Business & Economics

As the effectiveness of traditional marketing techniques continues to diminish, contemporary marketing increasingly becomes the most reliable method of expanding outreach and reflecting the needs of the modern consumer. When implemented, these contemporary strategies offer the greatest support for their client base, with a product range that adapts to the desires of the target market. The channels used to underpin these strategies are also radically different from traditional methods – placing emphasis upon platforms such as social media.

Designed for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as those in executive education and general business, The Essentials of Contemporary Marketing covers a wide range of themes, including:

– Consumer behaviour
– The latest marketing research
– Services marketing
– Brand management
– Global marketing, and
– Ethics in marketing.

Each chapter includes case studies to illustrate and contextualise the topics covered, featuring companies as diverse as Amazon, McLaren, Unilever, UBS and Virgin Money.

In alignment with its subject matter, The Essentials of Contemporary Marketing prioritises practicality over theory-based content – providing a comprehensive and contextualised insight into how marketing is developing in the 21st century.

The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn’t content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that’s never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech’s other elite innovators — Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg — Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.

The Everything Store will be the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong.

For all that’s been written about the Four over the last two decades, no one has captured their power and staggering success as insightfully as Scott Galloway.

Instead of buying the myths these compa­nies broadcast, Galloway asks fundamental questions. How did the Four infiltrate our lives so completely that they’re almost impossible to avoid (or boycott)? Why does the stock market forgive them for sins that would destroy other firms? And as they race to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company, can anyone chal­lenge them?

In the same irreverent style that has made him one of the world’s most celebrated business professors, Galloway deconstructs the strategies of the Four that lurk beneath their shiny veneers. He shows how they manipulate the fundamental emotional needs that have driven us since our ancestors lived in caves, at a speed and scope others can’t match. And he reveals how you can apply the lessons of their ascent to your own business or career.

Whether you want to compete with them, do business with them, or simply live in the world they dominate, you need to understand the Four.

Momentum is your greatest ally–with it you can do anything, without it you will stall. As CEO you hate surprises, especially the kind that undermines momentum–yours or the organization you lead.

Every CEO’s journey is unique. However, there exists a very predictable, but previously unknown pattern: the CEO life cycle. The Four Dilemmas of the CEO outlines the common challenges that every CEO will face during their tenure, irrespective of geography or industry. Once understood, action can be taken to break through these glass ceilings that cause CEOs to get stuck in the business, while their mandate for working on the business is continually diverted.

Framed within the life cycle of a CEO, the Four Dilemmas are:
1. You’re in charge of everything, but cannot completely trust anything.
2. You know that today’s executive cannot deliver tomorrow’s results.
3. How do you engage the full capability of your executive working on the business when they are at capacity working in the business?
4. At what point does the price of remaining personally relevant outweigh your other options?

In the first book to focus on these four issues collectively, the authors draw on their decades of experience as trusted advisers across a range of industries to show every executive how to recognize and anticipate the individual dilemmas, master them, and accelerate through them.

The Go-Giver Influencer is a story about two young, ambitious businesspeople: Gillian Waters, the chief buyer for Smith & Banks, a midsized company that operates a national chain of pet accessory stores; and Jackson Hill, the founder of Angels Clothed in Fur, a small but growing manufacturer of all-natural pet foods.

Each has something the other wants. To Jackson, Smith & Banks represents the possibility of reaching more animals with his products–if he can negotiate terms and conditions that will protect his company’s integrity. To Gillian, Angels Clothed in Fur could give her company a distinctive, uniquely high-quality line that will help them stand out from their competitors–if Angels Clothed in Fur can be persuaded to give them an exclusive.

At first, the negotiations are adversarial and frustrating. Then, coincidentally, Gillian and Jackson each encounter a mysterious yet kindly mentor. Over the next week, while neither one realizes the other is doing the same, both Gillian and Jackson learn the heart of both mentors’ philosophies: The Five Secrets of Genuine Influence.

The story ends in a way that surprises everyone–and with lessons we can all apply in our efforts to resolve conflicts and influence others.

Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, shares the epic inside story of how a working-class kid from the Nebraska prairie took on Wall Street’s clubby brokerage business, busted it open, and walked away a billionaire.

Joe Ricketts always had the gift of seeing what others missed. The son of a house builder, he started life as a part-time janitor, but by the age of thirty-three he saw the chance to challenge the big brokerage firms by offering Americans an inexpensive way to take control of their own stock trading. Nowadays, we take for granted that Main Street is playing right there on Wall Street, but Ricketts made that happen. His company, begun with $12,500 borrowed from friends and family, took off like a rocket thanks to an early embrace of digital technology and irreverent marketing. But Ameritrade also faced a series of near-disasters: the SEC almost shut him down; his partners tried to force him out because of his relentless risk-taking; penny brokers swindled the company; the crash of 1989 nearly cost him everything; and he was almost shut down again when a customer committed massive fraud. By the time of the dot-com bust, he had proven that his strategy based on frontier values could survive just about anything.

The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get offers a view inside Joe Ricketts’ mind, giving readers a visceral understanding of how entrepreneurs think and act differently from the rest of us—how they see the horizon where we just see a spreadsheet. As unvarnished as the prairie he comes from, Ricketts also talks honestly about his shortcomings as a manager, the career sacrifices his wife made for his business, the complexity of being a father, and the pain of splitting with his mentor and of his brother’s death from AIDS. Overcoming these and other challenges, he built a company now worth $30 billion.

A must-read for anyone who’s ever dreamed of starting their own business, The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get is the ultimate only-in-America story.