Essential Reading for Marketers

Too busy to pursue an MBA, Steve McKee turned to business books to educate himself on branding, marketing, and advertising. Here are his top picks

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By Steve McKee

I began my career in advertising as a field marketing manager on the Pizza Hut (YUM) account, which basically meant I got to travel from restaurant to restaurant, work with the managers on their local marketing efforts, and eat all the free pizza and breadsticks I could (not a bad gig when you're 22, newly married, and broke).

I operated out of my home, and when I wasn't traveling I had a fair amount of downtime that needed to be filled. Unable to pursue an MBA at the time (those were pre-Internet days), I decided to do the next best thing: read all I could about my chosen field.

That began a career-long love affair with business books. King Solomon himself said, "The words of wise men are like goads, and masters of these collections are like well-driven nails." I wanted to be a "well-driven nail"—sure, steady, and able to piece things together no matter what marketing challenges I would come to face.

Since that time I've occasionally been asked to recommend the branding, marketing, and advertising books that have had the biggest impact on me. It's impossible to choose just one, so below I've listed a handful of my favorites. I've structured the list based on how they've contributed to my own marketing education: prerequisites, concentration, and application. This isn't necessarily the order in which I recommend you read them, and depending on your goals, you certainly don't need to read them all. But you can't go wrong with any of them.

Prerequisites

Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, by Thomas Sowell

The front flap of Basic Economics says it brings its topic to light in a way that is "easy to absorb and hard to forget." That's certainly true. Sowell presents practical concepts about how incentives, trade-offs, and other dimensions of the economy really work. More interesting (and more relevant) than the economics course you may have suffered through in college, this book is for people who get paid for results rather than for effort, pontification, or simply showing up. (For extra credit, read Sowell's follow up, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One.)

The Marketing Imagination, by Theodore Levitt

Levitt, who died in 2006, was a professor at the Harvard Business School and former editor of the Harvard Business Review. The Marketing Imagination was one of the first books I read that made the concepts of marketing and "why people buy" come alive for me. Since the book was first published in 1983, some of the examples in it are dated, but reading them with the benefit of hindsight offers a unique Monday-morning-quarterback dimension that imparts another layer of education.

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, by Michael E. Porter

This is the heftiest tome of the group, and I'm far from the first to recommend the current guru of the Harvard Business School. You don't so much read Competitive Strategy as gnaw on it, and it takes a long time to digest. But there's no better presentation of the multivariate dimensions (how's that for an academic term?) of competition, and the book's principles can be applied to any and every industry. I've found myself referring back to it time and time again as I work with clients on their own competitive strategies. (Extra credit: Kellogg on Marketing, a collection of thought-provoking essays from the faculty of the business school at Northwestern University.)