Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout.

Ries and Trout provide many valuable case histories and penetrating analyses of some of the most phenomenal successes and failures in advertising history. Revised to reflect significant developments in the five years since its original publication, Positioning is required reading for anyone in business today.

Permission Marketing by Seth Godin.

Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works. Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity, time, Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to voluntarily accept advertising.

Icarus Deception by Seth Godin.

In his bravest and most challenging book yet, Seth Godin shows how we can thrive in an economy that rewards art, not compliance. He explains why true innovators focus on trust, remarkability, leadership, and stories that spread. And he makes a passionate argument for why you should be treating your work as art. The path of the artist isn’t for the faint of heart – but Godin shows why it’s your only chance to stand up, stand out, and make a difference. The time to seize new ground and work without a map is now. So what are you going to do?

Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pullizzi

How do you cut through the noise, commotion, and bad information that is right now cluttering up your customers’ digital space? Epic Content Marketing. One of the world’s leading experts on content marketing, Joe Pulizzi explains how to draw prospects and customers in by creating information and content they actually want to engage with. No longer can we interrupt our customers with mediocre content (and sales messages) our customers don’t care about.

Epic Content Marketing takes you step by step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act – without actually telling them to. Epic content, distributed to the right person at the right time, is how to truly capture the hearts and minds of customers. It’s how to position your business as a trusted expert in its industry. It’s what customers share and talk about. Once we hook customers in with epic content, they reward us by sending our sales through the roof.

Selling the invisible by Harry Beckwith

SELLING THE INVISIBLE is a succinct and often entertaining look at the unique characteristics of services and their prospects, and how any service, from a home-based consultancy to a multinational brokerage, can turn more prospects into clients and keep them. SELLING THE INVISIBLE covers service marketing from start to finish. Filled with wonderful insights and written in a roll-up-your-sleeves, jargon-free, accessible style.