The 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards: Marketing & Sales

We are dedicating the book giveaways for the rest of 2016 to giving away all 40 books, one category at a time, on the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Longlist. This week, the Marketing & Sales category. 

(Editor's Note: the copy below is promotional copy from the books' publishers. If you would like to hear from the judges at 800-CEO-READ as to why these books in particular were chosen, check back in to the News & Opinion channel later this week to go "inside the longlist," or subscribe to the Keen Thinker to get our weekly roundup of content.)

Each of this week's winners will receive all five finalists for the Marketing & Sales category, and we have five sets available. The books you'll receive are:

Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer, Portfolio

Based on proprietary research and more than 70 exclusive interviews, New York Times bestselling author Jay Baer offers a new playbook for handling unhappy customers. Hug Your Haters provides the recipe for a mobile, social, right-now world where complaints are faster and louder than ever.

Technology has evaporated the barriers of complaint. With smart phones and always-on Internet access, consumers complain more often and across more channels, many of them public. This requires a completely new system for instantly finding, evaluating, and addressing these complaints.

Jay Baer and Edison Research conducted a landmark study of more than 2,000 consumers and found that not all complainers (“haters”) are created equal. In fact, there are two vastly different categories of haters: Offstage Haters and Onstage Haters. Baer also includes The Hatrix, a detailed examination of the differences between Offstage and Onstage haters. The book reveals:

• how, where and why people complain (by demographic and by channel)
• how and when consumers expect a response to their complaints
• the advocacy impact of answering (or ignoring) a hater
• differences in complaint type and expectations by industry

Supported by dozens of interviews with large and small companies, social networks and review websites, psychiatrists, and legal experts, Hug Your Haters gives readers a step-by-step process to magnify the impact of happy customer interactions, and to minimize the impact of haters and complainers.

Customers expect more from businesses than ever before, and the importance of real-time customer service has never been greater. Hug Your Haters explains this new reality and shows readers how to embrace complaints and turn bad news into good.

Martketing: The Heart and the Brain of Branding by Javier Sanchez Lamelas, LID Publishing

Secrets, lessons, and insights from the frontline of world-class branding and marketing.

This book exposes the marketing secrets and lessons learnt from one of the world’s most exciting global brands—Coca Cola—and how you can apply them to your own brand. It explores the core beliefs and principles that were needed to evolve one of the most powerful marketing machines on the planet that worked successfully across cultures and fast-changing environments. 

The author was part of a team of outstanding individuals and agencies that generated better, faster, and more effective marketing on an unprecedented level. Through a combination of research, theory, and real-life experience, Lamelas explains why and how marketing works, and offers a proven framework to help you master your own marketing strategy.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz, Harper Business

A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations—whether in the boardroom or at home.

After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues to succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles—counter-intuitive tactics and strategies—you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.

Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car; negotiating a salary; buying a home; renegotiation rent; deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.

The Power of Fifty Bits: The New Science of Turning Good Intentions Into Positive Results by Bob Nease, Harper Business

Going beyond the bestsellers Predictably Irrational and Thinking, Fast and Slow, the first “how to” guide that shows you how to help customers, employees, coworkers, and clients make better choices to get what they truly want.

Of the ten million bits of information our brains process each second, only fifty bits are devoted to conscious thought. Because our brains are wired to be inattentive, we often choose without thinking, acting against our own interests—what we truly want. As the former Chief Scientist of Express Scripts, a Fortune 25 healthcare company dedicated to making the use of prescription medications safer and more affordable, Bob Nease is an expert on applying behavioral sciences to health care. Now, he applies his knowledge to the wider world, providing important practical solutions marketers, human resources professionals, teachers, and even parents can use to improve the behavior of others around them, and get the positive results they want.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom, St. Martin's Press

The bestselling author of Buyology maps the subtlest desires of people around the world - and shows how they lead to breakthrough products and services

Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year overseas, closely observing people in their homes. His goal: to uncover their hidden desires and turn them into breakthrough products for the world's leading brands. In a world besotted by the power of Big Data, he works like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, accumulating small clues to help solve a stunningly diverse array of challenges. In Switzerland, a stuffed teddy bear in a teenage girl's bedroom helped revolutionize 1,000 stores, spread across twenty countries, for one of Europe's largest fashion retailers. In Dubai, a bracelet strung with pearls helped Jenny Craig offset its declining membership in the United States and increase loyalty by 159 percent in only a year. And in China, the look of a car dashboard led to the design of the Roomba vacuum—a great American success story. How? Lindstrom connects the dots in this globetrotting narrative that will fascinate not only marketers and brand managers, but anyone interested in the infinite variations of human behavior.

Small Data combines armchair travel with forensic psychology into an interlocking series of international clue-gathering detective stories. It presents a rare behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create global brands; and along the way, reveals surprising and counter-intuitive truths about what connects us all as humans.