With a broad range of insights and expertise ranging from corporate strategy to nuts-and-bolts checklists, the authors seek to simultaneously unburden themselves, promote and differentiate their agencies and give back to the profession. Each one draws on personal experience, cites client cases or quotes clients and articulates their personal greatest hits.

Some offer cautionary tales, illuminate disasters and describe the one that got away. All evidence a genuine understanding of the business. So if you are comfortable using a highlighter on the beach check these books out.

Full disclosure: I got all these review copies for free. I don’t know any of the authors, though Jim Joseph interviewed me once and didn’t hire me. Books are reviewed in alphabetical order according to author’s last names.

CONSUMED – Rethinking Business in the Era of mindful Spending

By Andrew Benett & Ann O’Reilly

This book grew out of the “New Consumer” global survey of 5700 adults in seven countries, the results of which are wrapped around interviews with Havas clients and punctuated with a mountain of secondary research. The authors, Andrew Benett, the CEO of Arnold Worldwide and Ann O’Reilly, the chief researcher at Euro RSCG, front contributions from a wide array of people in the Havas network. This book reads like Al Gore lecturing on a topic you agree with well supported with documentation – a bit obvious, a little pedantic, somewhat preachy but undeniable.

After tracing the history and drivers of rampant global consumerism, the authors, reading the survey data, argue that fundamental attitudinal changes are affecting consumers worldwide and that the global recession has not prompted these changes, but instead reinforced and validated them. And while the book documents and articulates philosophies and cultural trends that have oscillated across the globe forever, the authors insist that dramatic, significant attitudinal change has occurred and that this fundamental mind shift will drive markets and brands into the future.

“The shift away from hyper consumerism to which we have all grown accustomed promises to be big and lasting in its effects. The changes we are seeing will affect the entire global economy and virtually everyone who is part of it. This book seeks to demonstrate how each of these overlapping and mutually reinforcing trends is shaping how consumers make choices and has the potential to revolutionize their relationship with brands.”

Brands that get it win; those who don’t die. Benett & O’Reilly offer four “paradigms” to describe consumer motivations and to prescribe tactics for effective consumer engagement in this radically different environment.  The four paradigms are the search for substance, the need to right size, the imperative to grow up and the pursuit of purposeful pleasure as key motivational drivers. Each is carefully dissected and documented. The new consumer is mindful and considered, wants to feel good about the brands they buy. Consumers want to buy brands that share and portray their values in on-going two-way conversations.

Successful brands are green, develop communities and connectedness, and are transparent and inclusive.  Instead of “pushing consumers’ hot buttons masterfully cultivating the desire for more now … in the new culture of Mindful Consumption, consumers feel best when they make smart choices that offer real substance, are appropriately matched to their genuine needs and contribute to their sense of purpose.”

PULL – Marketing Secrets the Fortune 100 Use

By Keith Chambers

Keith Chambers started and runs The Chambers Group, a design studio in LA that morphed into a strategic consultancy cum agency.  This guy writes in a personal tone, as if your uncle took you aside at a family gathering eager to share what he’s learned in the business. Simultaneously self-effacing and self-aggrandizing, Keith gives you the sense that he’s been there, done that and has the scars and the cash to prove it. In fact he dissects his own book cover to illustrate the marketing and design principles he espouses.

An unbridled capitalist, Keith starts with the basics. “ Free enterprise is a game … a mandatory game in that we must play just like fish must swim.”  The game turns on your ability to be perceived as unique and your ability to immediately communicate a remarkable selling proposition. According to Keith, there’s lots of headroom for new players since “I’d estimate that less than 3% of all products and services are powerfully communicated to their audiences.”

This leads to the notion of “pull” which is rooted in the fact that humans process all new data through their experiential database. Everything new we encounter, we relate to or triangulate off what we already know. This is how we make sense of the world. Unfortunately for brands it’s a death trap.

“We humans, as it turns out, are hard wired to pull anything that comes at us from the future back into the past and do it as fast as we can. You could say pull is how we make everything okay.” The trick is to use character elements; anything the target will have an affinity for, to build remarkable triggers that short-circuit this process and to get consumers excited and desirous of the new stuff.

It’s a hard-to-grasp construct, which then is used to organize a ton of illustrated cases, studies, examples and war stories. Keith then spins the basic marketing tenets through this model illustrating how to use remarkability and character to drive awareness, preference and loyalty. It feels clunky as if the details were shoehorned into the theory. When he’s talking cases and practice, Keith delivers incredible value and insights based on real-life experience across a range of verticals and categories addressing virtually every marketing situation in anyone’s playbook.

The Experience Effect

By Jim Joseph

Like basic marketing and branding 101 courses, Jim tries to give the reader both the big picture and the bird’s eye viewpoint. He argues that “ at the crux of good marketing is the conscious and methodical process of determining exactly the kind of brand to offer consumers and exactly the kind of experience to create for them – and then developing it consistently across every facet of the marketing plan … The essence of good marketing is creating consistent brand experience with each specific consumer interaction.”

For Jim, it’s all about upfront strategic thinking. If you think through the brand experience and zero-in on the wants and needs of your target consumers, you’re good to go. Since “how consumers feel about brands is completely shaped by the interactions they have with them”, all you have to do is execute the desired experience across all your channels and touch points. It’s about setting expectations and delivering on them. “The experience effect done well means that consumers can expand their interactions with the brand and have an understanding of what it will deliver.”

