Tag: books

Friday Five: Summer reading edition

Inspired by this list of 11 marketing books for summer reading, I thought I’d share what’s on my marketing-related reading list for the summer:

A few of the books on my summer reading list.

Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action, by Rohit Bhargava. I’m about two-thirds through this book about the importance of building trust in our marketing. Look for my review of this book soon.

Happy Customers Everywhere: How Your Business Can Profit from the Insights of Positive Psychology, by Bernd Schmitt, a business prof at Columbia University. I’ve been getting more interested in positive psychology movement since watching Shawn Achor’s TED talk, The Happy Secret to Better Work (highly recommended). In Happy Customers Everywhere, Schmitt talks about the latest positive psychology research and how it can help organizations build stronger connections with their constituents.

What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism and China’s Modern Consumer, by Tom Doctoroff. Now that the campus where I work has started building a new university in China, I thought it was high time for me to start learning more about this powerful player on the global scene. This book looks like a promising introduction to modern China and its marketplace.

Empathetic Marketing: How to Satisfy the 6 Core Emotional Needs of Your Customers, by Mark Ingwer. More psychological insight for marketing.

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, by Peter Bregman. This one comes highly recommended by Karine Joly, one of the most productive bloggers I know. Read her 1-1-1 review of this book.

I hope I get through all of these over the summer. Maybe I should read that productivity book, 18 Minutes, first.

What’s on your list? What are your recommend summer reads for marketers? (Or if you’re tired of marketing books, you might want to take a cue from Dave Van de Walle and take a break from marketing books this summer.)

Flickr photo: Beach Reading by aafromaa.

Book review: ‘University Marketing Mistakes’

28348mistakesweblg.jpgIt’s been more than a month since I claimed I was “working on” a review of the book University Marketing Mistakes: 50 Pitfalls to Avoid, by Roy D. Adler (a marketing prof at Pepperdine) and Thomas J. Hayes (same, from Xavier) and published earlier this year by CASE. (Adler and Hayes kindly responded to a Friday Five Q&A request last month.) It’s also been more than a month since I finished reading the book, so I guess I’d better get to that review before the lessons from this nifty little book start to fade from memory.

The review, like the book, is going to be succinct and to the point.

University Marketing Mistakes is a dandy little book for several reasons.

  1. It’s a quick read, only 127 pages in all. You could finish it on a two-hour flight.
  2. It’s loaded with excellent advice based on real-world examples from the world of academia. Many of the examples hit close to home. For example, there’s the story of the president of a university in our state and with nearly identical enrollment who is bent on moving his institution into the upper echelons (Case 2.4: Next, World Domination!). While reading it, I could have sworn the authors had been reading our strategic plan. But then I remembered we have a chancellor instead of a president, and that we’re a public university, not a private college like the one Adler and Hayes describe.
  3. It over-delivers. The subtitle promises you “50 pitfalls,” but the authors give you 53.
  4. The examples will make you chortle, if not laugh out loud, because they are universal truths exposed. Who among us hasn’t heard our institution described as “the best-kept secret” in the realm of education? (Can there really be more than one best-kept secret? Maybe our trustees and administrators call our institutions “well-kept secrets,” instead.) Who in higher ed hasn’t naively offered up a proposal to address a campus marketing issue without understanding the political terrain? What communications staffer hasn’t argued with their admissions staff about the need to emphasize benefits (what prospective students will get) instead of features (what we offer)?
  5. You’ll actually pick up some useful ideas for your own marketing efforts. (At least I did.) That in itself should make the book worth reading.

So, there you have it. A short, glowing review about a short, useful book. If any readers of this blog who have also read the book would like to share their thoughts, please do so in the comments section below.

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