Now is a good time to think about your marketing reading list. Reading one of the best marketing books listed below is likely to change and improve the way you market. While there are many classic marketing books that could make a best-books list, the recommended reading list below focuses only on marketing books published within the last 5 years. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, and architects are all required to do ongoing education to maintain their licenses. Marketers have no license so must tackle the task of self-educating. Serious marketers should read the equivalent of 10 or more educational and industry books per year (2500 pages) to maintain and expand skills and knowledge. Below are our suggestions for the must-read best marketing books this year.
From new releases to timeless classics published over 30 years ago, here are 15 books that should be required reading for product marketers — and anyone that might just be looking for a good marketing book. 12 Of The Best Marketing Books 1.
Start by benchmarking your digital marketing skills with the BrightEdge digital marketing quiz. After a few years in the sun, ebooks have declined in sales by 18.7%, according to the Association of American Publishers. Paperback sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%. Ebook sales fell to about $877 million, while hardcover and paperback sales grew slightly to account for more than $1.7 billion and $1.6 billion each. A major driver for the increase in sales is the decrease in price Amazon forced on major publishers starting in 2015. Another factor is the growth of the self-publishing platforms and the lower prices that come with it, especially for digital versions. Self-published books and small publishers are growing at more than 50% at the expense of the 5 largest publishers, which are contracting.
Muddying the picture of digital vs paper books is the fact that many self-published books do not have an ISBN number used for inventory and sales tracking. Also, not many people realize how active a publisher Amazon itself is. Amazon now has 13 active imprints, or publishing lines, and in 2016 alone, Amazon Publishing released more than 2,000 titles.
With those commercial details out of the way, let’s get to the list of best marketing books. Great marketing books for this year From new takes on influence to effective multi-channel marketing and to getting down to basics with ridiculously good writing and content, these marketing must-reads are likely to boost your marketing results in 2018 and 2019. Here is a free bonus read: A New Era of Content. Learn how to create content that performs and drives better results online with four proven steps to content marketing. Also see our list of best digital marketing books.
Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets By Kevin Maney, Dave Petersen, Chistopher Lockhead, Al Ramadan, 2016 4.7 rating on Amazon, #57 in Consumer Behavior Serious marketing executives need to be familiar with this book. In it the authors describe the process of category creation and how to become a category king. They cover how to discover a category, the power of a point of view, creating a flywheel, continuous category creation and how to overcome the innovator’s dilemma, and finish with category definition and creation for your career. “Category is strategy. You create a category to plug into when you define a new way to solve a problem or define a new problem that people did not know they had.” After identifying a category based on a clear need, marketers must create a point of view to educate the market and deploy it in what they call a lightning strike to make a big splash that gets catalyzed with PR and word of mouth. Though marketing plays a big role, category creation has to be embraced by the whole company from the CEO down to have a chance.
This is an epic read and my new top pick for best marketing books. Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller, 2017 4.8 rating on Amazon, #2 in Business Writing on Amazon Storytelling is the focus of so many marketing books and assets in recent years that it is impossible to ignore; it’s like a tidal wave washing over drab beaches cluttered with pale, self-promoting, feature-based marketing.
Miller takes a topic that seems kind of obvious and adds his proven 7-step StoryBrand framework. He analyzes the structure of good story similarly to Nancy Duarte in Resonate: character, problem, meets a guide, gets a plan, drives to action, avoids failure, and ends with a success. Where Miller exceeds Duarte is that he directly applies the storytelling structure to business cases that resonate with marketers like me and you. Download a free site style guide checklist to help you communicate your message to more customers. One of the measures of a book’s value to me is how many points I mark up as I read, and I did that 70 times in 210 pages. Here are just a few: “If you confuse, you’ll lose.” The enemy of good marketing is noise.
(corporate speak) “Story is the greatest weapon we have against noise because it organizes information in such a way that people are compelled to listen. Story makes music out of noise.” “The customer is your hero, not your brand or product.” The brand should be positioned as the guide to the hero. “The guide, not the hero, is the one with the most authority.” As you can see, the ideas are familiar, but the context and insights are fresh and compelling. Miller explains how the StoryBrand framework will also help with staff recruiting and managing corporate identity and culture. Miller also includes useful templates and instructions.
I highly recommend this book. Marketing: A Love Story, How to Matter to Your Customers by Bernadette Jiwa, 2014 4.7 rating on Amazon, #36 in Kindle Store, Marketing on Amazon Don’t be deterred by the “love” in the title; instead focus on the ultra-compelling subtitle “How to Matter to Your Customers.” Mattering to your customer requires emotional connection. The book does not have much structure because it is adapted from a series of blog posts Jiwa wrote, but the material is original and engaging, and the book is so short at 81 pages that it doesn’t matter.
The book will apply for entrepreneurs, B2B, and B2C marketers. If you have been unsure about how to introduce emotion into your sales or marketing communication, this book will give you more insight, ideas, and inspiration than any other book out there. She claims you don’t sell a product, you sell a story and doing so requires both facts and feelings. Here are some examples from the book: “One of the biggest challenges an entrepreneur or innovator has is understanding how to make his ideas resonate.
We tend to have no shortage of ideas, but we struggle to tell the story of how they are going to be useful in the world and why it will matter to people.” “The smart brands of the new millennium have thrived on this notion of building for belonging.It’s more important to create deeper connections to the right people to make your business sustainable.” “All the marketing tactics in the world won’t save us from our own indifference to the customers we acquire.” “Marketing is not a department; it’s the story of how you create difference for your customers. Marketing is about becoming part of people’s stories.” Download a Content Funnel Mapping Checklist to help you deliver your message to your prospects and customers. Like Simon Sinek, Jiwa brings up Why questions frequently. Why is an important question that marketers fail to ask often enough. This was my #1 pick from last year. Highly recommended. Also by Jiwa, Hunch and The Fortune Cookie Principle.
The New Rules of Marketing and PR: 6th Edition, How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott, 2017 4.5 rating on Amazon, #9,430 on Amazon The rules of digital marketing are constantly changing. Using case studies and real-life examples, David Meerman Scott explores the latest best practices that lead to marketing success. The book is a good introduction to the role of social media marketing and PR. The first part is an argument why organizations, especially smaller businesses and nonprofits, should emphasize social media and how the efficient use of social media depends on a different way of thinking compared to traditional media. The second part discusses the different tools of social media and how they could be used to support marketing and PR.
He goes on to define niche and mission, providing information and targeted content, thinking about virtual audience, and dialogue with members and related organizations. He covers the implications for web site content as well. See how to maximize the SEO value of press releases with this checklist. Scott’s essential message is that you can now bypass the traditional marketing channels and reach out directly to customers, provided you have a worthwhile offering and message. To do this, you must philosophically move from monologue to dialogue and from propaganda to participation. These necessary changes in marketing approach are the result of the Internet’s expansion of communication channels from one-to-many. To many-to-one.
To many-to-many. To one-to-one. These four communication modalities combined with the ability to bypass land-based distribution channels and transact commerce online represents a sea change in marketing.
Don’t Make Me Think Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability By Steve Krug, 2014 4.6 rating on Amazon, #1 in User Experience and Usability Krug published the first edition in 2000, and the book has been the bible of user experience since the early 2000s. Web sites are the primary interface between most businesses and their customers. So all the great marketing campaigns in the world won’t work well unless the site is effective at handling the customers marketing brings to it. The title is the recurring theme of the book: customers should not have to figure out or interpret your site, it should just work the way they expect.
He adds his web facts of life to guide us: #1 We don’t read pages. We scan them. #2 We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice them. #3 We don’t figure out how things work.
We muddle through. For the most part, be conventional and don’t try to reinvent the wheel each update or release. Download a free site style guide checklist to help you communicate your message to more customers.
The book is shortish at 191 pages and uses the principles he recommends. It is colorful, uses high-contrast layout, and is very skimmable with clear headlines and subheads.
Every marketer with a web site needs to read this book periodically. PRE-SUASION: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini, 2016 4.6 rating on Amazon, #768 on Amazon Cialdini wrote the seminal work on Influence in 1984; Pre-Suasion is the long-awaited sequel, and it delivers. Both books belong on a marketer’s bookshelf because marketers work to influence people to take particular actions.
