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Friday, March 20, 2009

Inside the Mind of the Shopper

Herb Sorensen has a book coming out in May: Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing, from Wharton School Publishing.

I am now reading it in preprint. Very good so far, covers lots of the domain we worked with in our innovation centers. Covers insights he and Peter Fader at Wharton developed, apparently with some contributions from Unilever. I will review here when I finish it. I often cover Sorensen's work in this blog.

And below a pointer to some of his current online work, always insightful:

Zero Based Retailing by Herb Sorensen
For planning purposes, most countries, businesses and individuals take their current situation as some kind of baseline, upon which they build their planning for the future. This is a seriously flawed approach, particularly when the enterprise is under severe stress. Sometimes, for planning purposes, it is better to sweep all away (conceptually,) and begin anew from scratch. This is the basic element of "zero based budgeting," the concept of starting with a zero budget, considering the mission and its scope, and then allocating exactly the right amount of resources (personnel, facilities, etc.) needed to accomplish the mission, without regard to past or present allocation of resources..... "

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