Joseph, president of Lippe Taylor PR, lays out an array of marketing steps ranging from positioning and market research to building personas. He advocates painting a holistic picture of customers and urges marketers to strive for customer intimacy. He advocates mapping brand touch points to customer lifestyles and lifecycles observing that “the best touch points are the ones that can get incorporated into consumers’ lives at the time when it makes the most sense for the brand.”

Celebrating Madonna and Tide as long-term effective brand stewards, he notes “ Both know exactly who they are as a brand, and both have had a consistent identity for decades. The brands have evolved through the years while still staying close to their equity. Both have had new competitors come and go, often at great risk to their brands, and both have shown great staying power.”

The book is easy to read, not filled with too much jargon or too many buzzwords, covers the essential bases and invites comment and interaction at JimJosephExp.com.

Facebook Marketing – Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign

By Justin R. Levy

Justin Levy, Director of Business Development of New Marketing Labs and general manager of the Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, wrote a step-by-step how to manual and guide to using and advertising on Facebook. With a goal of taking a deep dive “into how Facebook can be leveraged by your company starting today,” he shares his insights, his techniques and his trial-and error experiments in a straightforward and fully illustrated way.

For Levy, social media is a matter of necessity. “Understand the social networks, especially one such as Facebook, are the new way to communicate and market your brand. You can either choose to embrace it or watch your competition pass you by as they figure it out. For the non-believers, this book is your call to action.”

Justin covers everything you need to know. From the origins of Facebook and Marc Zuckerberg, to the latest stats on usage, to the different communications options and page types to specific cases on creating pages, groups, campaigns and apps. Up to date, focused, comprehensive, this book is an operations manual for anyone vaguely interested or completely serious about using Facebook as a media channel. And you can argue or contact Justin here.

Fast Track Networking – Turning Conversations Into Contacts

By Lucy Rosen

Lucy Rosen, president of SmartMarketing Solutions, believes in networking as if it were a religion. After “25 years continuing to connect people whenever and wherever and however I can,” this book “is a compilation of everything I’ve learned by doing, listening, trying and experiencing.”

Claiming that networking is like dating only better, Rosen says “good networkers share their contacts altruistically. They are not looking for or expecting anything in return, other than perhaps some heartfelt appreciation that someone went out of his or her way to do something helpful.” Then she lays out a process for defining and building your personal network along with techniques overcoming anxiety, power working a room, cheat sheets, gender-based networking styles and connecting the dots.

But despite a cornucopia of tips, Lucy doesn’t address three things that bother me most. One, she doesn’t tell me how all this networking improves my life or my business. Two, the recession has seriously decayed the value of networking. Everyone was fired or broke and every networked their ass off. The problem was the networks were in no better shape than the individuals in them. As a result many people feel that networking has been played out.

Third, she skips the downside of networking – the fact that you meet an array of oddballs, nudniks and needy people who follow you around like Mary’s little lamb and incessantly pester you. There’s very little guidance in this book for selecting, sorting or filtering the networking effort.

The New Launch Plan – 152 Tips, Tactics and Trends from the Most Memorable New Products

By Joan Scheider & Julie Hall

This book, written by the principals of Schneider Associates, a Boston-based marketing communications firm specializing in launch publicity, is rooted deeply in CPG and FMCG thinking. Much of it is applicable to other categories but the heart of the book is a deep understanding of the strategic thinking, component parts and careful sequencing of manufactured product launches.

Assuming that its gets harder and harder to launch new products each day as manufacturer’s battle for mindshare and media share sufficient to get their products noticed, the authors propose a “new” launch plan mentality and template to beat the odds. Using data developed in the firm’s annual Most Memorable New Product Launch Surveys of 1000 consumers, part of the impetus for writing down these best practices is the goal of reversing a downward trend in launch successes.

In 2009, 51 percent of respondents could not name a single new product. This result was a 64 percent up tick in lack-of-awareness from the previous year. Ninety-three percent could not name a single new product launch after being exposed to a list of fifty. This detailed and tactically focused volume is aimed at fixing this problem.

For Joan and Julie launch is “the creation and implementation of a powerful multi-disciplinary process that successfully propels a new product in the marketplace and sustains it over time.” These guys are talking about launch and product lifecycle promotion and they lay out options, ideas and tactics galore in because “creating a launch plan requires discipline and a systematic approach to insure all bases and contingencies are covered.” This they do admirably in 243 densely packed pages.

Tips are detailed, enumerated and illustrated with case studies, advice and imagery. Cases range across categories as the authors plumb the key lessons and articulate how-tos. But they are also realists who insist, “The bedrock of a successful launch is real innovation.” Similarly they argue “shorter is better when it comes to launch messages… Just stop and realize that nobody is listening past the first sentence.”

Keenly aware that a launch plan can’t be too mechanical and has to be organically synchronous with brands, they note “ All launch choices should be based on your brand’s attributes, the dynamics of the marketplace, how your product fits within today’s retail environment, the benefits the new product brings to users and your target customer’s behaviors and preferences.” Beyond brand appropriateness Joan and Julie touch on every topic, from positioning, messages, advertising, social media, sampling, and measurement to keep marketers focused on the process and the prize but don’t take themselves too seriously closing with the admonition, “ Remember launch is both and art and science … Make sure your launch campaign is as fresh as the product you are introducing.”