In Pre-Suasion Cialdini goes deeper into the subtleties of persuasion, covering privileged moments, attention and importance, focus and causality, identity, place, crowds, and shared action. The book seemed particularly insightful and relevant after watching the momentous 2016 US presidential election. Watch a webinar on persuading your organization to support SEO. These insights help a marketer in two primary areas: 1) persuading internal colleagues and executives to support the marketing plan and its initiatives, 2) persuading the consumers to take appropriate action. Though the book is primarily sociological and psychological, Cialdini does give examples of how to influence purchase behavior and willingness to spend more. He cites studies that showed how free gifts increase tips dramatically, that people are pre-suaded to purchase by commonalities and getting compliments, and how social proof works. A compelling read. Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Digital Distraction by Derek Thomson, 2017 4.3 rating on Amazon, #133 in Pop Culture/General Thomson set out to study what makes things break big.
This is an important topic for marketers whose main goal is to make their products known and loved by as many people in their target market as possible. He covers many media over the last 2 centuries, including Impressionist art, winning political speech and speakers, movies, music, fashion, books, Etsy hit products, and mobile apps.
Interestingly, he finds that viral distribution in the common sense does not really drive the results. Most of the hits benefit from a big push from one or more players with a large megaphone. In the end he concludes there are no hard and fast rules on what makes things pop, but there are some reliable patterns: 1) simplicity, 2) familiarity, 3) frequency, 4) influential supporters, 5) close-knit supportive groups, 6) rhyming and catchy copy, 7) logical balance and intriguing inversion in messaging, 8) cross-channel support, 9) gradual innovation, and 10) ad hoc random influences. He uses a shorthand acronym, MAYA, developed by famed designer Raymond Loewy, which stands for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.
This defines the range of where something new is novel and refreshing but also not so different from known elements as to feel too strange. That is a sweet spot for cutting-edge design and media. Thomson is a good, young writer and fine storyteller, and he has put together a useful treatise on a nebulous topic. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley, 2014 4.7 rating on Amazon, #6102 on Amazon Marketing is driven by content, so our next pick on the list of the best marketing books is about content creation. To create really good content, you need the writing skills to make your ideas come alive in an engaging way.
In this book, marketing guru Ann Handley gives insightful guidance that everyone can use to uplevel skills, write like a pro, and develop high-quality content that gets results. The book covers all things writing, from grammar and organizing ideas to creating a compelling brand story. Read the free ebook on content marketing success. From the author: “That means you’ve got to choose words well, and write with economy and the style and honest empathy for your customers. And it means you put a new value on an often-overlooked skill in content marketing: How to write, and how to tell a true story really, really well.
That’s true whether you’re writing a listicle or the words on a Slideshare deck or the words you’re reading right here, right now. And so being able to communicate well in writing isn’t just nice; it’s necessity. And it’s also the oft-overlooked cornerstone of nearly all our content marketing.” Learn more about what smart content is and how marketers are succeeding with content. This book has dozens of useful insights for how to produce really good writing content. Highly recommended for all the marketers who write or edit content. By Matt Watkinson, 2013 4.6 rating and #309,508 on Amazon (a hidden gem) Watkinson is a designer and consultant who helps businesses get their customer experience right, and he brings a product and service design perspective to customer experience. Midway through the book he recommends to “start at the start and end at the end” in other words really understand the customer experience in step-by-step detail and as a whole flow.
He explains that setting and exceeding expectations are critical to managing the customers’ reaction to the experiences provided. He brackets the situations into Dissonance, or not matching, Absence, or no expectation exists, and Inference, or the customers’ expectations are being set elsewhere.
Great customer experiences are effortless — for the customer. He outlines 3 areas to address: 1) Time on task, 2) Convenience, 3) Simplicity. Companies often lose track of this principle as they evolve and update their products and services. Less is usually more if you deeply understand what is most important to your customer and what they value most from you. Organize information in predictable ways: 1) category, 2) time, 3) location, 4) alphabet, and 5) continuum. In the stress principle, Watkinson covers proper error handling and recovery.
Download a checklist of site usability and readiness. The book is an excellent read on design and customer delight which leads to better customer retention with many practical tips and takeaways. What Customers Crave: How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint by Nicholas Webb 2017 4.9 rating and #90,238 on Amazon Webb advances the discussion of how to treat customers and move beyond customer service to creating exceptional customer experiences. He recommends starting with an audit by an outside provider to properly allocate time and resources to establishing a benchmark and finding problems. Instead of simple personas, Webb advises to frame up what your customers love and hate. He defines a model for customer typing based on ESP, Expectation Sensory Experience and Price/Value. The heart of his customer experience analysis are the 5 touchpoint moments: pre-touch, first-touch, core-touch, last-touch, and in-touch.
