Marketing and the work of marketing departments is ever changing, and determining what the future holds can at times get pretty fuzzy. If you peruse the bookstores and online bookstores, there are thousands of marketing books available that cover every topic you could possibly think of — or worry about.
Professional marketers have relied for years on the writings of top marketing consultants, academics and writers for advice, trends and techniques. The past two decades have seen some of the best books ever published on marketing.
A great resource to learn or review summaries of the best of the best books is in a recently published book, Marketing Gurus – Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of all Time. And, many of the books summarized are still in print and available for purchase.
What’s Old Is Now and New
So many times the past becomes the present or whips around and becomes the future. Marketing trends – just like history — tend to repeat themselves. Faith Popcorn was once tagged as the “Nostradamus of marketing” by Fortune magazine. She continues to write, consult and lecture on marketing and has written several marketing books. Her book, The Popcorn Report, was written in 1991 and has many predictions that have occurred in the recent past. Some are still occurring today – 17 years after the book was published.
Popcorn wrote about the top ten trends for the 1990s but some of those trends are occurring today. Cocooning is one of those trends. Popcorn foresaw people wanting to stay at home, working from home and shopping from home. A second trend detailed was “Small indulgences” of consumers. Instead of being motivated by I want or I need, she believed that consumers would be driven by I deserve – and look at what has happened with the SUV craze of the past few years – which is a strictly I deserve consumer base.
In her 1991 book, Popcorn also wrote about boomers becoming health-smart and about the green movement.
Valuable Lessons from the Marketing Gurus
Marketing gurus such as Faith Popcorn, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Ries, Jack Trout, Regis McKenna, Seth Godin and many like them are great thinkers and provide marketers with ideas and techniques that work now and, as history has shown, well into the future.
The Internet has changed buying trends in ways that nobody could have believed and as such has created an environment and a consumer that many believe is different than consumers of just five short years ago.
Many of the marketing gurus center their ideas on giving the customer what they want, when they want it and how they want to purchase it, and beyond any other characteristic of today’s customer, that holds truer today than it ever did in the past in large part due to the 24/7 side of the Internet.
Reading IS Professional Development
Reading books and articles written by the marketing gurus should be considered part of any marketers’ professional development. The books summarized in the Marketing Guru, prove that gurus of the past 25 years got it right then and now as their theories still apply today.
The valuable lessons contained on their pages can help every marketing professional become more savvy – more informed – and ultimately more successful.