Framing thinking … 6 books that made a difference

Age. Experience. Lot’s of stories. You get to a point in life when these three inevitably mean people start asking for advice. Maybe for the wrong reasons, maybe just to be nice, maybe because they are desperate for advice. I am sure any of you who have reached a certain birthday or level of professional standing will have been asked for “magic elixir’s”. Someone comes up to you after you have given a presentation or chaired a meeting or been part of a brainstorming session and … “wow that was interesting, how did you get started in this” or “how do you know that?” or “I am just starting out, what books do you suggest I read?” or something similar.

Maybe it is because I spent the first decade of my working life as a librarian, or because I have been talking about the idea behind the word and decided to call my consultancy Bibliosexual but that last question pops up a lot. Or probably it is just that people like to have bibliographies of books they can say they have read when they are asked the same question. Whatever the reason, I have indeed been asked many times for suggested books to read. And inevitably who ever asks gets a couple of surprises. Because my reading has been eclectic and catholic and random. The ideas that have helped form the basis of my knowledge of marketing, market research, insights development, and strategy planning come less from textbooks and more from reading that has allowed me to (maybe) see the world in a broader way.

The ideas that have helped form the basis of my knowledge of marketing, market research, insights development, and strategy planning come less from textbooks and more from reading that has allowed me to (maybe) see the world in a broader way.

Keep in mind my main interest has been as a strategy planner in an advertising agency who has been both a client and a provider of research, and a consultant trying to help brand managers understand how people, brands and mediums inter-connect. My reading goes back a long time and involves books that may not be available on “e” formats (I have not bothered to check, and as research constantly shows, you will learn more from reading a hard copy anyway) or may not be currently available (so forcing you to actually use libraries, which is never a bad thing in the eyes of a trained librarian).

So with that, here is how I might answer that oft-asked question … “where do you get ideas from? What books would you recommend?”

“UNDERSTANDING MEDIA” , Marshall McLuhan, Abacus, 1964

You can kid yourself or you can be serious about understanding media and how it works. If you have not read McLuhan (or at least gone on Youtube and watched some of his lectures) then most of what you read is second rate. Over the six decades since McLuhan wrote his defining books he has gone in and out of vogue but in our age of mobile screens, social media, fake news and primo television, nothing is as clued in as this textbook on how media affects and effects us … “this is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation…”. And no one has come near to “the medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action”.

“CULTUREMATIC”, Grant McCracken, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012

You could read any of Grant’s books and learn a lot about the way pop culture works and interplays with brands. He has been bringing anthropology alive in the context of American pop culture, and its relevance to the needs of brands for decades. Long before the current fad for brands to have “meaning” or “worth”, he has been a champion of the rather obvious idea that understanding what matters in culture and aligning with it really will make a difference.

Of his many books, Culturematic really brought me a lot of practical thinking. Like the simple formula of “ask what if” … “discover a moment in culture”… “unleash value” as a structure for developing relevant big thinking. Too simple. Yet so true. His shout out that all organisations would benefit with the placement of a Chief Culture Officer at a very senior level has proven to be truer and truer in the last decade. And this is also the way to not only open up ideation but also embrace and enhance the role of more forward-thinking research in order to look for coming cultural gaps seems so logical. Grant would be all over the idea that research should only be about looking for cultural gaps to grasp. An idea I just love.

“THE GREAT GOOD PLACE”, Ray Oldenburg, Marlow&Company 1989

The 3^rd Place. The place you go to “be yourself”, to be alone or to socialize. The place where you can express an opinion, create your own personality, like and unlike what you see, who you listen to, what you share. It’s not limited to and never has been defined by digital access. It is as old as a café, a bar, a favourite bench in the park where the kids play. Before my mate Darrell Berry invented the term “social media” in the early 90s Ray Oldenburg explained why we need the 3^rd place, and how it has manifested itself across cultures. As a planner trying to understand how to get deep into what mattered to people, this was the closest to a real textbook I have encountered. 30 years after first reading it, my well worn copy get’s constant rifling as I try to understand the real relevance of the latest social platform.

“Third places that render the best and fullest service are those to which one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there. To have such a place available whenever demons of loneliness or boredom strike or when the pressures and frustrations of the day call for relaxation amid good company is a powerful resource”. He may have been talking of coffeeshops or pubs or Facebook. His understanding of the need for togetherness and how it plays out is a gift for anyone exploring how we share information and ideas.

“WORLDLY GOODS”, Lisa Jardine, Norton, 1996

Lessons on how marketing really works, and how business needed and used marketing are plentiful. For me they became apparent when I was studying Renaissance Italian history at university. A lecturer gave me her personal, much read and battered copy of Gene Bruckner’s classic text “Renaissance Florence” (one you might need to go to a library to find). Fascinating as it was, I was working as a public librarian and this was just something interesting. Until. A few years later I started working at an advertising agency and learning to be a research / strategist and suddenly the lessons about how business needs drive marketing practice, how innovation in media changes tactics but not strategy, how influencers, content and social are all key to successful marketing tactics all came back. Then in 1996 Lisa Jardine’s book arrived as a Christmas gift and took everything I had learned from Bruckner and others and made it even clearer.

