Monday, June 9 12:00pm – 1:30pm

Dan Ariely, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT and author of the New York Times Bestseller “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions”

Unlocking Customer Behavior...How to Understand and Profit from Predictably Irrational Customers

Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet and exercise, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by?

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?  Or at prices that we would otherwise concede are beyond our budget?

Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?

Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who haven’t? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace?

Dan Ariely provides answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world.

For B2B businesses, these irrationalities help unlock our understanding of common behaviors and choices in buying, pricing, investing and saving, employee recruitment and selection, office politics and a myriad of other choices and interactions.

As a bonus you will also learn how much fun social science can be, and how to see more clearly the causes for our everyday behaviors, including the many cases in which we are predictably irrational.

Dan Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT, where he holds a joint appointment between MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences and the Sloan School of Management. He is the only person ever to hold joint appointments at MIT’s business school and also at its famous Media Lab. A behavioral economist, Ariely’s research has shown that we all succumb to irrationality in situations where rational thought is expected. He is an expert on how people actually act – and why they act – in all kinds of business and economic environments, and what this means for business innovation, strategy, marketing and pricing. Dan is the author of the new best-selling book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, (HarperCollins), currently on the New York Times best-seller list. In this groundbreaking work, Ariely presents often humorous and peculiar research findings that provide new insights into human behavior – that will help us make better decisions as individuals, as corporations, and as a society.

Tuesday, June 10 12:15pm – 1:45pM

David Meerman Scott, Author, The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly

B-to-B Viral Marketing: How to Trigger Word-of-Mouse that Spreads Your Ideas for Free

What do fruitcake, boring gossip, last week's hockey scores, and most failed viral marketing campaigns have in common? They're not worth sharing.

Thousands of B-to-B companies try to create something on the Web that will catch on and become a hit. The lure of telling stories and spreading ideas for free using YouTube, blogs, Facebook, and other Web based tools is intoxicating because there is that possibility of having a community of people that numbers in the millions exposed to your ideas… and it is free! However, the vast majority of people who create something that they expect will spread like a virus from person-to-person fail miserably. Why? Because they apply the old rules of marketing and PR to the new world of the Web. They follow the tried and true techniques of getting noticed offline: Buying your way in with advertising and begging your way in with the media. However, what works in the Web is utterly different: Publishing your way into people’s minds directly with great content and having a trigger to get it talked about. You can't generate buzz without something to buzz about. 

In this informative keynote address, David Meerman Scott explores the art and science of creating B-to-B viral marketing initiatives in a presentation that you’ll want to share. Told with dozens of case examples of successful Web phenomenons from B-to-B companies large and small, learn the tools and techniques of empowering others to tell your story and spread your ideas for free.

David Meerman Scott is a recovering VP of marketing for two publicly traded B-to-B companies and was Asia Marketing Director for Knight-Ridder, at the time it was one of the world’s largest newspaper and electronic information companies. He is now an online thought leader and viral marketing strategist. The programs he has developed have won numerous awards and are responsible for selling over one billion dollars in products and services worldwide. David is the author of the number one best selling PR and marketing book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly, which is being published in 14 languages. He developed the New Rules of Marketing™ course for Pragmatic Marketing, Inc. based on his book.