If you’re wondering how to make your company seem more exciting, you’re asking the wrong question. Because you’re not only competing for attention against other similar products – you’re also competing against your customers’ friends and family and viral videos and cute puppies.

To win attention these days, you must ask a different question: “How can we help?” If you sell something, you make a customer today – but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life.

In his keynote presentation at IHRSA 16, Jay Baer will highlight a new approach that cuts through the clutter: marketing that’s truly, inherently useful. Offering dozens of real-world examples, Baer will fundamentally change the way that you think about your business.

Baer is a business strategist, active venture capitalist, keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling author of four books. He’s also the founder of Convince & Convert, a consulting firm that helps prominent companies gain – and keep – more customers through the smart intersection of technology, social media and customer service. He has advised more than 700 companies since 1994, including Caterpillar, Nike, Allstate, and 31 of the Fortune 500.

He’s also an avid tequila collector.

Greg McKeown has dedicated his career to discovering why some people break through to the next level while others fail to progress. In his keynote presentation, he will demonstrate why leading as an essentialist is critical for taking teams to the next level and producing breakthroughs in results and innovation.

He will teach five key principles, providing examples of how teams and companies can be killed by their own success – and what to do instead. Using evocative stories, hard questions and thought-provoking exercises, this will be an interactive keynote session.

The definitive treatment of this issue is addressed in his latest project: the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less. This book challenges core assumptions about achievement to get to the essence of what really drives success.

McKeown is the CEO of THIS, Inc – a leadership and strategy design agency based in Silicon Valley whose clients include Airbnb, Apple, Google, Facebook, Pixar, Symantec, Salesforce.com, Twitter, VMware and Yahoo.

His writings have appeared in, or have been covered by, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Fortune, The Huffington Post, Politico, and Inc. Magazine. He’s among the most popular bloggers for the Harvard Business Review and LinkedIn’s Influencers Group, averaging a million views a month.

In this entertaining talk, which feels as much a one-woman show as a keynote – complete with musical performance and audience interaction – Randi Zuckerberg takes you through 10 of the most exciting trends in tech/business/leadership/entrepreneurship that you can’t ignore if you want to build successful, sustainable businesses.

Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, a boutique marketing firm and production company working with high profile organisations and Fortune 500 companies such as The Clinton Global Initiative, Cirque du Soleil, Condé Nast and PayPal.

She’s the author of The New York Times bestseller Dot Complicated, in which she discusses her personal journey on the front lines of Facebook and her thoughts on how technology has transformed our lives. She’s also the author of Dot, a children’s picture book that features an energetic little girl who learns to find balance between her gadgets and playing outside with her friends. The Jim Henson Production Company recently optioned the television rights for Dot.

Zuckerberg is a TV producer and contributor. In 2011, she was nominated for an Emmy Award for her innovative blend of online/TV coverage of the US mid-term elections. In 2012, she was the executive producer for a TV docu-series, aired on Bravo, about Silicon Valley’s start-up culture, and she regularly appears on camera as a contributor for The Today Show and the Katie Couric Show to discuss life in the digital age. She can currently be heard on the business talk radio show, Dot Complicated, on SiriusXM.

Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us?

Nir Eyal answers these questions and many more by explaining the Hook Model – a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage certain customer behaviours. Through consecutive ‘hook cycles’, these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Eyal writes, consults and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology and business. He has founded two tech companies since 2003 and is also an advisor to several Bay Area start-ups, venture capitalists and incubators.

He’s the author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller Hooked: How to build habit-forming products – named one of Inc. Magazine’s ‘Top 10 Marketing Books of 2014’. He has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, he’s a contributing writer for Forbes, TechCrunch and Psychology Today.