How many likes? How many purchases? How many email subscribers? It's easy to get lost in the numbers. As entrepreneurs, we have to remember that there are people behind all that data. People who are looking for someone they trust, someone who has their best interests in mind. Pat Flynn shows a path to becoming that trustworthy person and creating a tribe of superfans around the world.
Perhaps the best book on positioning to come out in recent times, learn from April Dunford on how you can understand your customers and use it to position your product to success. Learn her five components of positioning, how to instantly connect your offering's value proposition to an audience, choosing the best markets for your product, and more.
Seth Goden's book talks about how all marketers tell stories, and good stories are what people believe in. Learn authentic storytelling that helps you form a strong bond with your customers and set your product and company apart from the competition.
Clayten Christensen seminal book is based on the Jobs to be done framework, and insight that when we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to make progress and get a job done. And if the product hired to do the job does it well, we hire it again. And if not, we “fire” it and look for an alternative. Christensen argues that when companies truly understand the job their customer is hiring their product or service to do, is when companies can drive innovative solutions forward.
Great marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. Seth Godin's book is a culmination of decades of experience to help people understand marketing and apply its core ideas to their own businesses. A must read book on marketing.
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, describes the challenges he had to overcome to keeping creativity alive as Pixar grew and integrated within Disney. Read this book to learn about the approach and processes to maintain and foster creativity in corporate cultures.
