Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction --
1. Fanning desire: How Siberian refrigerator doors and Saudi Arabian Mall created a revolutionary website for Russian women --
2. Sauge, chicken and the pursuit of real happiness: Transforming the future of how we shop for food --
3. The united colors of India: Selling breakfast cereal to two generations of warring women --
4. Getting a bead on weight loss (with help from fast food, a middle Eastern movie theater and a hotel lap pool) --
5. How horses, shirt collars and religious belief helped recarbonate a strrugling Brazilian Beer --
6. The case of the missing hand cream: How selfies smoothed the way for an in-store fashion revolution --
7. Sleeping without a bredspread: Charred paper, toy cars and pixie dust help decipher the meaning of "quality" in China --
8. A glimpse behind the scene: incorporating small data into your business and life.

Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year overseas, closely observing people in their homes. His goal: to uncover their hidden desires and turn them into breakthrough products for the world's leading brands. In a world besotted by the power of Big Data, he works like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, accumulating small clues to help solve a stunningly diverse array of challenges. In Switzerland, a stuffed teddy bear in a teenage girl's bedroom helped revolutionize 1,000 stores, spread across twenty countries, for one of Europe's largest fashion retailers. In Dubai, a bracelet strung with pearls helped Jenny Craig offset its declining membership in the United States and increase loyalty by 159 percent in only a year. And in China, the look of a car dashboard led to the design of the Roomba vacuum - a great American success story. How? Lindstrom connects the dots in this globetrotting narrative that will fascinate not only marketers and brand managers, but anyone interested in the infinite variations of human behavior. The Desire Hunter combines armchair travel with forensic psychology into an interlocking series of international clue-gathering detective stories. It presents a rare behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create global brands; and along the way, reveals surprising and counter-intuitive truths about what connects us all as humans.