Top 10 Marketing Booksand Marketing Gurus

By John Cousins

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Marketing Books, Authors & Ideas

• Criteria: ideas from psychology, behavioral economics, marketing, advertising, and business about how to influence behavior and buying patterns at the edges of bounded rationality

• Leveraging Human experience into Customer experience

Crossing the Chasm• A marketing book by Geoffrey A.

Moore that focuses on the specifics of marketing high tech products during the early start up period.

• Moore's exploration and expansion of the diffusions of innovations model has had a significant and lasting impact on high tech entrepreneurship.

• In 2006, Tom Byers, Faculty Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program, described it as "still the bible for entrepreneurial marketing 15 years later"

Crossing the Chasm• By identifying the differences between

"innovators" and "laggards" and everything in between, Geoffrey Moore creates a roadmap for how new markets develop. While his book focuses on high tech, the lessons that he draws and the example he gives are applicable to every industry and business situation.

•  Best quote: "'Why me?' cries out the unsuccessful entrepreneur. Or rather 'Why not me?' 'Why not us?' chorus his equally unsuccessful investors. 'Look at our product. Is it not as good--nay, better-than the product that beat us out?'... In fact, feature for feature, the less successful product is often arguably superior."

Guerrilla Marketing• Thirty years ago, Jay Conrad Levinson

took marketing out of the world of Mad Men and huge corporations into the hands of entrepreneurs and small businesses. The book explains why it's no longer necessary to spend a great deal of money to gain visibility, as long as you're willing to get creative. Amazingly, the book got it "spot on" way before anybody was talking about "going viral."

• Best quote: "Guerilla marketing requires you to comprehend every facet of marketing, experiment with many of them, winnow out the losers, double up on the winners, and then use the marketing tactics that prove themselves to you in the battleground of real life."

Jay Conrad Levinson

• Creative Director at Leo Burnet Advertising Agency (original Mad Men)

• Developed iconic brands:• Marlboro Man, Tony the

Tiger, Morris the Cat, Jolly Green Giant, Charlie the Tuna, Pillsbury Doughboy

• Jay went on to teach Marketing and Advertising at Berkeley

Positioning• As true today as it was when

published 20 years ago, this classic by Al Ries and Jack Trout lays out the basics of finding where your product fits in larger picture of what other people want and what other companies are doing. Some of the case studies are showing a little age, but this remains a seminal, essential text.

• Best quote: "Positioning is now what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect."

Al Ries

• Al Ries is one of the greatest marketing thinkers, practitioners and authors.

• Ries coined the term "positioning", as related to the field of marketing, and authored Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind, an industry standard on the subject.

Kotler’s best books

Philip Kotler• American marketing author, consultant,

and professor; currently the S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

• He is the author of over 55 marketing books, including

• Principles of Marketing, • Kotler on Marketing: • How to Create, Win, and Dominate 

Markets, and • Marketing 3.0: From Products to 

Customers to the Human Spirit. • Kotler describes strategic marketing as

serving as "the link between society's needs and its pattern of industrial response."

Permission Marketing• For decades marketing pundits

thought about marketing in terms of cramming your brand messages down people's throats. Seth Godin turned this concept upside down by pointing people have so many choices today that they're going to pick and choose what messages they want to hear.

• Best quote: "Marketers want to get their messages in front of you. They must get their messages in front of you, just to survive. The only problem is--do you really want more marketing messages?

Seth Godin• https://www.ted.com/talks/set

h_godin_on_sliced_bread#t-125784

• “Godin is a demigod on the Web, a best-selling author, highly sought-after lecturer, successful entrepreneur, respected pundit and high-profile blogger. He is uniquely respected for his understanding of the Internet.” — Forbes.com

• Seth has been self publishing and financing his recent books through Kickstarter campaigns

The Long Tail• 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.

• Best quote: "As demand shifts towards the niches, the economics of providing them improve further, and so on, creating a positive feedback loop that will transform entire industries-and the culture-for decades to come."

