Brand Sense: Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound
by Philip Kotler and Martin Lindstrom
"BRAND sense is a landmark work that explains what the world’s most successful companies do differently, integrating all five of the senses — touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. The book will transform the way marketers approach the entire concept of branding."

— Charlie Bell, CEO & Chairman, McDonald’s Corporation

Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff
by Mark Hughes
There’s fake corporate marketing and then there’s real marketing. This is the real stuff for real people.

— Ben Cohen, cofounder,
Ben and Jerry’s

License to Deal
by Jerry Crasnick
Matt Sosnick co-runs a small California agency representing nine major league baseball players, including All-Star pitcher Dontrelle Willis. Crasnick, a baseball writer for ESPN.com, spent months at Sosnick’s side, watching him work with clients and try to sign up new prospects. This in-depth profile is especially good at capturing the earnest but earthy young agent’s contradictions: he feels so strongly about integrity that he can complain that a competitor’s luring away of a player "doesn’t add to the goodness or the kindness of the world," yet he plots pragmatically to pry loose some talent for his own roster.

Bait and Switch
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Through over three decades of journalism and activism and over a dozen books, Barbara Ehrenreich has been one of the most consistent and imaginative chroniclers of class in America, but it was her bestselling 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed, a undercover expose of the day-to-day struggles of the working poor, that has been the most influential work of her career. Now, with Bait and Switch, she has gone undercover again, this time as a middle-aged professional trying to get a white-collar job in corporate America.

FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop–From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication
Gershenfeld, who runs MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, foresees a time when computers will upgrade from PCs to PFs, or personal fabricators. This eye-opening survey of "fab labs" completes the progression in Gershenfeld’s earlier studies of the overlapping of computer science and physical science, such as When Things Start to Think (1999). A programmable PF, predicts Gershenfeld, will make it possible for users to design and create their own objects, instead of shopping for existing products. Interest in such cybercrafting became evident in 1998, Gershenfeld says, when an overwhelming number of students took MIT’s How to Make (Almost) Anything course, aimed at "fulfilling individual desires rather than merely meeting mass-market needs."

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization
Many firms have used outsourcing and offshoring to shave costs and reduce operating expenses. But as opportunities for innovation and growth migrate to the peripheries of companies, industries, and the global economy, efficiency will no longer be enough to sustain competitive advantage.

In Your Next Business Strategy, renowned business thinkers John Hagel and John Seely Brown argue that the only sustainable advantage in the future will come from an institutional capacity to work closely with other highly specialized firms to get better faster. Enabled by the emergence of global process networks, firms will undergo a three-stage transformation: deepening specialization within firms; mobilizing best-in-class capabilities across enterprises; and, ultimately, accelerating learning across broad networks of enterprises.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike "red oceans," which are well explored and crowded with competitors, "blue oceans" represent "untapped market space" and the "opportunity for highly profitable growth." The only reason more big companies don’t set sail for them, they suggest, is that "the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies"-i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. With this groundbreaking book, Kim and Mauborgne-both professors at France’s INSEAD, the second largest business school in the world-aim to repair that bias. Using dozens of examples-from Southwest Airlines and the Cirque du Soleil to Curves and Starbucks-they present the tools and frameworks they’ve developed specifically for the task of analyzing blue oceans.

The Trendmaster’s Guide : Get a Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next
According to Robyn Waters, it’s a myth that trends can only be spotted early by überhip Bohemian types who are ever so much cooler than everyone else.

She ought to know. As Target’s former VP of Trend, Design, and Product Development, Waters helped a dowdy regional discount chain become a national fashion destination. Today she consults for many different companies to help them stay ahead of the curve.

The Trendmaster’s Guide features her favorite tips and examples for understanding and anticipating trends. Every letter from A to Z offers an insight to help readers navigate the unknown and prepare for whatever their costomers want next. It’s a quick read that packs a lot of insight between "A is for antennae" and "Z is for Zen."

Competitors: Outwitting, Outmaneuvering, and Outperforming
International strategy guru Liam Fahey provides a new integrated, comprehensive method for analyzing the competition. Called competitor learning, the method is the product of Fahey’s 15 years of consulting, researching, and teaching competitor analysis in cutting-edge companies in the United States and Europe. It combines a system for identifying critical competitor data with a series of analytical frameworks to help you develop powerful strategic insights. Competitors teaches managers how to know their competition as thoroughly as they know their own organization, and how to use that knowledge to outwit, outmaneuver, and outperform rivals.

Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing
This is not your ordinary marketing manual. With casual humor and a laid-back tone, Wipperfürth, a marketing professional who helps brands like Dr. Martens and Napster "appear like serendipitous accidents," advocates the "brand hijack," a process of allowing customers to shape brand meaning and drive a brand’s evolution.

Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People
Breaks new ground in proposing innovative ways to create powerful and effective branding programs for meeting the challenges and opportunities of the new emotion-based economy.