Confessions of a Beauty Addict

When college friends Kate, Nina and Zoë take holiday from their busy schedules on opposite coasts to join their former roommate, Hannah, for her wedding in Lake Tahoe, they not only bring suitcases packed with what-not-to-wear bridesmaid dresses, but baggage of a more emotional kind.

Supported by a variety of eclectic characters determined to wreck havoc on their carefully organized lives, each woman is forced to come to terms with her past before she walks down the aisle. Zoë must learn how to reveal a vulnerability beneath her bravado before she can finally open her heart. Kate needs to reclaim her identity before she can regain her strut. Nina must heal her own inner child so she can provide for another. Hannah needs to release a ghost in order to recover her spirit.

A bottle of booze, a host of laughs, a hankie or two worth of tears, and seventy-two hours among those who know and love them the most is the perfect recipe for four women to Eat, Drink, and Be Married.

How organizations can deliver significant performance gains through strategic investment in marketing

In the new era of tight marketing budgets, no organization can continue to spend on marketing without knowing what's working and what's wasted. Data-driven marketing improves efficiency and effectiveness of marketing expenditures across the spectrum of marketing activities from branding and awareness, trail and loyalty, to new product launch and Internet marketing. Based on new research from the Kellogg School of Management, this book is a clear and convincing guide to using a more rigorous, data-driven strategic approach to deliver significant performance gains from your marketing.

• Explains how to use data-driven marketing to deliver return on marketing investment (ROMI) in any organization
• In-depth discussion of the fifteen key metrics every marketer should know
• Based on original research from America's leading marketing business school, complemented by experience teaching ROMI to executives at Microsoft, DuPont, Nisan, Philips, Sony and many other firms
• Uses data from a rigorous survey on strategic marketing performance management of 252 Fortune 1000 firms, capturing $53 billion of annual marketing spending
• In-depth examples of how to apply the principles in small and large organizations
• Free downloadable ROMI templates for all examples given in the book

Nobody knows that better than Elinor Young, one of the posh housewives of Westchester County. She's worked hard all her life to get where she is. With her perfect husband, gorgeous grown-up children, and a house with more rooms than she can count, Elinor has it all—including her own personal blackmailer. Somehow, someone has figured out that she hasn't been spending her afternoons in Manhattan with ladies who lunch but with a major married politician, and now she's got to shell out a whole lot of money or the truth about her life will be exposed. If her family learns everything it would be embarrassing—besides she never set out to hurt them—but if the town finds out she's really screwed!

So she gathers her friends around her, spills the beans to them, and decides to do whatever it takes to prevent scandal. But when Elinor and friends set out to track down the extortionist, none of them expected other secrets to be told.