Marketing Books

Recommended by Marketing Experts

The Actionable Marketing Guide asked several dozen marketing experts to list the books they felt were must-reads for understanding the marketing landscape today. (See our post: Top Marketing Books: Experts Recommend the Best!.) We’ve listed those books below in alphabetical order noting those where we’ve interviewed the author. (Titles are Amazon affiliate links.)

• All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories, Seth Godin
• Ask, Ryan Levesque
• Back of the Napkin, Dan Roam
• Balancing the Demand Equation, Adam Needles.
• Beyond Buzz, Lois Kelly
• Big, Social Mobile, David Giannetto
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott
• Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
• Brainfluence, Roger Dooley
• Business-to-Business Direct Marketing, Bob Bly
• Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke, David “Doc” Searls, David Weinberger, and Rick Levine
• Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy
• Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger [interview]
• Content Inc., Joe Pulizzi [interview]
• Content Rules, Ann Handley
• Creativity, Inc.,  Ed Catmul
• Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore
• Crush It, Gary Vaynerchuk
• Curate This: The Hands-On, How-To Guide To Content Curation, Steve Rosenbaum
• Data Strategy, Bernard Marr
• Different, Youngme Moon
• Diffusion of Innovations, Everett M. Rogers
• Digital CMO’s Guide to Marketing Measurement: Think Like a Submariner for Operational Success, Bryan Semple
• Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Business Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services, Robert J. Glushko and Tim McGrath
• Drilling Down: Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet, Jim Novo
• Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch
• Ego Is The Enemy, Ryan Holiday
• Elon Musk’s biography, Ashley Vance
• Email Marketing Demystified: Build a Massive Mailing List, Write Copy That Converts and Generate More Sales, Matt Paulson
• eMyth Revisted, Michael Gerber
• Epic Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown
• Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content, Ann Handley [interview]
• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charran
• Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, Robert Rose and Carla Johnson [interview]
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, Jessica Livingston
• Free, Chris Anderson
• From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor, Jerry DellaFamina
• Global Content Marketing, Pam Didner [interview]
• Groundswell, Charlene Li
• Hacking Marketing, Scott Brinker
• How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
• How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, Jordan Eilenberg
• How To Become a Marketing Superstar, Jeffrey J. Fox
• How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
• Hug Your Haters, Jay Baer
• Inbound Marketing, Brian Halligan and Dhamresh Shah
• Influence, Robert Cialdini
• Insanely Simple, Ken Segall
• It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be, Paul Arden
• It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For: Why Every Extraordinary Business is Driven by Purpose, Roy Spence
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World, Gary Vaynerchuk
• Launch, Jeff Walker
• Likeable Social Media, Dave Kerpen [interview]
• Linchpin, Seth Godin
• Losing my Virginity, Richard Branson
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Dan & Chip Heath
• Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand, Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose
• Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper
• Marketing Masters, Connie Pheiff
• Micromotives and Macrobehaviors, Thomas C. Schelling
• Moments of Truth, Jan Carlzon
• NetSmart by Howard Rheingold
• New Rules of Sales & Service, David Meerman Scott
• Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi
• Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy
• On Writing, Stephen King
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
• Permission Marketing, Seth Godin
• Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout
• Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, Howard Schultz
• Predictable Success, Les McKeown
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dan Ariely
• Presentationzen, Garr Reynolds
• Primal Branding, Patrick Hanlon
• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, Seth Godin
• Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge
• Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
• Scientific Advertising, Hopkins
• Selling Is Dead, Marc Miller
• SEO for WordPress, Yoast
• Sharology, Bryan Kramer
• Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel
• Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg
• So, What’s The Bottom Line?,  Yitzchok Saftlas
• So You Think You Can Write? The Definitive Guide to Successful Online Writing, Julia McCoy
• Spin Sucks, Gini Dietrich [interview]
• Start With Why, Simon Sinek
• Steve Job’s biography, Walter Isaacson,
• Story, Robert McKee
• Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, Harvey Mackay
• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Tested Advertising Methods, John Caples
• The 12-Week Year, Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout
• The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! Stoney deGeyter
• The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier
• The Challenger Sale /The Challenger Customer, CEB’s Adamson, Dixon, et al
• The Closer’s Survival Guide, Grant Cardone
• The Content Code, Mark W. Schaefer [interview]
• The Dip, Seth Godin
• The Discipline of Organizing, Robert J. Glushko et al.
• The Disney Way: Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company, Bill Capodagli
• The Elements of Style, E.B. White
• The End of Business As Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution, Brian Solis
• The End of Competitive Advantage, Rita Gunther McGrath
• The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine & Jim Gilmore
• The First American, H. W. Brands
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
• The Idea Virus, Seth Godin
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,  James Gleick
• The King of Madison Avenue, Kenneth Roman
• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
• The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott
• The One Thing, Gary Keller
• The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t, Nate Silver
• The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall
• The Thank You Economy, Gary Vaynerchuk
• The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson
• The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes
• The War of Art, Steve Pressfield
• The Wizard of Ads, Roy H. Williams
• They Ask, You Answer, Marcus Sheridan
• Think & Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
• To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink
• Traction, Gabriel Weinberg
• UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging, Scott Stratten and Alison Kramer
• We Are All Weird, Seth Godin
• Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash Kaushik
• Welcome to the Funnel: Proven Tactics to Turn Your Social and Content Marketing up to 11, Jason Miller [interview]
• What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis
• X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, Brian Solis
• Youtility, Jay Baer