Tom Roach’s Reading List for Marketers

This week Tom Roach, VP of Jellyfish, regaled our community with the seven principles of effective communication. He also provided a reading list. So, what does he recommend?
Tom Roach's Reading List for Marketers

This week Tom Roach, VP of Jellyfish, regaled our community with the seven unchanging principles of effective communication. 

Afterwards, he was kind enough to provide a reading list to us. So, what does he recommend? See below…

How brands grow: What Marketers don’t know

This book provides evidence-based answers to the key questions asked by marketers every day. Tackling issues such as how brands grow, how advertising really works, what price promotions really do and how loyalty programs really affect loyalty, How Brands Grow presents decades of research in a style that is written for marketing professionals to grow their brands. It is the first book to present these laws in context and to explore their meaning and application.

How brands grow: Part Two: Emerging Markets, Services, Durables, New and Luxury Brands

How Brands Grow Part 2, by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp, is about fundamentals of buying behaviour and brand performance – fundamentals that provide a consistent roadmap for brand growth, and improved marketing productivity.

Ride the next wave of marketing knowledge with insights such as how to build Mental Availability, metrics to assess the strength of your brand’s Distinctive Assets and a framework to underpin your brand’s Physical Availability strategy. Learn practical insights such as smart ways to look at word of mouth and the sort of advertising needed to attract new brand buyers.

Building distinctive brand assets

Building Distinctive Brand Assets is divided into three sections that capture the processes involved in brand asset creation, implementation and ongoing management. The first section is focuses on strategy, and covers how Distinctive Assets are created and their role in a broader brand equity building. The second section covers measurement approaches, and how to use and interpret key metrics. The third section delves into the strengths and weaknesses of different types of assets and introduces the idea of a Distinctive Asset palette. This section also outlines how to set up a Distinctive Asset management system to provide an early warning system to identify potential threats before they evolve into major issues.

Media in focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era

Media in Focus, written by Les Binet and Peter Field, takes the changing media landscape as its focus and addresses, among others, the issues of: Does mass marketing still work? Is tight targeting now the most efficient approach? Is unpaid making paid media redundant? It also investigates the broader issues of budgeting, planning and reporting, and challenges the industry to reconsider approaches to efficiency, ROMI and measurement strategy.

Effectiveness in Context: A Manual for Brand Building

Les Binet and Peter Field, uses evidence from hundreds of Effectiveness Awards case histories collated in the IPA Databank, to show how successful marketing strategy is shaped by the context in which brands and businesses operate. Building on previous IPA Databank reports which identified what makes for effective, long-term marketing, the authors show how marketers can adapt some general principles to the particular context of their brands

The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies

This publication is the eagerly anticipated update of Marketing in the Era of Accountability, examining the impact of timescales of effect, exploring the tension between long and short-term strategies for brands and businesses as well as providing evidence-based recommendations on how best to approach investment in advertising.

The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising

How does advertising work? Does it have to attract conscious attention in order to transmit a ‘Unique Selling Proposition’? Or does it insinuate emotional associations into the subconscious mind? Or is it just about being famous… or maybe something else? In Paul Feldwick’s radical new view, all theories of how advertising works have their uses – and all are dangerous if they are taken too literally as the truth. The Anatomy of Humbug deftly and entertainingly picks apart the historical roots of our common – and often contradictory – beliefs about advertising, in order to create space for a more flexible, creative and effective approach to this fascinating and complex field of human communication.

A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King

In 1988, on Stephen King’s retirement JWT published ‘The King Papers’ a small collection of Stephen King’s published writings spanning 1967-1985.  They remain timelessly potentially valuable but are an almost unexploited gold mine.  This book is comprised of a selection of 20-25 of Stephen King’s most important articles, each one introduced by a known and respected practitioner who, in turn, describes the relevance of the particular original idea to the communications environment of today.

Eat your greens

How can we sell more, to more people, and for more money?

