This is a collection of books that I regard as essential reading and that I have very much taken to heart. I hope you get as much out of them as I did. Click the title to go to Amazon US, click the UK link to go to Amazon UK (Amazon links are affiliate links, mostly so I can see if anyone gets any use out of the page – I doubt the pennies it earns me will add up to much).
Guy Kawasaki really deserves a section all to himself here, his books are literally page-turners, starting with Selling The Dream
which is about using Evangelism to sell products and ideas, through to the irreverent How to Drive the Competition Crazy
- great fun to read for the first time when I was just starting out in marketing, it really energised me to read all these ways that companies had frustrated their competitors by being better, nicer, funnier than them, stealing their thunder, and customers. The latest book, Reality Check
is in Kawasaki’s own words, a culmination of all his previous books – Rules for Revolutionaries was good but not as meaningful as the earlier two, and The Art of the Start was a little drier in my opinion, though very useful to startups. Reality Check condenses down a lot of ideas to the important nuggets of information. If you read only one Guy Kawasaki book, make it Reality Check. Reading more than one? Start at the beginning, skip Art of the Start though.
Kawasaki also wrote the foreword for a very readable, short-ish book on customer evangelism – Creating Customer Evangelists
, by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. Excellent if your focus is word-of-mouth marketing.
Back at university there was a module on the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. I’d been turned on to Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm
by someone on the Rules for Revolutionaries mailing list so in a tutorial session I’m up at the blackboard, teaching my classmates about Chasm Theory. Put simply: innovators/early adopters will accept an incomplete/imperfect/immature product, they like it because it’s new, they are comfortable adapting it themselves. The early majority have no truck with such inconveniences. Chasm Theory is all about getting your product over that gap and into the early majority, where you can start making serious money.
Another book I enjoyed greatly back in the mid nineties was The One-to-one Future
by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. It’s interesting to note how this book also inspired Seth Godin. The first edition was printed in 1993, it is all about share-of-customer, customer relationship management and one-to-one marketing. It’s out of print now (but available 2nd hand from Amazon sellers), though Peppers and Rogers are still writing together. I’ve not read any of their later work but I’ll be checking them out shortly. Given what they were writing about I find it amusing that the only review of this early book I can find online, written in 1999, says “Plenty of Wow but not so much How”. Probably a good thing – how you reach out to your customer, tailor your offering for them and win a bigger share of their business isn’t going to use exactly the same tools as it did in 1993, ’96 or ’98, when the last edition was printed. This book hinted at the possibilities to come. Now here we are, 16 years later, and a lot of what they talk about is commonplace.
photo credit: gadl via flickr
