Positioning

As Al Ries and Jack Trout - the world-renowned marketing consultants and best-selling authors of Positioning - note, you can build an impressive airplane, but it will never leave the ground if you ignore the laws of physics, especially gravity. Why then, they ask, shouldn’t there also be laws of marketing that must be followed to launch and maintain winning brands? In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Ries and Trout offer a compendium of 22 innovative rules for understanding and succeeding in the international marketplace.

They Ask You Answer is a straightforward guide to fixing your current marketing strategy. Regardless of your budget, you are almost certainly overspending on television, radio, and print ads, yet neglecting the number-one resource you have at your disposal: the Internet. Content marketing is no longer about key word-stuffing and link-building; in fact, using those tactics today gets your webpage shuffled to the bottom of the heap.

Donald Miller's StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides listeners with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services.

Smart and accessible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the definitive text on branding, pairing anecdotes about some of the best brands in the world, like Rolex, Volvo, and Heineken, with the signature savvy of marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries. Combining The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding, this book proclaims that the only way to stand out in today’s marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand - and provides the step-by-step instructions you need to do so.

In Branding Basics for Small Business, marketing expert Maria Ross shares real-life examples and expert interviews to show how organizations of any size can create a winning brand. Small businesses, start-ups, and nonprofits enviously watch the big guys create tribes of loyal followers. How do they do it? What can time- and resource-strapped organizations learn from them? The secret is starting with a strong brand strategy, which goes far beyond a logo.

Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better, and look cooler, than $20 no-names... and believing it makes it true.

Most entrepreneurs, even seasoned brand managers, launch first and then work on slowly transforming the new offering into a brand. A logical progression, I would agree. After all, how can you possibly launch as a brand if you don't have any customers or marketing outreach and - obviously, since you just launched a new offering - you have no legacy or advocates? The simple answer is by design. Design relates to the systematic process you have to adhere to, which is likely the primary reason you have sought to listen to this book.

What do Starbucks and JetBlue and KrispyKreme and Apple and DutchBoy and Kensington and Zespri and Hard Candy have that you don't? How do they continue to confound critics and achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and true brands to gasp their last? Face it, the checklist of tired P's marketers have used for decades to get their product noticed - Pricing, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few - aren't working anymore.

As a digital marketer, are you marketing banner ads or building brands? Do you even know what a brand decision tree or a category ladder is? Probably not. Well, it's not your fault. You most likely grew up inside of a digital marketing environment. You had no brand mentor. However, your future career success depends on your ability to grow from being a digital marketer to becoming a brand expert. Brands and Bulls**t. strips away the mystery of branding and gives you a branding primer necessary for every digital marketer.

Brainfluence explains how to practically apply neuroscience and behavior technology and behavior research to better market to consumers by understanding their decision patterns. This application, called neuromarketing, studies the way the brain responds to various cognitive and sensory marketing stimuli. Analysts use this to measure a consumer's preference, what a customer reacts to, and why consumers make certain decisions.

The author of cult classics The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability.

New from the best-selling HBR's 10 Must Reads series. Stop pushing products - and start cultivating relationships with the right customers. If you listen to nothing else on marketing that delivers competitive advantage, hear these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you reinvent your marketing by putting it - and your customers - at the center of your business.

Present moment awareness is an essential ingredient in life if one expects to experience any degree of authentic peace and contentment. It has been acknowledged for centuries as the cornerstone of spiritual awakening in all traditions of Eastern thought. In the West, however, it is still a relatively unrecognized concept for living. The Western mind is always restless, never content with the moment.

To make these big moves happen for your company, you’re going to have to break through inertia, gamesmanship, and risk aversion. You’re going to have to mitigate human biases and manage group dynamics. Eight practical shifts can help you do this, and unlock bigger, bolder, better strategies.  This is not another by-the-book approach to strategy. It’s not another trudge through frameworks or small-scale case studies promising a secret formula for success. It’s an irreverent, fact-driven, and humorous take on the real world of strategic decision making.

Often the decision between a customer choosing you over someone like you is your ability to know exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to make it count. Phil M. Jones has trained more than two million people across five continents and over 50 countries in the lost art of spoken communication. In Exactly What to Say, he delivers the tactics you need to get more of what you want.