Free• Free follows a thread from the

previous work The Long Tail. It examines the rise of pricing models which give products and services to customers for free, often as a strategy for attracting users and up-selling some of them to a premium level. That class of model has become widely referred to as “freemium" and has become very popular for a variety of digital products and services.

Chris Anderson• British-American author and

entrepreneur. He was with The Economist for seven years before joining WIRED magazine in 2001, where he was the editor-in-chief until 2012. He is known for his 2004 article entitled The Long Tail; which he later expanded into the 2006 book, The Long Tail

• He is currently the cofounder and CEO of 3D Robotics, a drone manufacturing company.

• Not to be confused with the curator of the TED conferences with the same name.

Made to Stick

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath published 2007.

• The book continues the idea of "stickiness" popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, seeking to explain what makes an idea or concept memorable or interesting.

The book's outline follows the acronym "SUCCES" (with the last s omitted). Each letter refers to a characteristic

that can help make an idea "sticky"

Chip and Dan Heath• Dan Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke

University’s CASE center, which supports social entrepreneurs. At CASE, he founded the Change Academy, a program designed to boost the impact of social sector leaders.

• Chip Heath is an American bestselling author and speaker. He is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University.

• The brother have co-authored three bestselling books: – Switch: How to Change Things When 

Change Is Hard – Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive 

and Others Die and – Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in 

Life and Work

The Tipping Point• The Tipping Point: How Little Things

Can Make a Big Difference is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell, published in 2000.

• Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point".

• The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life.

• As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do".

• The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the steep drop in New York City's crime rate after 1990.

• The "three rules of epidemics" (or the three "agents of change") in the tipping points of epidemics.• The Law of the Few• "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a

particular and rare set of social gifts“. This the "80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the 'work' will be done by 20 percent of the participants" (Pareto Principle).These people are described in the following ways:

• Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub Malcolm Gladwell characterizes these individuals as having social networks of over one hundred people.

• Mavens are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information". They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others. Mavens start "word-of-mouth epidemics" due to their knowledge, social skills, and ability to communicate.

• Salesmen are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them.

• The Stickiness Factor• The specific content of a message that renders its impact memorable. Popular children's television

programs such as Sesame Street and Blue's Clues pioneered the properties of the stickiness factor, thus enhancing effective retention of educational content as well as entertainment value.

• The Power of Context• Human behavior is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment. As Malcolm Gladwell says,

"Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur".

For example, "zero tolerance" efforts to combat minor crimes such as fare-beating and vandalism on the New York subway led to a decline in more violent crimes city-wide. Gladwell explains how Dunbar's number plays into the tipping point. Gladwell also discusses what he dubs the rule of 150, which states that the maximum number of individuals in a society or group that someone can have real social relationships with is 150.

Confessions of an Advertising Man

• David Ogilvy• Original Mad Man• Confessions of an

Advertising Man is a 1963 book by David Ogilvy. It is considered required reading in many advertising classes in the United States. Ogilvy was partly an advertising copywriter, and the book is written as though the entire book was advertising copy.

Buy-ology• By injecting neuroscience into the art of

marketing, Martin Lindstrom 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.

• Best quote: "If marketers could uncover what is going on in our brains that makes us choose one brand over another--what information passes through our brain's filter and what information doesn't--well, that would be key to truly building brands of the future.

Nudge

• Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness is a book written by University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein.

• The book draws on research in psychology and behavioral economics to explore the active engineering of choice architecture

Nudge

• The book is critical of the homo economicus view of human beings "that each of us thinks and chooses unfailingly well, and thus fits within the textbook picture of human beings offered by economists."

• They cite many examples of research which raise "serious questions about the rationality of many judgments and decisions that people make".

• They state that, unlike members of homo economicus, members of the species homo sapiens make predictable mistakes because of their use of heuristics, fallacies, and because of the way they are influenced by their social interactions.

Madness of Crowds• Ultimately, 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 all THAT 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 or the popularity of the Kardashians.

• Best quote: "We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."

Notable Exclusions:

• Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson• Steve Blank’s work• Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss• The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter• Edward Bernays’ work• The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton

Christensen• Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman