Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles

Having trouble closing your deals? Hitting a frustrating plateau with your sales numbers? Feel that upselling is a lost cause? Let sales guru Stephan Schiffman drive your sales pitches up a notch with his tried-and-true techniques – and get results immediately! Stephan Schiffman’s Sales Essentials includes time-tested tips on: Mastering the cold call Using email as a selling tool Raising the stakes to “up” your next buy Closing the deal – every time! Plus, you’ll also find 50 surefire questions to ask to make deal after deal, year after year. Packed with insider information you need to beat the competition, you can’t afford not to read Stephan Schiffman’s Sales Essentials!

Coca-Cola. Harley-Davidson. Nike. Budweiser. Valued by customers more for what they symbolize than for what they do, products like these are more than brands–they are cultural icons. How do managers create brands that resonate so powerfully with consumers? Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America’s most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands become icons. Douglas B. Holt shows how iconic brands create “identity myths” that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change. Holt warns that icons can’t be built through conventional branding strategies, which focus on benefits, brand personalities, and emotional relationships. Instead, he calls for a deeper cultural perspective on traditional marketing themes like targeting, positioning, brand equity, and brand loyalty–and outlines a distinctive set of “cultural branding” principles that will radically alter how companies approach everything from marketing strategy to market research to hiring and training managers. Until now, Holt shows, even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition and serendipity than by design. With How Brands Become Icons, managers can leverage the principles behind some of the most successful brands of the last half-century to build their own iconic brands. Douglas B. Holt is associate professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.

A One-on-One Financial Planning Session with Suze Orman

With her New York Times bestseller The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, America’s leading financial expert Suze Orman transformed the concept of money forever by teaching us to recognize the emotional aspects of our relationship with it. Now, this fully revised edition of Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook translates Suze’s own brand of motivation and inspiration into a user-friendly, hands-on workbook that will empower you to work through the nuts and bolts of personal finance, with Suze as your trusted adviser.

Updated to keep you abreast of our quickly shifting economy, you’ll find:

• Insightful exercises, quizzes, and worksheets to help you understand how your parents’ relationship with money affects yours, and what money means to you

• Up-to-the-minute information on tax codes, IRA rules and regulations, and long-term-care insurance

• Useful strategies for coping with the ever-changing landscape of educational costs, social security, and the stock market

• An outline of key questions that every financial adviser should ask you upon your initial meeting

• An in-depth analysis of all your monthly expenses, providing a realistic picture of just how much money you have to work with and how you may not be respecting your money as much as you should

Regardless of your age and income, it is never too early or too late to take control of your money. Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook is the perfect companion to The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, the personal finance classic that changed the way millions of Americans viewed money. Full of self-tests, thought-provoking questions, and Suze’s easy-to-understand personal finance advice, here is your empowering approach to achieving financial freedom forever, with the best guide possible.

Now in its fifth edition, Investing in Real Estate is the straightforward guide that helps you start growing your fortune by investing in houses and small apartment buildings. Successful real estate investor Gary Eldred shows you how you can outperform the stock market by investing in residential real estate–the surest and safest way to build assets.

This updated edition covers all the new trends and tactics in real estate investing, including how to shop for properties outside your home market and how to use option arms to achieve positive cash flow. As always, you’ll find all the information you need to start investing now, as well as up-to-date tips on negotiating deals, spotting market trends, and using the Internet as a research tool to find and buy properties. Let the authors show you how to:
* Buy with a low or no-money down payment
* Build wealth without paying income taxes
* Find the neighborhoods and properties that will appreciate fastest
* Add value to your properties with smart improvements
* Choose the best financing for your investments
* Protect your net worth with LLCs and other legal strategies


Whether you need money for your child’s college tuition, a prosperous retirement, or a higher quality of life, Investing in Real Estate, Fifth Edition is the best guide available to help you start building real wealth right now.

Sally Hogshead believes the greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself.

Hogshead rose to the top of the advertising profession in her early 20s, writing ads that fascinated millions of consumers. Over the course of her ad career, Sally won hundreds of awards for creativity, copywriting, and branding, and was one of the most awarded advertising copywriters right from start of career, including almost every major international advertising award.

She frequently appears in national media including NBC’s Today Show and the New York Times. Hogshead was recently inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame, the industry’s highest award for professional excellence. Her advertising work hangs in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

The science of fascination is based on Hogshead’s decade of research with 250,000 participants, including dozens of Fortune 500 teams, hundreds of small businesses, and over a thousand C-level executives.