I know, summer’s winding down, so how could you start such a lengthy reading list now! Hopefully, you’ll be able to cross off the ones you’ve already read. And you can claim that no marketing book published before Fall of 2008 is still relevant. That’ll shorten the list. But at the very least, I hope you can find one or two of these that sound worthwhile. Better yet, you can post your suggestions in the comments area.

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First, the classics

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Blue oceans represent untapped market space and the opportunity for highly profitable growth. The authors urge companies to create and capture new demand and to focus on the big picture, not the numbers.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. In this book, James Collins uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organization to make the leap from good to great while other organizations remain only good. His findings are surprising.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. It’s almost ten years old, yet people still reference it. If you haven’t read it, here it is in three points: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context. Or maybe you could find someone’s well-worn copy and read it.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Many apparent mysteries of everyday life could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections, even when the connections aren’t obvious.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Drawing on psychosocial studies on memory, emotion, and motivation, this study is couched in terms of stickiness, the art of making ideas unforgettable. It is about storytelling—a how-to for crafting a compelling narrative.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. This has been called the definitive work on branding, distilling the complex principles and theories into 22 quick and easy-to-listen-to vignettes. Find out how to own a word in the mind of the consumer.

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Some other worthy reads

Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business. Presented as some of the world’s most fascinating case studies, the Fallon founders tell stories about the hits and misses in their experience using creative leverage.

BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep it Simple and Succeed. Build your brand on a simple idea that can be adopted by an entire organization and executed brilliantly and consistently across all points of customer interaction.

Marketing’s 10 Deadly Sins (and How to Avoid Them). Marketing’s 10 Deadly Sins helps readers understand common mistakes made by those involved in the marketing process and presents proven methods to avoid them. (Just like the title says, huh?)

Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success. 80% of decisions are made emotionally. Then we find the rational reasons to defend those decisions. After reading this, you’ll never settle for “confidence” as the desired emotional response.

The Brand Gap. This book shows how to close the gap between strategy and creative. It includes topics like the five essential disciplines of brand-building, the three most powerful questions to ask about any brand, and (my favorite as an art director) how design determines a customer’s experience. Nice quick read.

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Reaching moms and the luxury market

Don’t Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy. With women making 85% of consumer buying decisions and running 40% of all companies in the U.S., it makes sense that marketers would want to appeal to this huge audience. The authors believe that too many companies either don’t cater to women or repeatedly send misleading messages.

Mom 3.0: Marketing WITH Today’s Mothers by Leveraging New Media & Technology. Maria Bailey examines how today’s mothers are bridging new media and technology to create marketing channels for companies to leverage.

Trillion-Dollars Moms: Marketing to a New Generation of Mothers. The authors help marketers tap into the spending of moms with pr campaigns that resonate with mothers, advertising campaigns with relevant messaging, special events that appeal to the mom market, and web sites with time-saving features for busy moms.

The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands. The Luxury Strategy sets out the counter-intuitive rules for successfully marketing luxury goods and services. It unveils how in any market, including B to B, a company can learn from luxury strategies to differentiate itself profitably.

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Some new reading for new media

The Art of Digital Branding. This book is described as the definitive guide to building a web presence. Chapters cover everything from color schemes and menu formats—and the pivotal roles they play—to adding depth to the web experience with audio, video, and animation.

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day. This guide is designed to teach you how to make social media an active part of your marketing plan by developing and pitching a social media campaign inside your company, building a map of your key conversation-generators, and getting to the consideration phase of the purchase funnel.

Unleashing the Ideavirus. Seth Godin describes ways to set any viable commercial concept loose among those who are most likely to catch it–and then stand aside as these recipients become infected and pass it on to others who might do the same. “Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.”

Experiential Marketing: A Practical Guide to Interactive Brand Experiences. This book demonstrates how experiential marketing fits in with the current marketing climate and how to go about planning, activating, and evaluating it for best results.

The Social Media Bible. Get to know over 100 social media tools and applications in fifteen different categories with a quick rundown of the features and functions of the tools that should become part of your social media strategy. It also includes mini exercises and assessments to help you conduct a social media audit of your brand.

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business. Whuffie is the author’s word for social capital in the Web 2.0 landscape. She includes many specific strategies and concepts from seeking out and incorporating feedback to treating your company’s message as a conversation.

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So how many of these have I read? Let’s just say more than four, but less than twenty-one. I guess we can make this our summer, fall, and winter reading list.