The marketing world is awash with myths, misconceptions, dubious metrics and tactics that bear little relation to our actual buying behaviour.

Eat Your Greens is inspired by genuine advances in marketing science. It challenges us to change the way we think, by taking the huge body of knowledge gained from data and technology and applying the best evidence based thinking to the practice of marketing and communications.

How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up

In the sink or swim world of planners, strategists and their clients, now more than ever, there is a need for a practical handbook to guide us through all the main parts of the process. And thanks to Les Binet and Sarah Carter at Adam&eveDDB we now have just that. The original inspiration for the book was a set of articles that they wrote for Admap over 6 years. In these they set out to bust a lot of myths and nonsense that swirl around marketing and communications by using evidence-based approaches and interesting examples to make their points. We’ve been working with them to turn this treasure chest of wisdom into a practical guide.

The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy

If you’re in the business of influencing decisions, you need to understand what drives them. The Choice Factory is an essential read for anyone who wants to learn. Taking us through a typical day of decisions, from trivial food choices to life-changing career moves, The Choice Factory explores how our behaviour is shaped by psychological shortcuts. The focus throughout is the marketing potential of knowing what makes us tick. Shotton draws not only on academia, but also on analysis of ad campaigns and his own original research, supporting his discussion with insights from some of the smartest thinkers in advertising.

Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy

In this groundbreaking book Phil Barden reveals what decision science explains about people’s purchase behaviour, and specifically demonstrates its value to marketing. He shares the latest research on the motivations behind consumers’ choices and what happens in the human brain as buyers make their decisions. He deciphers the ‘secret codes’ of products, services and brands to explain why people buy them. And finally he shows how to apply this knowledge in day to day marketing to great effect by dramatically improving key factors such as relevance, differentiation and credibility.

Lemon. How the advertising brain turned sour.

Using a unique mix of neuroscience, cultural history and advertising research, the study shows how an increase in abstract, left-brain thinking has spread across business and popular culture and how this is undermining creativity and making advertising less effective. Crucially, it also provides practical advice to reverse this decline. According to the 130-page publication, the reasons underlying the crisis relate to the way the brain attends to the world: the same instincts that lie behind short-termism and narrow focus are resulting in work that is flat, abstract, dislocated and devitalised – advertising that doesn’t move people. An attentional shift has occurred in business and society; a change in thinking style that has left its mark not just on advertising, but also on popular culture.

Value-Based Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Corporate Growth and Shareholder Value

This book provides a clear practical introduction to shareholder value analysis for the marketing professional. It gives them the tools to develop the marketing strategies that will create the most value for business. For top management and CFOs the book explains how marketing generates shareholder value. It shows how top management should evaluate strategies and stimulate more effective and relevant marketing in their companies.

The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company Value ​Value-Based Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Corporate Growth and Shareholder Value

The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, by former McKinsey Partner Thomas Barta and senior London Business School professor Patrick Barwise, is the first research-based leadership book for marketers in the 21st century. Based on the largest ever research study of its kind, with detailed data on over 8,600 leaders in more than 170 countries, this game-changing book identifies 12 specific behaviors–or Powers–that drive marketers’ business impact and career success.

Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense

To be brilliant, you have to be irrational

Why is Red Bull so popular – even though everyone hates the taste? Why do countdown boards on platforms take away the pain of train delays? And why do we prefer stripy toothpaste? We think we are rational creatures. Economics and business rely on the assumption that we make logical decisions based on evidence. But we aren’t, and we don’t.

In many crucial areas of our lives, reason plays a vanishingly small part. Instead we are driven by unconscious desires, which is why placebos are so powerful. We are drawn to the beautiful, the extravagant and the absurd – from lavish wedding invitations to tiny bottles of the latest fragrance. So if you want to influence people’s choices you have to bypass reason. The best ideas don’t make rational sense: they make you feel more than they make you think.