What we bring back from the field.
Explore Readings
Check our readings. The books we like, what each one argues, and one line worth keeping from each.
How Brands Grow. Byron Sharp (2010)
The evidence-based case that brands grow by reaching more buyers rather than by deepening loyalty among the ones they have. Built on decades of purchase panel data from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and the most disruptive marketing book of the last twenty years.
Growth comes from being easy to think of and easy to buy, not from being loved by a few.
Ogilvy on Advertising. David Ogilvy (1983)
The working manual of the man who built Ogilvy & Mather, on headlines, layouts, research, and the difference between advertising that wins awards and advertising that sells. It is a book of craft instructions, not a theory, and it should be read as one.
Rules learned by counting, from a man who thought the customer was intelligent and the industry was not.
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Al Ries and Jack Trout (1981)
The book that moved the battleground from the product to the prospect's mind. Own a word, or own a place relative to the leader, before somebody else does. It began as a series of articles in Advertising Age in 1972 and has shaped how marketers talk ever since.
You do not position a product. You position it in a mind that is already full.
Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman (2011)
Kahneman's summary of a career's work on judgement and how people decide, built around two modes of thought: a fast automatic one that runs most of the time, and a slow deliberate one that mostly arrives afterwards to justify what the first already decided.
The fast mind decides and the slow mind writes the justification, which is why asking people why they bought is close to useless.
The Long and the Short of It. Les Binet and Peter Field (2013)
The IPA study that separated brand building from sales activation, showed they work on different timescales through different mechanisms, and put a number on the split between them. The most quoted finding in modern marketing effectiveness, and the most misquoted.
One half of marketing produces a spike you can see and the other produces a slope you cannot, and the measurement system only rewards the spike.
Alchemy. Rory Sutherland (2019)
An argument for the value of ideas that do not make logical sense but work anyway. Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, makes the case that the search for rational, measurable, defensible marketing has squeezed out the irrational solutions that often deliver the largest returns.
Organisations choose the defensible option over the effective one, because nobody is ever fired for being reasonable.
Influence. Robert Cialdini (1984)
The book that catalogued the mechanisms of persuasion into six principles, built on three years of fieldwork inside sales training, fundraising and advertising operations. It is the most useful book on this list and the most misused.
Six mechanisms that work, written partly so you could tell when they were being used on you, and now mostly used on you.