Criteria for a great marketing book: 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

1. Top 10 Marketing Books
and Marketing Gurus

2. By John Cousins
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3. 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

4. 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"

5. 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."

6. 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."

7. 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

8. 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."

9. 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.

10. Kotler’s best books

11. 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."

12. 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?

13. 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

14. 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."

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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"

19. 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

20. Ryan Holiday
• https://ryanholiday.net/
• A new generation of megabrands
like Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb,
and Twitter haven’t spent a dime
on traditional marketing. No press
releases, no TV commercials, no
billboards. Instead, they rely on a
new strategy—growth hacking—to
reach many more people despite
modest marketing budgets.
Growth hackers have thrown out
the old playbook and replaced it
with tools that are testable,
trackable, and scalable. They
believe that products and
businesses should be modified
repeatedly until they’re primed to
generate explosive reactions.

21. 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.

22. • 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.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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
• Behavioral Economics

26. 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.

27. 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."

28. Jonah Berger
• He is an expert on word of
mouth, viral marketing, social
influence, and trends.
• He's the author of
– Contagious: Why Things Catch
On and
– Invisible Influence: The Hidden
Forces that Shape Behavior.
• Berger's theory of what
spreads with word of mouth is
based on six key principles:
social currency, triggers,
emotion, public, practical
value, stories.

29. 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
• Priceless by William Poundstone
• Edward Bernays’ work
• The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
• Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman