What Consumers Want, and How They Find It

Treasure Hunt is formatted for easy, enjoyable, informative reading. It features anecdotes about specific consumers, showing how they blend trading up and trading down into their spending regimes in the same chapters in which it shows companies responding effectively to the trend or drifting inexorably toward the shrinking middle. Silverstein offers suggestions to companies for avoiding death in the middle. One is what he calls "spanning the poles," i.e., holding onto a share of the middle by reaching with different products and services toward the opposites... There is a trove of premium advice and valuable information in Treasure Hunt for anyone in any business who wants to cash in on the trading up/trading down trend and avoid getting mired in the dwindling profit margins of the middle.