The in-touch element is about building a relationship with the customer based on personal, relevant, and valuable exchanges and content, somewhat like the Challenger model. Learn how to map to customer touchpoints with this content funnel map checklist. This is the heart of modern content marketing and why this new book makes a great addition to my recommended marketing reading list. Non-Obvious 2018: How to Predict Trends and Win the Future By Rohit Bhargava, 2018 4.8 Rating on Amazon, #232 in Consumer Behavior Bhargava focuses on the landscape in which we work, spots trends, and explains how marketers can tap into and take advantage of them. He also explains how to curate information and spot trends for those who are interested.
Bhargava republishes the book each year as he understands that trends are fast moving and he wants to keep a current perspective. His trends include: Enlightened Consumption, Overtargeting, Brand Stand, Backstorytelling, Manipulated Outrage, Lightspeed Learning, Virtual Empathy, Human Mode, Data Pollution, and Predictive Protection among others. Learn about the present and the future by reading the free Future of Marketing and AI Survey Report. These trends are great for marketers to understand and incorporate into their commentary and thought leadership. Overtargeting describes the tendency to over focus on performance and exclude market segments that are less well understood. Brand Stand explains how a company takes a principled stand in favor of a cause and also generates positive PR and customer connection. Manipulated Outrage drove the 2016 presidential election.
Lightspeed Learning explains how to increase the adoption of information and knowledge to drive business by getting the duration and weight of the material right. See how I tried to do some LightSpeed Learning by benchmarking your digital marketing skills with the 4-minute BrightEdge digital marketing quiz. Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong By Eric Barker 4.8 stars on Amazon, #176 in Self-Help/Success This is a more general business success book that marketers will find interesting. Barker reviews some well-trodden success paths and digs further and adds nuances that are fresh and interesting. He cites research that is less well known than what is usually cited in business success books.
Here are some of the most interesting takeaways: In discussing optimism he cites that people subvocalize or think between 300 and 1000 words per minute. In Navy Seal training positively reinforcing thoughts increased the pass rates by nearly 10%.
Salespeople who score in the top 10% of optimism sold a whopping 88% more than the most pessimistic 10%. Knowing how many hours a student studied in college is predictive of how much money they make later in life. Researchers at Emory University found that whether children knew their family history was the best predictor of the child’s emotional well being. “Resume values are things that bring external success, like money and promotions. Eulogy values are about character.” “Efficiency entails removing game mechanics from the design of labor.
In other words taking the fun out of it.” And taking the fun out of work leads to high disengagement. Gamification entails making sure the project is Novel, Winnable, has Goals, and provides Feedback. Drinkers make 10% more money than non-drinkers and smokers make 7% less because drinking is social but smoking is usually private.
Speaking early and often in groups causes other people to see you as a leader. Employee networks are valuable to companies; contacts are worth an average of $948 each. Wearing glasses does make people think you are smarter. Above 120 IQ will and persistence is more important than intelligence. Moderate job hopping is correlated with higher income and higher career ascension. If you want to know which CEO will run the company into the ground count the number of times they say and write Me and I. Narcissism is bad for business.
Read the book to learn how all these data points fit together to make a person successful. By Ryan Deiss and Russ Hennesberry, 2017 4.6 rating on Amazon, #53 in web marketing Digital Marketing for Dummies is published by Wiley. This book is an excellent reference, and it includes many practical, specific, and current details, insights, and advice. Learn more about the channels and the digital marketing technology in the free Martech Stack Checklist. It’s a very readable 300 pages and covers the customer journey, marketing planning, landing pages, blogging, SEO, SEM, social, display, email, and data and analytics.
I like the focus on landing pages, which often get lost in the shuffle of channel and media planning as a high-leverage link in the funnel chain. They also reiterate the importance of the offer and revisiting and tuning the offer regularly. They provide 57 blog category ideas, including List, How-To, Research, Stat Roundup, People to Follow, Parody, Issue, Comparison, What-If, Challenge, and Products Tips to name just 11.
