30 Best Marketing Books For Scaling A Business
Why does reading matter? Why spend time checking out the best marketing books?
Before any big accomplishment of mine, it first started with a book.
- Starting the million-visitors blog TakeYourSuccess.com came from an idea in a book arguing the best job is the one you create for yourself
- All my investing success, like finding Bitcoin in 2016, and discipline comes from a period of time where I only read investing books and Warren Buffett biographies
- Prior to starting Robben Media, I read business and marketing books every week for years
Everyone knows what you learn from a good book is life-changing.
That’s why society has phrases like:
Knowledge is power. Leaders are readers. Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.
Since reading has changed my life exponentially, I want to pass along the best marketing books on the planet.
I guarantee once you read through this list of the best marketing books, you’ll have an unofficial PhD in marketing. And my hope is, your career opportunities, mindset, and life will exponentially change like mine did.
Best Marketing Books
1. Blue Ocean Strategy
The idea that competition is a good thing is what most business owners and marketers get wrong. Reading Blue Ocean Strategy will give your brain an entirely different perspective on how to maximize profits by defining your own rules, by playing your own game.
This idea is what the authors call a blue ocean. A red ocean is fighting competitors using the same rules and mindset everyone else has.
If you’re feeling stuck in copycat mode and find yourself spending more time analyzing your competitors instead of listening to your customers, this book will set your strategy down a much more rewarding path.
Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.
2. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
In marketing, you’ll find groupthink where everyone copies everyone. Is it safe? Yes. Is it going to lead to explosive growth? Most likely not.
Originals is a marketing book for contrarian, non-comformists who want to create big change, in a different way.
This book will teach you how to think differently about the advertising strategy you deliver to your audience—and how it can payoff big if executed correctly.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw
3. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
If you read any list of the best marketing books, odds are you’ll find Influence amongst the ranks. There’s a good reason why.
PhD author Robert Caildini’s book on influence and persuasion analyzes the psychological question, “Why do people say yes?” In the business world, knowing how to get people to say yes to giving you their time, attention, and money is a powerful tool that can change entirely how you operate. This book on behavioral change defines six key principles and how to implement them to improve you or your company’s success in your efforts to get more yeses than nos.
Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions.
4. The Undoing Project
Behavioral psychology is the secret to understanding customers. Nail that, and you’ll have an endless supply of ideas to drive them to take your desired actions.
In The Undoing Project, author Michael Lewis focuses on the human psyche using a story of a friendship as the vehicle. This book is educational. It’s entertaining. Any marketer should invest time into reading it.
The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see.
5. Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products
How do you create super fans using your product? Follow the pattern that Nir Eyal points out in Hooked. This book explains why and how some products and services become a habit in people’s life, while others never pick up any traction in the highly-competitive consumer market.
If you want a product launch that grows like wildfire, then read this product marketing book and execute everything it recommends.
Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.
6. Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd
Stop focusing on your weaknesses and embrace your strengths. You can compete with everyone and try to get your weaknesses up to their standards, or you can go done an unpaved path and create your own success.
I believe everyone should read this book and heed its advice. Stay strong. Be different. Succeed using your strengths. Stand out. And escape competition.
My guess is that you’d feel pressure to address the “vulnerabilities” in your brand. Meanwhile, it might not even occur to you to do the opposite—to double down on your strengths, further extending the distance between you and your competitors.
7. Top Of Mind: Use Content to Unleash Your Influence and Engage Those Who Matter To You
In business, competition is naturally high and the margins are often low. So how do you create separation to be the number one brand? John Hall prescribes a heavy dose of content to reach and build relationships with those who can make a difference for your mission—like using blogging to reach new consulting clients.
Edge out the competition and be seen as the best brand in your space by using this actionable guide.
If you can tangibly improve your target audience’s quality of life, even in ways that seem minute, they’ll begin to think of you as a positive force in their lives. Do this consistently and your audience will reward you with top-of-mind status.
8. Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising
Controversial author Ryan Holiday takes us through how to build a marketing machine that reaches millions of people via growth hacking. If you’re looking for viral PR for your company, then use this as your guide.
It’ll take you down the, sometimes dark and entertaining, alleys of acquiring buzz, maintaining it, and multiplying it at scale.
Focusing on customer acquisition over ‘awareness’ takes discipline. . . . At a certain scale, awareness/brand building makes sense. But for the first year or two it’s a total waste of money.
9. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
This book is gold for marketing startups. Traction’s main idea is all struggling startups face the same problem: not enough customers. Why they don’t have enough customers is they’re always focused on product and not enough on distribution channels and testing new marketing methods.
Read this marketing book and you’ll walk away with worthy ideas to achieve rapid growth. I’m going to reread this book now that I think about it.
Poor distribution – not product – is the number one cause of failure.
10. How Brands Become Icons
Cultural branding is the concept bestselling author Douglas Holt uses to describe how the iconic American brands use classic ideologies to help audiences express desire and relieve anxiety. Some of these cultural ideas are America as a land of opportunity, independence, and sports.
This isn’t your shiny-object advertising. It’s deeper, emotional, and meaningful marketing that gets potential customers to feel some type of way. Author Douglas Holt is a global leader in marketing and it shows in this killer book you’ll have a tough time putting down.
