One of the problems with working is that there is never enough time to read – even if you want to. In particular, there is never enough time to learn about topics that are outside your immediate area of interest. This lack of time is the best explanation I can find for the fact that marketers rarely seem to have read even the most important books on business strategy. Here are a few books that I think are useful to any active marketer, with a strong bias towards short and easy-to-read ones.
First, Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy is a classic for the best of reasons. It introduces his ‘Five Forces model’ which is a simple and practical tool to evaluate markets and potential profitability. There have been many follow-up books, from Porter and others, but this remains a simple summary of what you need to know.
Since marketers increasingly concern themselves with innovation and a desire to be first to market, a short book by Markides and Geroski, Fast Second, may be salutary. It shows in fewer than 200 pages how being first to market through radical innovation is often less profitable than scaling up the markets created by others.
There is also a love in the marketing community of trying to copy successful companies – sometimes in an informal way, sometimes through techniques such as benchmarking. Before you embark on this course, please read a salutary text by Phil Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect. It demonstrates convincingly that we tend to see successful companies as good in all they do and unsuccessful companies as uniformly bad – even the same companies and people just a couple of years apart. He also identifies eight other popular business delusions that I am sure we have all fallen for at some time.
Marketers always need to balance analysis with intuition. There is a lot written about analysis in the marketing field, but less on intuition. One classic from the field of decision theory is The Power of Intuition by Gary Klein. He demonstrates convincingly how intuition can outperform analysis in many fast-moving situations – but also how intuition can be developed only through deep immersion in the environment in which decisions are going to be taken. This should give pause for thought to any marketer who believes you can jump between industries and still trust your gut. Finally, a recent book by John Kay, called Obliquity, pulls together thoughts on how
goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. This provides the basis of an argument for why businesses should pursue customer satisfaction as a means to improve, shareholder returns – so it should be required reading for marketers and their bosses.