I have taught marketing strategy to MBAs and Executives at Business Schools and companies around the world, and have consulted for major companies in financial services, consumer packaged goods, software, and others for over three decades. Some of my Harvard Business Review articles are among the review’s bestsellers, and my book on marketing strategy, TILT: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers, received the best business book award in 2014. I run a marketing strategy consultancy at Brand Strategy Group with clients on three continents.
This book is an antidote to product-centricity. Businesses in technology, pharma, materials, commodities, and even financial services all suffer from a turgid obsession with their product. Everything within the business is defined by the product – in fact, if you ask managers what business they’re in, they’ll talk about the product. Measures of success are product-based (units sold, market share), behaviors are linked to product moved (quotas), and even innovation is defined solely in terms of better products.
TILT helps you rethink not just the product focus, but what an organization should look like to become more customer-centric. It takes you through the thought process with sparkling examples and practical checklists. If you want to make your business more customer-centric, start with this book.
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This is your strategy playbook: it will teach you to think systematically about the amorphous subject of strategy. It is both concrete and an eye-opener on what strategy is and can do for an organization. Use it as a step-by-step guide to think about strategy, and use it also to understand what strategy is.
Marketing today is a battle for the customer’s mind-space. In Attention Merchants, Tim Wu lays out the stakes, the players, and the methodologies they use to grab and grasp space in the consumers’ mind. Marketing has transformed, for better or worse, from a game of cajoling the consumer through alluring branding and advertising to discipline of converting consumers’ attention into purchase and loyalty behavior. Tim Wu describes how this is done. While not intended as a “how-to” book, it is a must-read for any marketer with a conscience.
This book described the economics of the internet age as the web was taking off. It remains a classic in that it not only predicted many of the transformations that were to play out on the web, including social media, and it continues to be useful as a template for predicting the coming transformations that will be wrought by Web3 and Blockchain.
This book has stood the test of time in its description of how small changes have large impact and make things (products, trends, ideas) take off. Chock full of examples and stories, as you would expect from Gladwell, this is a well-crafted, well-told, and coherent idea.
A large part of what we buy today is information or products wrapped in information. How that information is presented changes the experience of consumption. Thaler shows how presenting the information differently (sometimes even consumers presenting the information to themselves) can change the choices we make. This is a book about how the consumer mind works.
5,309 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about consumer behaviour, decision making, and planning.
We think you will like Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, and The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals if you like this list.
From Yoav's list on The best non-fiction books about happiness and the choices we try to make in order to get it.
Don't worry, this is not a conspiracy book. This is an optimistic book about the ways we can help people make better choices by designing the system around them better—preventing car crashes, promoting better nutrition, and even increasing the pool of organ donors. It is a fascinating read about small changes around us that can create big differences.
From Yoav's list on The best non-fiction books about happiness and the choices we try to make in order to get it.
People consider themselves as rational beings, but we are not—in more than one surprising way. Ariely is giving us examples and sharing stories that show us how irrational we can sometimes really be. Reading this book cannot just allow us to see things more clearly when we make our choices in life. It can also allow us to understand others, and in a weird and funny way maybe even help us be more compassionate when facing other people's mistakes.
From Gojko's list on The best books for new software product managers.
Four Disciplines of Execution is a great summary of the essential ideas on how to turn plans into outcomes, based on wide industry research that compared exceptional performers to teams that just wasted time. The real gem in the book is distilling the difference between lagging and leading indicators, and providing models for measuring value in the short term, so you can focus the work of your teams.
The authors distilled the ideas into a simple model with a very clear vocabulary, that you’ll be able to use with your colleagues and stakeholders to speed up the discussions. For that alone, even if you’re up to date with modern product management methods, you should definitely read this book.