On email, they recommend writing to answer the four questions: Why now? Why should they care? Can you prove it? They also introduce data.studio.google.com for visual reporting. Chapter 14 is The Ten Most Common Digital Marketing Mistakes and includes ten classic errors to avoid, like being product-centric, not aligning Marketing’s goals with Sales’, and the distraction of shiny objects. They also add information on marketing jobs and resume building.
Overall, it is an extremely useful and valuable marketing book. Some other books worth considering: Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger, Future Marketing by Jon Wuebben, Originals by Adam Grant. Read a list of recommended SEO books and top B2B marketing books in these posts.
All of the titles on this best marketing books list are well worth the money and time and will help set you up for a productive 2018. Learn more enterprise SEO platforms. Learn how to create content that performs and drives better results online with four proven steps to content marketing.
Also see our list of best digital marketing books.
It’s never too late to make professional development a part of your everyday life and there is no better way to do that than to catch up on your reading (either e-reading or a good old fashioned physical book). What follows are some of the best books ever written about marketing and if we were putting together a comprehensive reading list for both recent business school graduates and business veterans wanting to understand the mindset of some of the youngest, brightest voices in the field, these books, many of which are classics, would be on that list. Here’s how we did it. We ranked Inc.’s, Ad Age, Forbes and Wall Street Journal lists of best marketing books and averaged out their place on the list to come up with a top 50. Whether you agree with our assessment or not, there can be no disputing the fact that these are some of the best written and informative business books out there, and available.
(Dover Publications, August 27, 2003) Marketing means understanding groups of people and how they think. While technology has changed over the decades, people haven’t, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that in 1841, Charles Mackay captured the essence of bonehead group-think. Read this, and you’ll never be surprised by events like the Great Recession of 2008 or the popularity of the Real Housewives.
English writer Charles Mackay was a 19th-century chronicler of culture and events. As a journalist he worked for London’s Morning Chronicle (1835-44), Glasgow’s Argus (1844-47), the Illustrated London News (1852-59) and, as a correspondent reporting on the American Civil War, the Times (1862-65). Mackay also was an associate of Charles Dickens. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a chronicle of various market crazes and irrational fads, is considered a classic in the field of market psychology. The Marketing Communication master’s concentration prompts you to analyze consumer behavior, conduct market research, and engage the power of brands and messages in order to develop powerful digital marketing strategies.
Evaluate various tactics, measure their effectiveness, and explore the intricacies of working with or in complex, multi-functional teams to execute compelling marketing campaigns. You’ll learn to:. Design, manage, and measure persuasive, integrated, digital marketing communication campaigns. Assess the current scope and predict future trends in traditional, social, mobile, email, search, and digital marketing.
Measure traditional and digital marketing communication efforts and create plans to adjust future campaigns based on results. Create strategies to elevate an organization’s or client’s marketing and branding efforts. SPONSORED (Doubleday, 2008) How much do we really know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today’s message-cluttered world?
By injecting neuroscience into the art of marketing, Martin Lindstrom, voted one Time Magazine’s most influential people of 2009, explains how everything we think and do is influenced by mental forces of which we are only vaguely aware (if at all). Lindstrom shows how these impulses might be scientifically measured and then used to hone marketing campaigns. Examples: An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle?
Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds, we’re barely aware of them? In Buy-ology, Lindstrom, presents the astonishing findings from a three-year, $7-million-dollar neuro-marketing study, an experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy. (Hachette Books; Revised edition, July 8, 2008) While the 20th century was dominated by hit products, the 21st century will be dominated by niche products, according to Chris Anderson’s groundbreaking explanation of web-based purchasing habits.
As useful as this book is, you can get the gist of it from his original article in Wired magazine. The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. Interesting theory.
Fascinating book by a terrific writer. (Entrepreneur Press, November 29, 2006) This is an instruction manual for Internet marketing success. Perry, who is regarded by many people, as THE AdWords expert, knows that if you want to succeed brilliantly in online marketing, you need to know a whole lot more than just how to gain Google’s trust and get cheap, targeted clicks on AdWords ads. The book covers a wide range of closely related topics, including how to identify your USP, how to build an unforgettable personality, how to put personality and pizazz into your email marketing, search engine optimization, remarketing, and so on.
