Marketing books

What Great Brands Do, Denise Lee Yohn
Rory Archibald, VisitScotland Business Events: "I saw her keynote in January 2018 and bought the book immediately. Within the first few pages I had ideas on integrating the strategies described into VisitScotland Business Events. More details on the book can be found here: www.amazon.com/What-Great-Brands-Brand-Building-Principles/dp/111861125X"

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Dan Heath
Martin Sirk, former CEO ICCA: "Dan Heath gave a brilliant keynote Copenhagen-Denmark Lecture at the 2009 ICCA Congress. Suspect sales of his book are about to rocket within the meetings industry community. Look out for mass rewriting of brochures in the near future!"

Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson (also The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, same author)
Martin Sirk, former CEO ICCA: "Distinguishes brilliantly between traditional understanding of the concept of "free" in business and economics and the newly emerging "free" concepts that are emerging in response to new business fundamentals - eg dramatically falling prices on processing, bandwidth, storage, and dramatically increasing quality/capacity at the same time. Explains how to make money out of weird pricing strategies. Should worry anyone who's business model is built on the premise that their customers' attitudes to pricing won't change over time. Also really readable and packed with examples."

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, Jeff Howe
Martin Sirk, former CEO ICCA: "Changes forever the way you'll think about consumers and producers, and is really scary in terms of imagining which businesses are going to thrive and which are going to collapse over the next few years. Great examples, solid analysis, extremely readable."

Funky Business Forever: How to Enjoy Capitalism, Kjell Nordstrom & Jonas Ridderstrale
Martin Sirk, former CEO ICCA: "My favourite business gurus ever since Kjell Nordstrom gave the keynote at the 2002 ICCA Congress in Copenhagen and stated that having a world class website was comparable with making sure your office had adequate staff toilet facilities, and that the independent republic of Britney Spears (it was 2002!) was more important from a business perspective than Belgium! Brilliant on what it now takes to build and retain competitiveness."

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell