John Butman is co-author of the best-selling book Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods and How Companies Create Them, the authoritative guide to today's incredibly demanding consumers and some of the new luxury leaders—such as Victoria's Secret and BMW—that brilliantly cater to them. Based on exhaustive quantitative and qualitative research, the book explores the drivers behind this powerful phenomenon and offers insights and methods to help audiences understand and take advantage of it.

In addition to Trading Up, Butman is the co-author of several other books and articles on emerging consumer behavior, fundamental market trends, and how companies respond to them. His books include the classic Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing and Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the New Consumer, which further explores the huge shifts in consumer spending and consumption patterns. Another of his co-authored books, Payback: Reaping The Rewards of Innovation, was named a BusinessWeek Top Ten Book on Innovation for 2006. The forthcoming American Dreamers: Living with Abundance in the Fourth Wave of Wealth shows that even the wealthiest of the world's consumers are driven by the need for value, experience, and emotional content through goods.

Butman has helped companies and organizations around the world to understand today's market so they can make deeper connections between their brands and consumers. He works closely with American Express Publishing on their annual Luxury Summit conferences and is an adviser to BzzAgent, the pioneering word-of-mouth marketing company. He has spoken with groups throughout the United States and Canada, including Starwood, Dow Chemical, TRW, PWCGlobal, New York University, PDMA, American Express, and dozens more.

In this endlessly fascinating presentation, John Butman shows us how intangible emotions can be invested in tangible products and services to benefit your company. Emotional value, it has been shown, is the essential element in creating successful consumer goods, whether at the high end, the low end, or in between. Butman lays out categories of consumers as defined by age, gender, income and life stage—and reveals the emotional values most important to each group, showing us the social and personal factors that underlie their consumption habits.

There are three fundamental ways that emotional value can be created in products and services—innovation, marketing, and social leadership—and, with multimedia case studies from the most successful companies in the world, Butman shows us how to tap into and use all of them. Involving the audience throughout, Butman creates a highly informative and entertaining blend of data, analysis, theory and practice that can be applied to any company interested in creating stronger bonds with their consumers. A funny, entertaining speaker, Butman packs his talks with informative and practical insights and is an ideal choice to open or close any major business event.