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 : 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…
Book Review : The Customer Experience Book by Alan Pennington. Businesses spend an extraordinary amount of money persuading people to become customers. Advertising campaigns. Social media. Websites. SEO. CRM systems. Brand strategies. Carefully crafted emails containing the recipient’s first name to prove that everything is now “personalised.” And then, having finally convinced someone to buy…
Book Review : Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Some ideas disappear almost immediately. Others hang around for years. You can forget an entire presentation before you’ve reached the car park, yet somehow remember an advertising slogan from 1997, the plot of a film you…
Book Review : Hacking the Human Mind by Richard Shotton and MichaelAaron Flicker. There are two kinds of books on marketing. The first promise to make known “the secret” for influencing customers. The second point is to explain that neither your customers nor you were ever making completely rational decisions from the start. The book…
Book Review : Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Roy Schwartz, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Modern business has an odd problem. People say they lack time, yet they send emails so long you need a packed lunch to finish them. Smart Brevity aims to fix this issue. The main idea…