Ads that seek to persuade people to think differently about product benefits—are becoming less effective as media get more fragmented and as audiences become more cynical about marketer’s claims. But cultural branding is different. Iconic brands perform ads that people love to watch. With the advent of the Web, customers search out these.
11. Contagious, Why Things Catch On
While some of the books on this list can loosely be applied to marketing, Contagious is a full out must-read for all aspiring marketers.
The author breaks down how people think, why they think that way, and how to get people to take the action you desire using proven persuasion principles. If you’re looking to go viral, you’ll quickly learn that it isn’t a coincidence when content goes viral. There’s a science to it. Learn the science, and you’ll have the power to make ideas catch on.
This list is not ordered in any way, but if it was, Contagious by Jonah Berger would arguably be the top marketing book.
People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.
12. The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing
Genius marketers Al Ries and Jack Trout show up more than once on this list for good reason. In this classic, you’ll uncover the laws of making a winning brand that lasts. Follow these laws and you’ll have an international winner. Violate them, and you’ll be stuck in mediocrity, or worse, irrelevance.
Fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term.
13. Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out
Do you have a voice for your business? You need one, and it should be 100% authentic. In Unlabel, founder of the Ecko Unltd clothing brand, Marc Ecko, teaches readers how to discover the anatomy of their brand and lead with it.
This branding and business knowledge will leave you feeling pumped to make your own mark in the industry, no matter how competitors and gatekeepers try to define your company.
My ‘vision’ didn’t start with billions, my vision started with a can of spray paint and what I could do with it in the next thirty minutes. Entrepreneurs lose sight of that. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built their first motherboard, they didn’t envision the iPhone. Visions can start small. Visions should start small.
14. Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds
Here’s a timeless classic from 1841 on human psychology and what makes people tick. Though the writing is old, the lessons are even more relevant today with the entire world within reach of our fingertips thanks to social media. Study up on crowd behavior so one day you can use it in your favor.
Many persons grow insensibly attached to that which gives them a great deal of trouble, as a mother often loves her sick and ever-ailing child better than her more healthy offspring.
15. Buy.ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
What if you knew exactly what intrigues your customers and influences them to buy? That power alone would forever change your organization and your life.
In Buy.ology, you’ll read findings from a 3-year, 7 million dollar neuromarketing study, with 2,000 global volunteers who encountered various advertising messages. You can’t pull off a study this comprehensive, but you can learn from it and apply it to your ads, logos, brands, and product marketing.
90 percent of all Gillette shavers are bought by women for the men in their lives.
16. Win: The Key Principles To Take Your Business From Ordinary To Extraordinary
With effective messaging, you can win over any customer. With weak messaging, you can have the best product in the world but no one will buy it. Your success depends on your communication skills.
Master communicator Dr. Frank Luntz knows how to get the most out of your brand’s communication. Read Win to communicate your company’s marketing more clearly, persuasively, and concisely for a better brand and customer experience.
Winners recognize that even when they aren’t physically selling a product, they are always selling themselves. Every human interaction is an opportunity to connect—and then to sell.
17. Made To Stick
Marketing anything successfully depends on can you craft a message that’s believable, memorable, and actionable.
In Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath explore into why some ideas, political phrases, proverbs, and societal legends remain through the test of time, and others die as quickly as they were created. Smart marketers will know how to make their message stick.
To get someone’s attention break a pattern of thinking.
18. Marketing Myopia
A Harvard Business Review Classic, Marketing Myopia asks business owners do you truly understand what business you’re in and is there customer demand for what you do? By applying the four marketing principles Levitt prescribes, you can turn from being on the verge of outdated to a firm customers continue to buy from year after year.
The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.
19. Misbehaving: The Making Of Behavioral Economics
Familiar with behavioral economics? You should be. No, you must be if you’re to become a top marketer.
Nobel laureate Richard Thaler teaches readers the irrational behaviors of consumers, incentives and market behavior, to give you a new perspective and encourage smarter decision making. If you don’t understand the public you’re marketing to, how can you ever expect positive results?
Psychologists tell us that in order to learn from experience, two ingredients are necessary: frequent practice and immediate feedback.
20. Red Team
As much as it sucks to receive it, getting early criticism can be the best thing for your team. It has the power to turn a terrible plan into a winning one.
Micah Zenko’s Red Team dives into why all ideas need to be challenged before they’re ever finalized and acted upon. This book can redefine how your organization produces marketing ideas so that you’re left with only the best ideas, which produce the most profits, highest customer acquisition, and least risk of wasting time or money.
The dilemma for any institution operating in a competitive environment characterized by incomplete information and rapid change is how to determine when its standard processes and strategies are resulting in a suboptimal outcome, or, more seriously, leading to a potential catastrophe. Even worse, if the methods an institution uses to process corrective information are themselves flawed, they can become the ultimate cause of failure. This inherent problem leads to the central theme of this book: you cannot grade your own homework.
21. The Life Of PT Barnum
You may not have heard of him, though that doesn’t take away from PT Barnum’s magnificent marketing prowess. PT Barnum is a world-class showman who captured the awe of kings and queens and the masses in his wild business ventures.
