, but elusive goal for businesses in the 21st century. The leading solution is to substitute material consumption with the consumption of services that offer consumers convenience and value but eliminate much of the inefficiency and waste associated with our throw-away society. Sustainable consumer services for households - services that are delivered to consumers at the premises such as home delivery of organic food, appliance leasing, mobile laundry services, internet marketing of homeservices or car pool schemes - provide a key part of the answer of how to reduce material consumption and waste while still turning a profit. Yet until now there has been little information to guide the development of such business models and practices, and to develop ways to make service-based consumption more attractive to consumers than object-ownership-based models. This book, equally a practical business handbook and business course text, provides the missing link in sustainable household service competitiveness by examining the issues, looking at business models, providing dozens of real-life best-practice examples and presenting data from the first large-scale consumer survey that explains consumer behaviour and what they want from home service provision. The book is an essential resource for businesses and public or nonprofit organizations and housing organizations entering the growing consumer services market. It provides a wealth of business know-how on what works and what doesn t, how to avoid potential pitfalls, and how to provide consumer services at the household level that are profitable, environmentally sustainable and that add to consumers quality of life.