One of the joys of living in a place where the winters are often long and dark is the reading weather. Build a fire in the fireplace, pour yourself a drink and open a good book.
I often do most of the year’s reading between October and March because it’s off-hours then (which doesn’t mean you can’t read outside).
We live in an age where we are surrounded by marketing. Everything and everyone seems to be competing for our attention.
If you work in marketing, the idea of reading a book about something you do all day and surrounds you every waking moment might seem unappealing. However, there are still new things to say and new things to learn about marketing.
As you head into 2024, here are six books to add to your reading list.
The first thing you’ll probably notice is that it’s not about marketing. But marketing is an essential part of every business and every leader must be a marketer to be successful.
1. Impossible to ignore: Create memorable content to influence decisions
The central objective of Dra’s book. Carmen Simon is about creating memorable presentations, which is an area where many people have enough knowledge of PowerPoint and Google Slides to be dangerous.
The problem with many of the day-to-day presentations we see in sales and business in general is that they try to function as both a presentation and a leave-behind. This leaves them full of information and light on strong images and stories, and these are the exact elements that stick in our memories and promote recall.
As proof that the techniques in the book work, I like to refer to how Simon uses them in the book itself.
Years after I first read “Impossible to Ignore,” I remember her anecdote about standing in line at a store as a child in Soviet-era Romania. There was a lack of food, so the workers had to limit the number of people in line. They decided to send everyone home after the girl who stood out in a bright red coat, who was a young Simon. The combination of strong visuals and a powerful story burned into my mind.
2. Running with a Purpose: How Brooks Overcame Goliath Competitors to Lead the Pack
Why would a memoir by the CEO of an athletic shoe company make the list? Because marketing, at its core, is about identifying and creating markets for what you sell.
When Jim Weber took over as CEO of Brooks, the company was trying to be everything to everyone who wore sneakers. That’s a lot of people in a market with a lot of big brands.
Weber and team decided to exit a large part of the market by leaving the “athletic” business, which consists of low(ish)-cost sneakers that people wear around the house or when they’re running errands. Instead, they decided to focus on serious runners.
This one also has a great marketing game that includes luxurious portable toilets that Brooks brought to the major races. To enter, runners had to wear Brooks shoes.
There is also a lesson in market disruption. Remember the five-toed sneaker craze? Yes, it was fun.
Will Guidara has a unique resume. Among his roles: restaurant owner, creative agency leader, conference presenter and author of four cookbooks.
His specialty is hospitality. One of his guiding beliefs is that hospitality should not be limited to what we think of as the hospitality industry (ie restaurants, spas, hotels). Instead, companies in all industries can create experiences that delight customers and drive more business.
As Guidara rose to prominence in the restaurant business in New York City, his business became legendary for providing experiences like sledding in Central Park for a family that had never experienced snow before.
The book’s moments of brilliance and generosity could serve as a lesson for corporations across the business spectrum. Americans have a relatively dim view of large corporations and financial institutions in general. They feel much better about small businesses, which are more nimble and structured so that personal touches are possible.
Many marketers will tell you that their brand is more than just a logo or a color palette, it evokes emotions and most importantly, trust. In Unreasonable Hospitality, you get a glimpse of what this actually looks like in practice.
We cannot remember every detail of every experience. If you’ve ever seen a courtroom drama, you’ve seen it.
“So what you’re saying is that you weren’t sure if the suspect had a beard or not when you saw him on that foggy, moonless night?”
We mostly remember the peaks of our experiences. Sometimes, we remember the valleys of our experiences. Everything else is labeled as “not important enough to remember” by our memory.
In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath help readers understand how our minds process and categorize experiences. Once you understand how this all works subconsciously, it’s much easier to be deliberate about creating moments that matter to our audience.
As a blueprint, the book looks at events that weren’t necessarily designed to be memorable, such as a “Signing Day” ceremony for high school seniors where they announced which college they were attending. Then deconstruct the events to see what made them memorable.
5. Humanize B2B: The new truth in marketing that will transform your brand and your sales
Download a white paper. Receive calls from sales representatives. Get email after email.
For years, the B2B marketing playbook was pretty boring, even a little annoying. It has improved to some extent, but there is still a long way to go. You probably know the feeling if you have friends who work in B2C marketing.
“Oh, you’re doing a Super Bowl commercial? That must be exhausting for you…”
What if it didn’t have to be like that? (Spoiler alert: He doesn’t.)
Rather than being the boring part of marketing, say Paul Cash and James Trezona, B2B should appeal to the emotions of people trying to transform organizations and create change.
They draw heavily on research from LinkedIn’s The B2B Institute to show that B2B buyers rely on emotions just as much as their B2C counterparts.
This makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. Because they are not actually homologous. They are the same people, and they don’t take off their B2B hat and put on a B2C hat when they finish their work day.
6. Obviously Awesome: How to nail product positioning so customers get it, buy it, love it
Part of what I love about April Dunford’s story is that, like me, she never set out to be a trader. As someone with no formal marketing education, he asked a lot of questions. The answers left her unsatisfied.
“Trust me, it works.”
“Because we’ve always done it that way.”
The result is “Obviously Awesome,” a book that rethinks product marketing from an outsider’s perspective.
The hardest part for people trying to turn their product into a story that resonates with customers is where to start. Do you craft a story that starts with your features? Or do you focus on customer needs first? What about differentiation?
You’ll have to read the book to find out.
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