The Dollarization Discipline: How Smart Companies Create Customer Value… and Profit from It
by Jeffrey J. Fox and Richard C. Gregory
Dollarization “is figuring out what your offering is really worth—in dollars and cents—to your customer.” The book discusses the role of dollarization in sales, marketing, and product development.
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The Kindness Revolution: The Company-Wide Culture Shift that Inspires Phenomenal Customer Service
by Ed Horrell
Ed Horrell writes about poor customer service in American business. “What is really surprising, however, is the number of companies that view service as the item to cut in order to make more money. They decide to focus on getting new customers at the expense of keeping existing customers loyal… They lose sight of the fact that it usually costs around five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. ”
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The Truth about Search Engine Optimization
by Rebecca Lieb
The Truth about Search Engine Optimization explains what will improve your website’s visibility within organic search results. Just as importantly, it explains what can get your site penalized by the search engines. If you are looking for a programming manual with lots of sample code, this is the wrong book for you. Think of it as an overview of SEO for the CEO.
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The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
by Chris Anderson
The Long Tail refers to the shape of the graph with high sales volume of a few hit products in the head, and low volume of many products in the tail. The book is about the shift from an economy of mass-market hits to an economy of niches.
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No Bull Selling
by Hank Trisler (1937-2012)
No Bull Selling offers practical sales advice with a sense of humor. Hank Trisler writes, “I’ve been going to sales seminars all my adult life. That’s how I got so misinformed.”
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The Unpublished David Ogilvy: His secrets of management, creativity, and success—from private papers and public fulminations
This collection of David Ogilvy’s memos, letters, speech excerpts, and other documents was compiled by an Ogilvy & Mather executive to commemorate the founder’s 75th birthday. The writings span a 50-year period from 1935-1986. The cool thing about this book is that most of the contents were not written with the intent to be published, so it feels like a behind-the-scenes look at his management style as well as his thoughts on various subjects.
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Email Marketing by the Numbers
by Chris Baggott
With a title like Email Marketing by the Numbers, one would expect the book to cover testing and analytics. “The organizations that embrace testing as an integral part of their programs simply outperform those that don’t… Rarely can the people within a company judge what is going to be successful outside of it.”
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How to Write an Inspired Creative Brief
by Howard Ibach
In an advertising agency, a creative brief is a set of instructions for the creative team, providing a clear understanding of the communication objectives and expected deliverables. “If you get the brief wrong, the creative work you see at the end of the process, when your team presents it, will also be wrong.” Garbage in, garbage out.
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Repositioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change, and Crisis
by Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin
Repositioning by Jack Trout (1935-2017) is a follow-up to a book called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, which Trout co-wrote with Al Ries 30 years prior.
Positioning is a competitive strategy, which Trout defines as “how you differentiate yourself in the mind of your prospect.” Repositioning is about adjusting perceptions about you or about your competition. Trout stresses simplicity–you need one powerful differentiating idea, the more obvious the better.
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The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR
by Al Ries and Laura Ries
The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR is about the role of PR versus the role of advertising in brand marketing. The thesis is that PR is needed to launch a brand and establish its identity; advertising is for maintaining an existing brand’s position. The reason is that advertising has no credibility, so it can only remind people of what they already believe.
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The Key Point 