Our Marketing & Design Book Review section exists to help separate genuinely useful thinking from recycled buzzwords, overhyped frameworks, and advice that could have been a two-page blog post instead of a 300-page hardback.
We’ll read the books so you don’t have to, or at least help you decide which ones are actually worth your time. Expect honest reviews, practical takeaways, and the occasional raised eyebrow when a “revolutionary” idea turns out to be something marketers have been doing since 1987.
Some books will inspire. Some will confuse. Some will make us wonder how the author stretched one idea across twelve chapters. Either way, we’ll overthink them so you can spend more time doing marketing, and less time reading about it.
Book Review : Writing for Busy Readers: communicate more effectively in the real world by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink. We are all busy. Or at least we like telling people we are. Our inboxes are full, our phones are buzzing, our calendars resemble unsuccessful games of Tetris, and somewhere in the middle of all…
Book Review : The Brand Gap (revised edition) by Marty Neumeier. Branding has a terminology problem. Ask ten people what a brand is, and you’ll probably get eleven answers. A logo. A colour palette. A reputation. A promise. A purpose. Something involving archetypes and a workshop with an alarming number of Post-it notes. Marty Neumeier’s…
Book Review : How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp. Marketing has accumulated a reassuring collection of beliefs over the years. Find your ideal customer. Build a tribe. Create passionate brand advocates. Reward your most loyal buyers. Differentiate yourself from everyone else. Then nurture those customers until they become so emotionally attached…
Book Review : Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong by Martin Lindstrom. We like to believe we’re rational consumers. We compare prices. Read reviews. Consider the alternatives. Weigh up the pros and cons. Make an informed decision. Then we buy something because the packaging felt nice. Buyology: How Everything We…
Book Review : Hegarty on Advertising – Turning Intelligence into Magic by Sir John Hegarty. Advertising has spent much of the last twenty years enthusiastically announcing its own death. Television was dead. Print was dead. Agencies were dead. Then social media arrived, and apparently everything changed. Then AI arrived, and apparently everything changed again. And…
Book Review : Marketing 7.0: A Guide for Thinking Marketers in the Age of AI by Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawa. Marketing has a slight obsession with declaring that everything has changed. A new platform shows up. A new technology launches. Someone coins a new acronym. Within about two days, we hear that…