Somebody asked me last month which brand strategy books they should read, and I did the thing everyone does. I started listing titles, got to about four, and realised I was already padding.
That’s the dirty secret of these lists. Most of them run to fifteen or twenty books because the writer wants to look well read, and by number nine they’re recommending things they skimmed on holiday in 2019. You don’t need twenty books. Reading twenty brand books back to back is how you end up sounding like a brand book instead of a marketer.
You need about six. Here they are, with who each one is actually for, and a caveat on every single one, because a recommendation without a caveat is an advert.
How Brands Grow, by Byron Sharp
Start here, because it will offend you, and the offence is useful.
Sharp takes most of what the industry believes about loyalty, differentiation and targeting, and tests it against decades of buying data. A lot of it doesn’t survive. What does: brands grow by being easy to think of and easy to buy. Mental availability and physical availability. Everything else is commentary.
I read it after years of running campaigns on instinct and it rearranged the furniture. It’s also why I bang on about measuring the things that actually build brands instead of the numbers that just flatter a report.
The caveat: Sharp writes like a man marking your homework, and some people take the book as permission to stop doing creative work at all. That’s a misreading. It tells you what brand growth is made of, not how to make anything.
Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Written in 1981 and still the clearest explanation of the only place marketing actually happens: inside someone’s head.
The core idea is that you don’t position a product, the market positions you, and your job is to influence what slot you end up in. Once that clicks you stop asking “what should we say?” and start asking “what do they already believe, and what’s the one thing we can realistically change?” Which, if you’ve read my stuff on brand strategy versus marketing strategy, is roughly where I live.
The caveat: the examples are ancient. Avis, Xerox, 7Up. Read it for the mechanism, not the case studies, and don’t quote the case studies in a meeting with anyone under forty.
Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland
The most fun on this list by a mile, and the one I’d hand to a finance director who thinks marketing is a cost centre.
Sutherland’s argument is that human behaviour doesn’t follow spreadsheet logic, so the biggest opportunities sit in places logic can’t reach. A train journey isn’t improved only by making it faster; it’s improved by making it feel better. Value lives in perception, which is precisely why brand work pays.
The caveat: it’s a collection of brilliant tangents rather than a method. You’ll finish it energised and slightly unsure what to do on Monday. Pair it with Sharp, they correct each other nicely.
Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy
Yes it’s old. Read it anyway.
Nobody has written better about the craft of selling with words and pictures, and the grounding assumption behind every page (“the consumer isn’t a moron, she’s your wife” needs updating in its phrasing, not its respect) will keep you honest forever. Half the “new” advice on LinkedIn is Ogilvy with the attribution filed off.
The caveat: some chapters are pure time capsule. Skip the ones about print production and agency politics of the 1980s without guilt.
The Brand Gap, by Marty Neumeier
The book I recommend when someone says they don’t have time to read books.
You can finish it in an afternoon, it’s half diagrams, and it does one job perfectly: explaining why strategy and creativity fail when they’re kept in separate rooms. If you work with designers, or you are one, this is the shared language.
The caveat: it’s a framework book, and frameworks flatter you into feeling finished. It starts the conversation well; it can’t finish it.
Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford
The newest thing on the list and the most practical. Dunford treats positioning as a working process rather than a philosophy: what you’d genuinely compete with, what makes you different, who cares most, in what market frame. Then she makes you write it down and test it.
If you run a small business or you’re marketing a product nobody understands yet, read this one first and Ries and Trout second. It’s the difference between admiring positioning and actually doing some by Thursday.
The caveat: it leans B2B and SaaS. If you sell chocolate bars, translate as you go.
What about the rest?
A rule that has saved me money: be suspicious of any brand book whose subtitle promises secrets, and of any book by a founder explaining the genius behind a success that had forty other causes. Survivorship bias with a dust jacket.
And most social media marketing books are out of date before the ink dries, which is why none are on this list.
The bigger point is that six books read properly beat thirty read for the feeling of progress. Every one of these earns its place because it changed a decision I made with real money attached. That’s the only test of a business book that matters.
What would you add? I’m always after the seventh, though so far every candidate has failed the caveat test.
Thanks for reading, Jack
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