The most important books that I recommend constantly or refer back to time and time again.
I read a lot! I’m guilty of buying more books than I can read. But there’s certain books that I can’t get enough of.
This list comprises of the books I consistently refer back to or recommend to others on the topic of branding and marketing yourself, ranging from the practical, psychological to philosophical.
My top 25 reference books:
These are phenomenal at actually giving practical insight into how to position products. Read Obviously Awesome first, because positioning is the foundation for all marketing, then Sales Pitch builds on how to have a strong sales pitch that helps people make buying decisions.
These are invaluable when it comes to understanding how to make your own market, create demand and become known. Oversubscribed gives you a good strategy for creating your market and demand, and Key Person of Influence compliments it, providing a practical path for becoming known.
These give you the science of fascination– which is the ability to captivate and hold attention. Fascinate is an overview of the different advantages there are, and what power they have, as well as examples of how businesses use them. How the World Sees You covers the fascination archetypes that combine two advantages so that you can find how other people see you and what your highest value is.
This dense but powerful book gives you the basic tools for creating meaningful brands, using 12 universal archetypes that exist already in everyones subconscious. Building a brand that activates these constructs of meaning allows them to resonate on a deeper, instinctual level.
This book (and comes with a card deck) expands off of the 12 foundational archetypes, into 60 archetypes that get into deeper detail. I use this system with my clients, choosing 3 archetypes, one primary, secondary and tertiary, that helps me make meaningful decisions about their identity and expression.
One of the first books I read starting my own independent agency. Pia gives you the knowledge to “productize” your services, so that you’re not reinvent the wheel each time you work with someone so that you’re able to expand your profit. I’ve also taken her No BS Agency program, and it changed my business for the better. Her podcast is great too.
Marketing is thought about backward. Business people look to what other businesses are doing or saying and doing that because they’re thinking of what to send, rather than what someone would like to receive. Improving your marketing means to do something different, but in a way that no one can copy.
A very comprehensive guide to business concepts and terms that are necessary working with business people. He also has a brilliant way to organize information to be able to find “strategic threads” to inform creative work that you can back up with reason. This one may take a while to digest if business terms are new for you, so keep coming back to it, and it will make sense over time.
Win Without Pitching is a fighting cry for creatives valuing their work, an essential read when you’ve had enough of being undervalued. Pricing Creativity gives you a much more detailed breakdown of how to price creative work, and more specifically, how to do a one page proposal.
This gets into the neuroscience of branding, pointing to the limitation that most marketers have, which is an over-reliance on the conscious. Branding is all about subconscious associations that create an emotional response, which is a much more powerful driving factor for decision making. He shares excellent process for uncovering these subconscious aspects of a brand, which I have adapted in my process.
This goes into where the brand value actually lies– it’s not features or even the emotional benefits, which most businesses position themselves on, but the self-expressive benefits of using a brand that creates irrational loyalty. The strongest brands make you feel good about yourself!
When you’ve got a great product that you know is better, but no one knows about it, it’s because your marketing isn’t different enough to show it. This gives you a super simple system to come up with different ideas to market businesses, but also addresses why businesses all seem to do the same thing.
The most common business advice is to hire people to grow, but you don’t have to! This book makes the case for staying small in business, and how it can work better for many business owners.
For neurodiverse high achievers, this book helps you look at why we work the way that we do in capitalist society, how we have internalized it, and offers a new way of setting goals for ourselves without burning us out. I also absolutely love Tara’s podcast with the same name, What Works, where she talks about how to work and keep your humanity intact.
An incredible look at the power of the human voice, how to sound more like yourself, even when you cringe at the sound of your own voice. She looks at how patriarchy has influenced specifically women’s voices, and what vocal patterns women use and what they actually mean. She stresses that the words we say don’t have the power, it’s the emotional tone underneath it that makes it resonate.
Providing deep insights into how to be an active listener, ask better questions, negotiate ethically, and generally be a person that people love talking to. This points to the patterns of what the most effective communicators do and how to do it yourself.
Do you have a stubborn pattern that no matter how hard you try, doesn’t go away? This book gets into the shadow self and how unconscious desires can rule our life. Provides instruction on how to integrate unconscious desires to be able to change and enjoy life more.
There’s the Heroes Journey, but there’s another journey that once you’re on it, you’re on it for life: it’s the Artists Journey. But on this journey, we’re in a war against resistance within ourselves. These two books will help you understand your battle with resistance in your artists journey.
Hard work doesn’t = success. There’s much more to the equation, even more than just luck. What it really is, is knowing what advantages you already have, and using them to leverage yourself. This book helps you identify where your advantages are and how to apply them to your work and life.
The greatest design project of our life is our life! This book gives you a creative process to deconstructing and reconstructing a life that you love to live.
This book goes over the technological forces that are already shaping our current reality and future. In the chapter on “filtering” he says that’s the role of a brand, is to filter.
