Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions—both big and small—have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. As Americans, we assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice—the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish—becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice—from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs—has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse. By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counter intuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on those that are important and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.

The ability to predict consumer choice is a fundamental aspect to success for any business. In the context of artificial intelligence marketing, there are a wide array of predictive analytic techniques available to achieve this purpose, each with its own unique advantages and disadvantages. Artificial Intelligence Marketing and Predicting Consumer Choice serves to integrate these widely disparate approaches, and show the strengths, weaknesses, and best applications of each. It provides a bridge between the person who must apply or learn these problem-solving methods and the community of experts who do the actual analysis. It is also a practical and accessible guide to the many remarkable advances that have been recently made in this fascinating field. Online resources: bonus chapters on AI, ensembles and neural nets, and finishing experiments, plus single and multiple product simulators.

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights. After years of research, Christensen has come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim—that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation—is wrong. Customers don’t buy products or services; they "hire" them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The "Jobs to Be Done" approach can be seen in some of the world’s most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes—it’s about predicting new ones. Christensen contends that by understanding what causes customers to "hire" a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they’ll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts. This book carefully lays down Christensen’s provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world—and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.

Product Assortment and Consumer Choice: An Interdisciplinary Review examines existing literature and builds on the current theoretical developments across different research domains to develop a set of research propositions delineating the impact of product assortment on consumer choice. Taking a consumer's perspective to examine how product assortment influences decision making and choice, this monograph defines the consumer aspect of assortment research to answer three key questions. First, how do consumers perceive the variety of items in an assortment? The first part of this review examines factors that influence consumer perceptions of the variety of an assortment. In particular, it investigates how factors such as assortment size, the degree of distinctiveness of assortment options, the dispersion of option frequencies, and the organization of the assortment influence consumer perceptions of assortment variety. Second, how do consumers choose an item from a given assortment? The second part discusses factors that influence consumer choice of an item from a given assortment. It examines the impact of assortment size on the purchase likelihood from a given assortment, the number of options purchased, and the particular options chosen from the assortment. Third, how do consumers choose among assortments? The third part examines factors that influence consumer choice among assortments. In particular, it investigates how assortment size, assortment structure, and purchase quantity influence consumers' choice of an assortment. Conceptual analysis of the existing research in each of these three areas is summarized in a series of research propositions that integrate current findings and offer directions for future research. Product Assortment and Consumer Choice: An Interdisciplinary Review concludes with a discussion of the theoretical contributions and managerial implications of existing product assortment research and identify venues for further investigation.

Fashion is everywhere! It transcends domains and applies to almost any kind of product (e.g., apparel, cars, digital devices, food, literature, travel, music, house decoration and personal wellness). Fashion greatly influences public interest, media coverage, and product success. The global fashion industry is among the most important in terms of investments, trade, and employment, despite its dependence on unpredictable demand. This book focuses on the fashion apparel and accessories industry in an attempt to help managers answer the following questions: Why and how do fashion products appeal to consumers, despite their constantly varying attributes? What specific elements and benefits of fashion influence consumers, and how can companies exploit them and gain from these? Which marketing strategies and tactics should companies use to increase fashion products’ success while communicating and managing customers’ image? How can companies maintain customer loyalty and generate higher profits with fashion products? By undertaking deep analyses of manufacturers and retailers’ best practices, interviewing customers and companies, and reviewing recent academic research on fashion marketing, this book answers such questions and thus helps managers leverage the value that fashion adds to products while creating loyal customers in truly competitive fashion markets.

Winner of the 2016 Berry - AMA Book Prize for Best Book in Marketing from the American Marketing Association! Named Marketing Book of the Year for 2016 by Marketing & Sales Books! Reshape Consumer Behavior by Making Your Brand the Instinctive, Intuitive, Easy Choice • Discover powerful new ways to simplify and guide consumer decisions • Gain actionable insights into social influence, how people plan, and how they interpret the past • Leverage surprising advances in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the behavioral and social sciences Whatever your marketing or behavioral objective, you’ll be far more successful if you know how humans choose. Human intuitions and cognitive mechanisms have evolved over millions of years, but only now are marketers beginning to understand their impact on people’s decisions. The Business of Choice helps you apply new scientific insights to make your brand or target behavior the easiest, most instinctive choice. Matthew Willcox integrates the latest research advances with his own extensive enterprise marketing experience at FCB’s Institute of Decision Making. Willcox explains why we humans often seem so irrational, how marketers can leverage the same evolutionary factors that helped humans prosper as a species, how to make decisions simpler for your consumers, and how to make them feel good about their choices, so they keep coming back for more!

Historical archaeology has made great strides during the last two decades. Early archaeological reports were dominated by descriptions of features and artifacts, while research on artifacts was concentrated on studies of topology, technology, and chronology. Site reports from the 1960s and 1970s commonly expressed faith in the potential artifacts had for aiding in the identifying socioeconomic status differences and for understanding the relationships be tween the social classes in terms of their material culture. An emphasis was placed on the presence or absence of porcelain or teaware as an indication of social status. These were typical features in site reports written just a few years ago. During this same period, advances were being made in the study of food bone as archaeologists moved away from bone counts to minimal animal counts and then on to the costs of various cuts of meat. Within the last five years our ability to address questions of the rela tionship between material culture and socioeconomic status has greatly ex panded. The essays in this volume present efforts toward measuring expendi ture and consumption patterns represented by commonly recovered artifacts and food bone. These patterns of consumption are examined in conjunction with evidence from documentary sources that provide information on occupa tions, wealth levels, and ethnic affiliations of those that did the consuming. One of the refreshing aspects of these papers is that the authors are not afraid of documents, and their use of them is not limited to a role of confirmation.