Have you had time to visit your favorite bookstore and dig for new gripping titles on marketing and business? If not, we found some for you. This month book list focuses on myth busting: learn that you don’t have to be original (or ashamed that you copied competition’s banner idea), online is not enough, and customer create products they use. Enjoy and don’t forget to let us know about your marketing literature types!
1 R. Levesque, Ask. The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discovering What Exactly Your Customers Want to Buy
We all recite that customers must be involved, discussed with, taken into consideration… but how? Do we have specific tools to do so? How to ask? Levesque tells how to make a sensible survey (and what questions not to ask), whether to reward participation in survey (and how to motivate customers to take it otherwise), what to do when your contact base is small (so you seem to have no one to send survey to), and many others. A lot of specifics and practical tips, useful if you want to move your relationship with customers to the next level.
2 M. Earls, Copy, Copy, Copy: How to Do Smarter Marketing by Using Other People’s Ideas
What originality is? Nothing more than a skillful imitation. We tend to delude ourselves with assumptions of our innovativeness and genius, because we don’t know that the solution we consider our was actually invented before. Discussion on human creativity aside, ability to observe others and adapt their ideas to our needs brings benefits.
How to copy in marketing, how it works, what you gain and why everybody does it – after reading this book you will be ready to transform others’ ideas … and won’t be ever embarrassed with it again.
By the way, the brilliant style will mesmerize you.
3 Steven Van Belleghem, When Digital Becomes Human: The Transformation of Customer Relationships
Our clients have access to huge amounts of data on the company. But even if communication in all channels runs smoothly, ¾ of customers still need human contact and expect brand to combine human resources and digital strategy into perfect whole.
The book gets you thinking about placing customer at heart of your company and not following blindly the digital mantra. Maybe your clients still like old-fashioned phone call. And it’s based on case studies (Toyota, Nike, Amazon)!
5 Josh Weltman, Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You’re Selling (The Little Black Book of Advertising Secrets)
Josh Weltman has 25 years of creative experience in ad agencies and he co-created “Mad Men”. In the book he collects his thoughts on fundamentals of communication, universal rules of ad world, story-telling and creations that work (“make s**t happen”, to quote the author).
It’s not a set of tips to quick application, rather a bunch of inspiration. Great gift!
5 A. J. Kimmel, People and Products: Consumer Behavior and Product Design
Kimmel, an academic marketing and consumer experience expert, presents a book on object design, discussing how customer feedback changes them. Thanks to the web (both people and objects constantly connected) customers’ impact on product design radically increases, because their way of using it and needs can be easily monitored and users have so many channels to share their opinions with producers.
Fascinating picture of future customer-brand relationship.
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