5 Foundational Marketing Books You Need to Read

Here at Oracle Marketing Consulting, we know we’re only as good as our ideas and our ability to execute. In other words, we’re only as good as our people.

That means we not only aim to hire the most talented strategists, designers, analysts, coders, and account managers around, we are also constantly looking for ways to help them become even better at helping our clients exceed their business goals. 

One of the ways we do that is by recommending books that can make them more effective—not only as marketers, but as team members and leaders. We’d like to share those recommendations with you, too.

Our Top 5 Marketing Book Recommendations

In no particular order, here are the books we find ourselves recommending most often to our more than 500 digital marketing consultants.

Good to Great by Jim Collins

Organizational self-awareness is powerful. Collins advises companies to figure out what they do best and create goals that accelerate that advantage—rather than try to be all things to all people. Conversely, he urges companies to face the cold hard facts when something is broken or the organization is failing. In those cases, there’s a limited-time window to redirect efforts and focus on areas of strength. 

For marketing departments, the big lesson is that knowing your value, as well as where you fall down, will help inform successful communications and sales plays. And for marketing team members, the lessons are similar: to avoid being complacent, to look for opportunities to improve, and to be ready to pivot.

What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith 

We want our team members to grow a little every day, but sometimes people run into their own glass ceilings. An easy-read, What Got You Here is full of great advice that helps you be a better employee, colleague, manager—ultimately, a better person. 

Goldsmith helps you gain self-awareness while giving you guidance on simple things you can start doing, like how to ask for feedback and what to do when you receive it. He also helps you avoid the trap of being the loudest voice in the room and realize that the higher you go in an organization the more your success depends on making those around you successful. This book is a great read for those just starting out, as well as seasoned leaders who want to become even better.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

This book will make you appreciate the awesome power of the humble checklist to reduce errors in a fast-paced world where distractions abound and everyone’s multi-tasking. It’s a big efficiency play when applied to processes that are repeated—whether that process is routine for a team member (e.g., QAing an email) or routine for a team (e.g., onboarding a new member). 

Checklists are also great for non-repeating processes, like tasks-to-be-done. It’s a visual guide that can help with prioritization and provide a serotonin boost to those like us who appreciate the feeling of a task being completed—like the writing of this recommendation. ✅ 

Predictably Irrational by Dr. Dan Ariely

At its heart, the job of a marketer is to change or amplify the behaviors of their customers and prospects to meet their business goals. So, it’s critical for marketers to understand how consumers make decisions. As this book makes clear, consumers are far less rational than we might believe. However, while not perhaps logical, there are predictable patterns to consumer behaviors. Predictably Irrational shares many of these important and surprising tendencies.

Email Marketing Rules (4th Edition) by Chad S. White

This is probably the most widely read book among our team members. While that probably has something to do with the fact that Chad is the Head of Research here at Oracle Marketing Consulting, it also has a lot to do with email marketing being one of our core services and little to nothing about email marketing being taught at universities. That means email marketing is learned the hard way—on the job. Now in its 4th edition, Email Marketing Rules provides the solid foundation every email marketer needs, making the hard way much easier.

Other Business & Marketing Books We Love

If you’re looking to stretch your marketing knowledge even farther, here are several more books we routinely recommend to our teams:

• Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers by Seth Godin

• Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

• Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

• Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman

• The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Watkins

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Need help with your digital marketing program? Oracle Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading, most well-read marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including teams that specialize in everything from strategy to creative to deployment.

Talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@Oracle.com.

Completely rewritten, this blog post was originally published on Apr. 15, 2019 by Todd Defren.