Sales and Marketing

Advertising as a measurable discipline: test every element against response.

An academic study of how new ideas spread.

How to win and keep agency clients and write advertising that sells.

Rules for advertising that sells, drawn from direct-response testing.

Set prices from the value customers get, not from cost or rivals' prices.

Evidence on how brands grow: reach light buyers and be easy to recall and buy.

How media from the penny press to social media capture attention and resell it.

How 1950s advertisers used psychological research to sway buyers.

Marketing happens in the buyer's mind: find an open position there and own it.

Military strategy applied to marketing, from the cola and burger wars.

Why tech products stall between early adopters and the mainstream, and how to cross.

Twenty-two rules of marketing, such as being first is better than being better.

How to move a tech product past early adopters into a fast-growing mass market.

How direct marketing was invented, from the Columbia Record Club to American Express.

How to build and manage a brand, using the four parts of brand equity.

Companies lose their position by broadening; narrowing the focus wins it back.

Keeping customers, employees and investors is what drives profit and growth.

Rules for building a brand, with a section on branding on the internet.

Arguments for consumers to question and take on the corporate superbrands.

Retail conversion economics observed on the shop floor.

The trust equation: credibility, reliability and intimacy over self-orientation.

Advertising has stopped working; build products remarkable enough to talk about.

Great marketers tell a story buyers want to believe, not a list of features.

How family luxury houses became conglomerates selling to the mass affluent.

Six traits of memorable ideas, from simple and unexpected to emotional stories.

The internet makes it cheap to gather people around a shared interest; lead them.

Digital costs near zero mean goods can be given away, which changes whole industries.

People have no fixed sense of value, so context and anchors set the prices they pay.

IPA data on the split between brand-building and activation spend.

Price is the strongest profit lever and the least managed; how to set it well.

The empirical laws of brand growth extended to new categories and channels.

Customers hire products to do a job; innovate by finding the job, not the buyer type.

Set the price before you design the product, since most failures are pricing ones.

Media firms fail by fixating on content when value lies in the connections around it.

Why firms are moving from selling units to selling ongoing subscriptions, and how.

How to position software so it clearly wins for a chosen market.

Disruptors win by breaking one link in the customer's chain of activities.

How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker and other online brands took on incumbents.

The classic account of the Coke-Pepsi rivalry.

Pepsi's president on the cola wars and Coca-Cola's New Coke blunder.

One agency account, followed in forensic detail.

Kawasaki on competing through service, speed and irritating incumbents

A critical look at the arithmetic behind multi-level marketing pay plans.

Challenger-brand economics against a dominant incumbent.

How fashion became a branded consumer-goods business.

How Procter & Gamble built its brands over 165 years.

How drug makers became marketing machines, from Risperdal to off-label promotion.

The standard analytical text on the LVMH-style brand model.

The economic, political and personal costs of making and buying everything cheaply.

Harvard business historian; sets her brand-building against the whole industry.

Preemptive distribution and control of the value chain.

Nokia's emerging-market operating model at the turn

The outbound-SDR machine that most SaaS sales teams copied.

Hit economics that explain Netflix's later spending strategy.

What advertising agencies sell, and the theories of how ads work they sell it with.

How an ordinary business can add subscriptions for steady recurring revenue.

Membership as a relationship, not a payment plan.

The SaaS growth playbook: niche, funnel, hiring cadence.

How to design a free tier that turns users into paying customers.

How startup brands such as Casper and Allbirds built loyal customers.

The case that programmatic advertising is a mispriced market.

Retention, pricing tiers and the mechanics of renewal.

An adman's anecdotes of his successes and failures, from inventing test campaigns on.

A copywriter's memoir bound with his primer on advertising, Scientific Advertising.

Selling through four kinds of question: Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff.

How firms must use real-time information to serve never-satisfied customers.

How firms can build value and competitive advantage from online virtual communities.

An analysis of Nike's brand-marketing machine at its peak, built on the swoosh.

Distillation of P&G brand-management practice for operators.

A marketing adviser's ideas for growing a business or a career.

The academic text on channel design, territories and exclusive rights.

Five disciplines to close the gap between brand strategy and its execution.

Brand history; useful on the retail model, thin on the man.

Practitioner text on how luxury houses are actually run.

How to reposition a business, practice or sales career to sell to affluent customers.

Nike's third employee on how the company marketed the running boom.

David Ogilvy's life and the making of his famous advertising campaigns.

Fifteen metrics that show which marketing spending works and which does not.

The case against surrendering the channel to big retail.

Insider account by P&G's global marketing officer.

Big goals call for a fourth degree of action, massive action, beyond normal effort.

How to build trust with wary customers and turn it into business and profit.

Letters from prison to a teenage son on direct-mail copywriting and living well.

How the advertising business is being upended, told from its most powerful rooms.

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