Books that you have to read to really understand branding
These are the books that I have read that have influenced my brand thinking. There may be more that I have forgotten about and not all are directly related to branding. Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll not only add more, but I’ll write brief reviews about some of the simple things I learnt from each. In my opinion, they are the best branding books:
1. Why Johnny Can’t Brand – Rediscovering the lost art of the big idea. Bill Schley & Carl Nichols Jr. This is one of the most exceptional books I have ever read. I have been working in brands for 20+ years and it made me think about things totally differently.
2. The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design : a Whiteboard Overview by Marty Neumeier. An exceptional and simple book. Again, its one of those ones that once you’ve read it will make you look at all brands and branding projects differently.
3. Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands by Kevin Roberts. Another exceptional one – Perhaps he was the man tat identified the power behind emotive brands and emotion within branding. Anyway, one you have to read to understand what makes Apple/Sony/Nike etc great.
4. A Book About Innocent: Our Story and Some Things We’ve Learned by Innocent – A new entry at number four and a brilliant book. Read my full review here and a part review that I had to write (because I was enjoying it so much) here.
5. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. This was one of my fave books ever until I went to see MG speak in London and then bought Outliers which became my new fave. It sall about creating and understanding what makes a business suddenly explode in success.
6. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell – He is a great writer and an even better thinker. I just love this book. See a brief book review here.
7. The Momentum Effect: How to Ignite Exceptional Growth (Financial Times Series) by Jean Claude Larreche. A bit tough, but produces the thought that advertising is the tax you have to pay for being mediocre. If you create a better product, you will need to advertise less. With a bad product you have to work harder to even stand still.
8. Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong by Martin Lindstrom. Research is dead, long live really powerful brain scanning consumer insight.
I’ve written a brief book review here, but it’s well worth a read.
9. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle. A brilliant example of single minded determination to create a product that is better than anything else in the world. So many exceptional business lessons in this, it’s well worth the pain of the dull bits.
10. Brand Warriors: Corporate Leaders Share Their Winning Strategies by Fiona Gilmore. All sorts of little lessons and insights that really prove there’s nothing new in branding or advertising, just new ways of describing things. Make great product that is designed around your customers needs.
11. Wally Olins: The Brand Handbook by Wally Olins. This was the best book to understand branding, but i’m not sure it hasn’t been a bit left behind. For someone entering corporate life, it shows you how to not cock stuff up, but I don’t believe there are as many insights into how to create a great brand as there should be. You can read a review of this here.
12. E-myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. Why entrepreneurs never make money. They create jobs and not businesses. If you are thinking about going out and starting your own business, you’d be a bit of an eejit not to read this first.
13. The Richer Way by Julian Richer. A little long in the tooth but still highly relevant, but this was one of the first books I read that seemed to show incredible customer insight. Richer Sounds, were in the Guinness World records for years with the highest sales per SqFt and this book shows some of their secrets. I met him at a conference once and he was Hugely impressive!
14. The Art of War for Executives by Donald G. Krause. It may be all a bit MBA for most thinkers, but it does give a simple lesson (similar to ‘Who Moved my cheese’) about a business needing to adapt to change in order to survive and thrive.
15. The Welch Way. Podcast. Weekly. Hearing Little squeaky jack is a joy every time. he does talk some crap too, but most of his thinking and insight is just sensational.
16. Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler, Gary Armstrong, Veronica Wong, and John Saunders. Yawn. I remember this all too well from College and still have a current copy now as it is the book that you use as a reference point. The hole of marketing can be explained with four box charts, Kotler and his mates show you how.
17. Azazel by Isaac Asimov. Nothing to do with branding, but lovely little parables about how your best intentions can be misinterpreted and my fave one about the author who thinks the world should move faster around him, but soon works out that you need time to think!
18. Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars by Roger Enrico. Always a good reference point. An insight into a back to back war in the 80′s where Pepsi pushed Coke so hard they forced them into launching new Coke – an abject failure – and Pepsi claimed this meant they had won the cola wars. hmmm.
19. Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca. Again, more of a general business book, but when he saved Chrysler, he did it all the time with 80% of the information and had a dread of MBA’s and their paralysis by analysis. Just a brilliant summary of an exceptional business brain and awesome strategic thinking.
20. Thinking in 3d by Andy Hanselman. Our good friend and death defying superhero. For a business to succeed, it needs to be clear and demonstrably different. Some fantastic examples (including my very own Purple Circle on Page 54!!!) all through this book.
21. Boo Hoo: A Dot Com Story by Ernst Malmsten, Erik Portanger, and Charles Drazin. A very sad story of technology too advanced for the market and a company that got so consumed by its own PR that it forgot it needed to make itself easy to buy from and have a platform that actually worked!
22.Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life by Spencer Johnson. Mice, cheese and little people with some simple parables to explain how to deliver change to your business. You can read a review of this great little book with a max 30 minute read time here.
And others that people have recommended to me but I have yet to read myself
1. Selling the Dream: Sales as Evangelism by Guy Kawasaki
2. Cutting Edge Advertising: How to Create the World’s Best Print for Brands in the 21st Century by Jim Aitchinson
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