10 books every marketer should read: 5 about marketing and 5 not.

September.

 

The beginning of fall also known as a back to school season.

 

Everyone knows studying doesn’t stop after you graduate, that’s something we continue doing forever.

 

That’s why today we talk: books!

Fall season 2018: let’s get it, let’s go!

 

  1. 1. The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life, by Oliver Luckett and Michael J. Casey

 

Luckett and Casey offer a revolutionary theory, a scientific look at the world of social media explaining how it mimics the rules and functions of biological life through the use of technology. A great staple and a true must-read. Moreover, not only is it an impactful, fulfilling read, it is also pretty fun: prepare for chapters like “Cracking the Memetic Code”

  1.  2. Location Is (Still) Everything by David R. Bell

David R. Bell argues that living circumstances/the physical world we inhabit shape each and every one of us as an online consumer. This book is about e-commerce and retail through the looking glass of experience, advice, and research beautifully framed to explain how the real and virtual worlds intersect and what one must do to succeed in sales.

3. Consumer Behaviour textbook by Del I. Hawkin and David L. Mothersbaugh

This is a nicely worded strategic plan for marketers to adjust their campaigns according to the 4 major parts of the advertising wheel: consumers environment and behaviour, their cognition and effect, plus the marketing strategy itself.

4. The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business, by Rita Gunther McGrath

This book offers a good insight into different marketing strategies and approaches that many successful businesses have used in order to “keep it fresh”. Get inspired to not find yourself trapped in an uncompetitive business using traditional but old-fashioned approaches.

5. All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin

This, hands down is one of our favorites! A great read that will open your eyes on the ways to tell a story that is believable and, well, relatable using world-wide known examples like Dyson vacuum cleaner, or Fiji water, or the iPod.

 

Now let’s move on to the non-marketing books.

 

  1. 1. Rules for Mavericks by Phil Beadle

Phil Beadle, known for winning Royal Television Awards for his classroom documentaries and writing the book on teaching by launching the How to Teach series. This book explores how original thinkers who challenge orthodoxy can find ways to be effective in the ways that matter to them, and how to let anything peoples genuinely original ideas count.

This is not a “maverick cult”, not an autobiography, and not a school book or a rant. This a brilliantly worded book written by a teacher with an intent to teach.

  1. 2. Notes on a nervous planet by Matt Haig

This book raises such important questions for nowadays society as how to stay sane in a world that forces us to live in a haphazard storm of nervousness at a speed of 100+ mph driven by the alarm bells we hear through mainstream and social media? After years of panic attacks, Matt Haig set out to find the truth about how the world around us is changing how we feel.

  1. 3. The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall

“A jaunty, insightful new book . . . [that] draws from disparate corners of history and science to celebrate our compulsion to storify everything around us.”

New York Times

This piece may just open your eyes and open your concept on how stories shape us as personalities using neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology. What it means to be a storytelling animal? How can we make this world a better place? Who are we but the stories?

  1. 4. The Sacred and the Profane and Patterns in Comparative Religion by Mircea Eliade.

This book is a dialectic between two poles in the human experience, namely transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary and vice versa. From Marx to Freud and Jung, Eliade elaborated on universal religious experience describing how humanity’s effort to live within a sacred sphere has manifested itself in cultures, beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths throughout history.

  1. 5. Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris. 

This is a fun, easy-to-read book of advice. Talking about her experience working in The New Yorker’s renowned copy department editing some of the most amazing writers Mary shares the most bizarre, laughable, irreverent and memorable moments.

 

Bonus books

If you read till this poin, congratulations! You get a bonus of three more books to indulge in.

 1. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

2. The Power of Visual Storytelling, by Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio

3. Driving Demand: Transforming B2B Marketing to Meet the Needs of the Modern Buyer, by Carlos Hidalgo

 

And as the Oscar Wilde once said:

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”

 

– Oscar Wilde

 

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