Rubicon's Top 5 Marketing Books

It would be easy to jump to the standard choices of offerings from Kotler, Ries and Trout, and Geoffrey Moore. Our top five choices are perhaps a little more off the beaten track but classics and worthy of a permanent spot on your bookshelf.

The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market, Treacy, Wiersema

The message of this book is to FOCUS the entire value proposition of the company around one primary value you offer customers. Imagine how straight forward messaging would be if everyone in the company agreed on the primary value proposition.

Amazon.com Overview:  Consultants and business strategists Treacy and Wiersema provide the conceptual model for companies to attain and sustain market leadership. Their plan is simple: put unmatched value (best product, best total solution, or best total cost) in the marketplace while meeting threshold standards in other dimensions of value. Making the improvement of the chosen value to customers the focus of the entire company will result in corresponding shareholder value. The authors follow up their theory with practical guidelines for constructing an appropriate operational model, and offer many examples using well-known companies. A landmark work in market strategy that goes beyond TQM principles, this volume is essential for entrepreneurs and for public, academic, and corporate libraries.

Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing, Beckwith

A delightful little book on selling (really marketing) services. A must for anyone challenged with marketing services.

Amazon.com Overview:  "Don't sell the steak. Sell the sizzle." In today's service business, author Beckwith suggests this old marketing adage is likely to guarantee failure. In this timely addition to the management genre, Beckwith summarizes key points about selling services learned from experience with his own advertising and marketing firm and when he worked with Fortune 500 companies. The focus here is on the core of service marketing: improving the service, which no amount of clever marketing can make up for if not accomplished. Other key concepts emphasize listening to the customer, selling the long-term relationship, identifying what a business is really selling, recognizing clues about a business that may be conveyed to customers, focusing on the single most important message about the business, and other practical strategies relevant to any service business.

Managing Brand Equity, Aaker

Quite simply the bible when it comes to branding, analyzing brand assets, and building a plan for the brand.

Amazon.com Overview:  In a fascinating and insightful examination of the phenomenon of brand equity, Aaker provides a clear and well-defined structure of the relationship between a brand and its symbol and slogan, as well as each of the five underlying assets, which will clarify for managers exactly how brand equity does contribute value. The author opens each chapter with a historical analysis of either the success or failure of a particular company's attempt at building brand equity: the fascinating Ivory soap story; the transformation of Datsun to Nissan; the decline of Schlitz beer; the making of the Ford Taurus; and others. Finally, citing examples from many other companies, Aaker shows how to avoid the temptation to place short-term performance before the health of the brand and, instead, to manage brands strategically by creating, developing, and exploiting each of the five assets in turn.

Marketing Imagination, New, Expanded Edition, Levitt

Beautifully written, this is the sort of book that reminds you why you love marketing so much. A brain stretcher for sure, it will leave you with a better holistic feel for the discipline and the enthusiasm to dive right into the next big project.

Amazon.com Overview:  Since its publication in 1983, The Marketing Imagination has been widely praised as the classic, all-inclusive "Levitt on Marketing." Now Theodore Levitt -- renowned as the Harvard Business School's "guru of marketing" -- has newly expanded his original work to recap the developing globalization debate and to respond to his critics. He has also added his famed McKinsey Award-winning essay "Marketing Myopia," and included detailed accounts of how to maximize the product life cycle and achieve the delicate balance between innovation and imitation.

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Porter

A solid tome of information this does for competitive strategy what Aaker's book does for branding. It is the definitive work, long, but comprehensive. If you are ever to help steer the course for your company, this book belongs in your collection.

Amazon.com Overview:  Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into nineteen languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity -- like all great breakthroughs -- Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies -- lowest cost, differentiation, and focus -- which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment.