J. Walker Smith is the president of Yankelovich, Inc., a marketing consultancy specializing in lifestyle trends and segmentation services. Walker is a much sought speaker and authority on consumer trends and marketing topics. Fortune magazine has described him as "one of America's leading analysts on consumer trends." He is co-author of Rocking the Ages: The Yankelovich Report on Generational Marketing, a highly regarded book about generational marketing strategies, and, most recently, Generation Ageless: How Baby Boomers are Changing the Way We Live Today...And They're Just Getting Started. He is also co-author of Coming to Concurrence: Addressable Attitudes and the New Model for Marketing Productivity, which has been excerpted in BrandWeek, DIRECT, AdAge POINT and Marketing Management. He is also co-author of Life Is Not Work, Work Is Not Life, a collection of short essays on work/life balance that was picked by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best work/life books of 2001. Walker writes a regular column for Marketing Management and Media magazines. He does a weekly on-air commentary for Smart City, a public radio show about cities and community life. His quotable insights appear frequently in the business and consumer media. Walker holds a doctorate in Mass Communication Research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Description
Now more than ever, consumers want more value from the marketplace. But not just more of the same old value rooted in price, quantity, luxury and convenience. Instead, consumers want new kinds of value — the value that is associated with the a newly self-empowered, consumer-controlled network of connections, information and intangibles associated with a product rather than with the actual product itself. And this is especially true for direct marketing. Attendees will hear eye-opening research about what consumers want in today's marketplace.