If you want attention, press, and brand recognition, then follow Mr. Barnum’s playbook and you’ll have it in abundance.
No one ever made a difference by being like everyone else.
22. Designing Brand Identity
Design all-star Alina Wheeler will help get your entire team aligned on creating and maintaining a reputable brand identity.
In her five-step process, she includes case studies of premier brands to inspire your team with the latest trends and functionality of a brand that’s alive. This is a reliable book for any marketer looking to expand their domain knowledge.
Brands now appear regularly on balance sheets in many companies. The intangible value of the brand is often much greater than the corporation’s tangible assets.
23. Zero To One
Peter Thiel’s hit book Zero To One takes on a contrarian pursuit of going left when every company goes right, arguing that’s how you can unlock tremendous value and avoid competition.
So if you can answer the question Thiel proposes, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” then you have a goldmine and can change the world. As business owners and marketers, it’s our responsibility to answer that question and achieve exactly that.
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
24. Icarus Deception
Who better to learn marketing from than a legend, Seth Godin? He teaches the tragic story of Icarus who fell from the sky when the wax on his wings melted from the sun’s heat.
Godin teaches us marketers how to avoid being average by breaking from the cookie cutter-mold, sharing our talent and passion creating something meaningful, and connecting and influencing others online. This book will help you find your courage.
Correct is fine. But it is better to be interesting.
25. Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear
Marketing boiled down is what do you have to say about what you do and is that being heard by your target audience. So when you learn to master the English language of speech and writing like Dr. Lutz prescribes, you’ll become a dangerous marketer who always knows what to say in any scenario.
This is Dr. Lutz’s second book on the list for good reason. Mastering words will help your business growth, secure deals that you’d normally be unqualified for, and overhaul the perception of the brand you’re marketing for the better.
You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and preexisting beliefs. It’s not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more real, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself.
26. Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind
This is what we call a classic. Al Ries and Jack Trout put on a show in getting your brand seen and heard in today’s crowded environment.
In Positioning, you’ll get a masterclass in naming products, finding the right niche, competitor analysis, and how to win over your customer’s perception of your brand. Warning: This book may produce game-changing epiphanies to your future plans.
Companies are focused on building products rather than brands. A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind. To be successful today, you have to build brands, not products.
27. The Boron Letters
Effective copywriting is a specialty skill that brings value to any marketing campaign. Good copywriters create converting website messaging, webinar scripts, Facebook ads, emails, and social media copy.
Gary Halber’s The Boron Letters centers around a conversation between a dad in prison and his son. The story and lessons are both enjoyable and thought-provoking. You won’t regret reading this one.
Get yourself a collection of good ads and DM pieces and read them aloud and copy them in your own handwriting.
28. Total Recall
Total Recall is the life story of a legend: Arnold Schwarzenneger. To climb to the top of the bodybuilding, acting, and political world, Arnold needed to master perception, branding, and image. Throughout the story, you’ll see how Arnold reinvents himself to both stand out and become elite at his next target. If your company is looking to reinvent itself or get more attention, Total Recall will provide that inspiration you desire.
More than anything else, in this book you’ll learn that if you want to become an unbelievable marketer, then put in the discipline and work required. Read all the best marketing books on this list. Apply what you’ve learned in each book. Analyze the results. Keep doing what’s working and retry what’s not. Success is that simple.
There are no shortcuts—everything is reps, reps, reps.
29. Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking
Did you know your subconscious bias affects how you think and act? And not just you, but how your prospects, customers, and co-workers think? It’s the thinking going on without thinking.
Again, this is another top marketing book that isn’t specifically written for marketers. But I’d put Gladwell’s Blink on the must-read list if you want to advance your marketing craft and understand customer psychology like a professional.
[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.
30. Shoe Dog
How does a guy with zero experience in the footwear industry, create the biggest shoe company in the world? Shoe Dog is the story of how Nike, and its founder Phil Knight, got started and dominated the industry like no one has before. The Nike logo, branding, lifestyle messaging, celebrity endorsements, and more marketing genius is all included inside this book.
While you’ll no doubt get your fair share of marketing tips, you’ll also be incredibly inspired after hearing how Nike persevered hurdle after hurdle along the way to become what it is today. If Phil Knight can do it, you can take your startup up the success mountain too.
I refused to even consider ordering less inventory. Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation.
Action Steps
There are 30 top marketing books on this list. You can reasonably read one book a week—four a month.
If you’re consistent, you’ll have finished this list and have an entire war chest of marketing knowledge in your head in the matter of four and a half months.
In less than five months, you’ll know more marketing insight than you know what to do with!
That’s going to help the growth of your career, business, personal finances, communities, and organizations you care about most.
After all, any organization who wants to accomplish anything remotely big, needs marketing.
You read these books and then you can step in as the marketing hero for everyone around you.
Have fun on your journey to become a master marketer. Even if you only read a few of these books, you’ll have a major advantage over most digital marketers.
Believe me, the best investment you can make is in yourself. Start today.
P.S. What’s your favorite digital marketing quote out of these 35?