You can study marketing and advertising and market research in ancient Rome, or Victorian England, or China’s different imperial periods but the 13-16^th centuries in Italy is where I see all the staples of what we do in modern marketing coming to life. And a reading of this easy to understand book for beginners in the history of modern economics and marketing will find it invaluable in understanding tactics and mediums change but the way we understand people and how to market to them does not.

“COPY, COPY, COPY”, Mark Earls,

I will be honest. I have never been afraid of plagiarism. Copyright has also seemed a very vague idea. Too often it seems that literally “to the victor goes the spoils” when it comes to inventing ideas. And when it comes to marketing and advertising, ideas ownership is very muddy water. Back in the 1990s I worked with a senior creative director whose party trick at conferences and client meetings was to ask people for their idea of a new, innovative and clever piece of television advertising. And then he would track back through two, three or more iterations to show that what we might think was the hottest Cannes or Effie winner was actually derived from one of only 4-5 commercials from the 1940-1950s. Nothing was original.

So when Mark Earls first started preaching the thought that only maybe it’s the lazy who don’t copy and then re-express, or that copying itself was a smart, intellectual and practical practice, I was an instant buyer. The difference between “invention” and “creativity” becomes truly clear. The over emphasis and false economy on focusing on “originality” when the real time and money would be better spent on taking what has worked and making it work better seems so obvious. And so honest. But more than a book this is a working tool. Not just case histories and tips, Mark has turned out a text that includes actual working tools and exercises. Fun to read, a joy to use with real client issues. And a font of ideas to be copied with pride.

“TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY”, Umberto Eco, Picador, 1986

I could just say “read anything by Umberto”. As a semiotician, I cannot imagine anyone who has done more to help us understand how that science works and it’s many applications. His late in life series of books on “Ugly” “Beauty” “Lists” etc are fantastic in helping us understand how to re-look at cultural icons and understand what they have meant in framing the way we think.

But! It is this one little volume of odd essays that I recommend (and because it is hard to find I occasionally lend) to anyone asking. He covers McLuhan and interprets how the medium as the message evolves with each technological advance but remains as the core of understanding how we interact. He discusses how the Dark/early Middle Ages period in European history remains so relevant to our imagination and in predicting The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones content arc, and why certain story types are embedded in us. His essay on spectacles as the single greatest media innovation opened my eyes (pun intended) in to rethinking what technology matters, and how we need to understand its role in enhancing us as humans.

“THE GEOGRAPHY OF THOUGHT: HOW ASIAN AND WESTERNERS THIN DIFFERENTLY … AND WHY ”, Richard E Nisbett, Nicholas Brealy, 2003

I have spent most of my professional life living and working in Asia, and a disproportionate amount of that time seemingly trying to explain why people in different countries and cultures act, react or ignore things. Maybe not in big ways. We all laugh, sing, cry, run away, trial new ideas, cling to family, reject what sometimes seems logical, and embrace what can feel to an outsider what appears false. But the when and why and how we do these things changes by economics status and personal experience and many factors that can all claim to be a part of culture.

If you have been or are likely to be in a role where you will be asked “ in twenty minutes can you explain Asia to us?” or “it worked in Europe but we can’t sell it at all in Pakistan or Korea” then this book is a must. In practical terms when I first read it, there was a real moment of clarity. Having developed advertising and undertaken dozens of pieces of research in the contact lense market, I suddenly understood a key difference in the way Japanese and Westerners looked at each other. When I taught marketing post graduates from across Asia the basics of insights, this was the one book I recommended. How we think is a product of physical and social differences. Obvious but too often not thought through as well as Nesbitt can explain it.

Of course, there are always standards that MUST be read. If you are interested in building strategy for marketing communications make sure you have studied these classics:

Notes (all good books have notes at the bottom of pages right?). I could have made this list for 20, 30, 40 books. I could have added :

• more practical (“TRUTH, LIES & ADVERTISING: The art of account planning”, Jon Steel, Jon Wiley, 1998 is the ONE text all communication planners or their clients or the researchers working with them should read) or
• more insightful (“THE VICTORIAN INTERNET”, Tom Standage) is a wonderful read about the first great digital medium, the telegraph in the 19^th century, and how all we were promised by the internet came alive a century earlier
• or more useful on a daily basis (“HOW CUSTOMERS THINK, Gerry Zaltman) and why I suggest it to young clients because too often they make the mistake in thinking people think like they do
• or simple to understand (“WHAT MAKES US TICK”, Hugh Mackay) where one of my early mentors on market research explains his cheat sheet on the ten desires that drive us

And on and on it goes. In a recent interview, I was asked how I feel about “long reading versus short reading”. Take a guess how I answered? As a market researcher and brand strategist, it has always struck me that too much time is spent jumping to quick answers on way too narrow observations and limited category enquiry. I guess my reading habits give me away as a bore. So be it. But a little breadth and depth in reading will always be my advice.