August 13, 2004

Marketing Books to Make You Smarter

David Wolfe wrote an outstanding series of posts last week.

He started with his post Why Marketing Underperforms and says:

Marketers don’t have a common foundation...Without a common foundation everyone set his own rules, so opinion often outweighs fact. Engineering is about facts. It’s easier to defend facts than opinions. What you experienced last week was marketers getting upset when their opinions were challenged by your engineer’s left brain logic.

He followed that with How to Fix Marketing and ended that post with:
Marketers are hired under the assumption that they have enough working knowledge of human behavior to be effective in what they do. Why else would you hire someone to help you market a product? Sorry, experience is not a substitute for dedicated scholarship and consumer surveys, interviews and focus groups cannot tell you what you should know about consumers.

His next post was Traditional Consumer Research Can't Do the Job and he talked about all of the research that is done and how it only vaguely describes consumers motivations.

What caught our attention at 800-CEO-READ was A Readling List of books in behavorial science:


I have only read one of these books (How Customers Think). I have some catching up to do.

Posted by Todd S. at August 13, 2004 4:58 PM
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