George Silverman

I'm a marketing consultant who believes marketing is not something you do TO customers, it's a service FOR customers: helping customers make the best decisions in the easiest way.

George Silverman, President of Market Navigation, Inc., is a recovered and reformed psychologist (ABD for a Ph.D. in educational psychology). His primary interest is in the psychology of marketing, decision-making, persuasion and particularly word of mouth, for which the formal study of psychology had not prepared him, but 35 years of marketing consulting has.

He is the inventor of the telephone focus group, co-inventor of the peer word of mouth group (widely acknowledged to be the most powerful marketing method ever developed in the pharmaceutical industry), and has successfully used word of mouth techniques to accelerate purchase decisions for some of the most successful products ever introduced, including the VCR, the automatic teller machine, the Trac II razor, the NordicTrack and many of the most successful pharmaceutical launches in history.

His approach to marketing is unique: Map the decision process, remove the blocks, then develop events and materials that help the customer make the best decisions in the simplest, easiest, fastest and "funnest" way.

He is a founder of the Qualitative Research Consultants Association (QRCA).

His book, The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing; How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth was published by AMACOM. He is currently finishing a book on simplifying the customer decision process and another on focus groups.

George is also a professional-level magician. He is the Workshop Chairman of the Parent Assembly of the Society of American Magicians and a member of the Academy of Magical Arts (The Magic Castle) in L.A. He is one of the small number of leading close-up magicians who convene yearly from around the world at the exclusive, invitation-only FFFF Conference. He uses illusions in his seminars and workshops to create a sense of open-minded wonder, to illustrate many of the illusions of marketing, and to instill a willingness to consider break-through "impossibilities."

He says, "Before people are willing to consider impossible, tenfold increases in their sales, they have to experience the impossible firsthand." About the parallels of marketing and magic he says, "I just like to remind people that things are not always as they seem, there's more than meets the eye, that you have to examine conventional wisdom because much of it is just very realistic-looking illusion, and most of all to remind people that they can do the impossible."