An insightful look at how touch, taste, smell, sound, and appearance effect how customers relate to products on a sensory level, and how small sensory changes can make a huge impact. Customer Sense describes how managers can use this knowledge to improve packaging, branding, and advertising to captivate the consumer's senses.

`This is an illuminating and topical study, which skilfully blends together theoretical and empirical analysis in search of the "citizen-consumer". It should become a key text for all with an interest in public service reform and the "choice" agenda, as well as consumerism and citizenship′ - Ruth Lister, Professor of Social Policy, University of Loughborough Political, popular and academic debates have swirled around the notion of the citizen as a consumer of public services, with public service reform increasingly geared towards a consumer society. This innovative book draws on original research with those people in the front-line of the reforms - staff, managers and users of public services - to explore their responses to this turn to consumerism. Creating Citizen-Consumers explores a range of theoretical, political, policy and practice issues that arise in the shift towards consumerism. It draws on recent controversies about choice to examine the tensions of modernising public services to meet the demands of a consumer society. The book offers a fresh and challenging understanding of the relationships between people and services, and argues for a model based on interdependence, respect and partnership rather than choice. This original book makes a distinctive contribution to debates about the future of public services. It will be of interest to those studying social policy, cultural studies, public administration and management across the social sciences, as well as for those working in public services. John Clarke is a Professor of Social Policy at the Open University. Janet Newman is a Professor of Social Policy at the Open University. Nick Smith is a Research Officer in the Personal Social Services Research Unit at the University of Kent. Elizabeth Vidler is a Project Officer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. Louise Westmarland is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Open University.

The End of Assembly Line Management We’re in the midst of a revolution. Quantum leaps in technology are enabling organizations to observe and measure people’s behavior in real time, communicate internally at extraordinary speed, and innovate continuously. These new, software-driven technologies are transforming the way companies interact with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders. This is no mere tech issue. The transformation requires a complete rethinking of the way we organize and manage work. And, as software becomes ever more integrated into every product and service, making this big shift is quickly becoming the key operational challenge for businesses of all kinds. We need a management model that doesn’t merely account for, but actually embraces, continuous change. Yet the truth is, most organizations continue to rely on outmoded, industrial-era operational models. They structure their teams, manage their people, and evolve their organizational cultures the way they always have. Now, organizations are emerging, and thriving, based on their capacity to sense and respond instantly to customer and employee behaviors. In Sense and Respond, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, leading tech experts and founders of the global Lean UX movement, vividly show how these companies operate, highlighting the new mindset and skills needed to lead and manage them—and to continuously innovate within them. In illuminating and instructive business examples, you’ll see organizations with distinctively new operating principles: shifting from managing outputs to what the authors call “outcome-focused management”; forming self-guided teams that can read and react to a fast-changing environment; creating a learning-all-the-time culture that can understand and respond to new customer behaviors and the data they generate; and finally, developing in everyone at the company the new universal skills of customer listening, assessment, and response. This engaging and practical book provides the crucial new operational and management model to help you and your organization win in a world of continuous change.

The Sense and Nonsense of Consumer Product Testing reviews the classic issue of product taste testing based on recent advancements made in psychology, neuroscience, and marketing, on how sensory cues affect product judgments. The authors: examine the implications that the five different sensory modalities (the olfactory, auditory, tactile, gustatory and visual systems) interact with each other, rather than exert independent influences, to define a customer's experience; propose that since consumers are unaware of the influence of a range of stimuli on their judgments and experience, they cannot explicate them, creating methodological challenges for managers to collect valid and reliable consumer insights regarding the consumers' experience; propose that the methodological paradigm of taste testing can be used to examine the effect of strategic and tactical marketing mix decisions. The goal of this monograph is to use the taste-test as a paradigm to understand how consumers make a range of sensory decisions combining intrinsic product information with the information available in the environment -- specifically the research testing context. The Sense and Nonsense of Consumer Product Testing yields reliable insights for managers that would be elusive using standard survey techniques, and adds to the nascent, but growing, literature in marketing on how sensory product experience is multi-modal.

An insightful look at how touch, taste, smell, sound, and appearance effect how customers relate to products on a sensory level, and how small sensory changes can make a huge impact. Customer Sense describes how managers can use this knowledge to improve packaging, branding, and advertising to captivate the consumer's senses.