There’s a fascinating chapter – Chapter 16 – on how to use social media indirectly – especially Facebook – to do your market research and produce a treasure trove of insights about what your customers really want. These tactics could also be used by affiliates looking for ideas for “money pages” – pages that generate revenue because they hit the spot exactly, targeting problems that are crying out to be solved right now. (Crown Business, May 2002) A classic book that every marketer should read. Before word of mouth marketing became a profession unto itself, Rosen figured out why certain brands get attention and how they do it. In The Anatomy of Buzz, former marketing VP Emanuel Rosen pinpoints the products and services that benefit the most from buzz-a universe that embraces everything from high-tech equipment to books, various consumer and entertainment products to legal and other support services-and offers specific strategies for creating and sustaining effective word-of-mouth campaigns. Drawing from interviews with more than 150 executives, marketing leaders, and researchers who have successfully built buzz for major brands, Rosen describes the ins and outs of attracting the attention of influential first users and “big-mouth” movers and shakers. He also discusses proven techniques for stimulating customer-to-customer selling-including how companies can spread the word to new territories by taking advantage of customer hubs and networks on the Internet and elsewhere.
(Portfolio Hardcover; New edition, November 12, 2009) If you are in marketing, you will have to get good at presenting and selling your ideas. There are countless books on the topic, and this is the only one worthy of reading, studying and applying. Woe the marketer that doesn’t heed these words. Sometimes a great idea will sell itself. The other 99% of the time, you have to find a way to persuade others that it is, in fact, a great idea.
Most executives spend the vast majority of their time creating their work, and almost no time on the presentation. Through an engaging and humorous narrative, Peter Coughter presents the tools he designed to help advertising and marketing professionals develop persuasive presentations that deliver business. Readers will learn how to hone their individual natural presentation style, how to organize a powerful presentation, how to harness the elegant power of simplicity, how to truly connect with an audience, (Basic Books; Anniversary Edition, April 5, 2011) If you could point your finger at one book that changed the face of marketing, it would be this one. The entire social media movement came out of this book. Long before Facebook and Twitter, this visionary book told the tale of everything we believe and hold dear in these times of inter-connectedness. Today’s biggest trends—the mobile web, social media, real-time—have produced a new consumer landscape.
The End of Business As Usual explores this complex information revolution, how it has changed the future of business, media, and culture, and what you can do about it. (Penguin Books; Reprint edition February 24, 2009) This book is not for the timid. Shirky is more academic than fluff, and this book dives deep into technology and social media with beautiful and high-brow writing. So well written and researched.
Welcome to the new future of involvement. Forming groups is easier than it has ever been: unpaid volunteers can build an encyclopedia together in their spare time, mistreated customers can join forces to get their revenge on airlines and high street banks, and one man with a laptop can raise an army to help recover a stolen phone. The results of this new world of easy collaboration can be both good (young people defying an oppressive government with a guerrilla ice-cream eating protest) and bad (girls sharing advice for staying dangerously skinny) but it’s here and, as Clay Shirky shows, it’s affecting everybody. For the first time, we have the tools to make group action truly a reality. (Wiley; 4 edition, February 10, 2012) When was the last time that you read a business book and laughed out loud?
Yes, this book is that funny, but it’s also one of the best books out there on what makes an ad great, and how to push yourself to create a great one as well. Written by a copywriter, this book demonstrates the power of words and the power of spending the time to find the right words. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This has inspired a generation of ad students, copywriters, and young creatives to make their mark in the industry.
But students need new guidance to ply their craft now in the digital world. This new fourth edition explains how to bring brand stories into interactive, dynamic places online, in addition to traditional television, radio, print, and outdoor ads. (Harper Business; Revised edition, December 26, 2006) Another classic, this one on the art of persuasion. Author Cialdini explains the psychology of why people say “yes”—and how to apply these understandings. Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.
Best Books For Marketing Leaders
You’ll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success. An incredible book about how we make decisions and what influences them (hint: it’s not what you think) and this was published long before behavioral economics became so very cool. This is profoundly powerful because of all of the science and research behind this book. Most marketers haven’t paid any attention to this book, and it shows in the vast majority of terrible work that we’re exposing the public to.