9 books to add to your summer reading list
A list by The Square — Your communication office
The hotter days are finally here, and we’ve got the perfect entertainment for your beach sessions. At The Square, we curated a special list of books about public relations, branding, and creativity to add to your summer reading list.
Shall we dive right into it?
Everything communications, public relations, and marketing, what else could you possibly need to turn your well-deserved time off productive nonetheless?
1. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Content Marketing, Podcasting, Social Media, AI, Live Video, and Newsjacking to Reach Buyers Directly — This book by David Meerman Scott and David Meerman Scott lists everything needed to speak directly to your target, to make a stronger connection on a deeper level, and generate the best kind of attention for your business.
2. This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See — This book by Seth Godin offers the core of his — wide — marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package and illustrates how to do work you’re proud of.
To explore marketing and communications a little bit more in-depth in tourism, taking advantage of timing, we totally recommend this book:
3. Marketing for Hospitality and Tourism — This 7th edition written by Philip Kotler, James C. Makens, and John T. Bowen is the definitive source for hospitality marketing. By taking an integrative approach, this highly visual book discusses hospitality marketing from a team perspective, examining each hospitality department and its role in the marketing mechanism.
To understand a bit better the secret of turning your customers into true loyal followers, we suggest looking at these two books:
4. The Business of Brands — This title written by Jon Miller and David Muir is not a ‘how to’ book about branding. Instead, it outlines approaches that will increase the accountability of marketing spending and provide tools to support investment decisions. For businesses, it shows how brands contribute to shareholder value, and for consumers, it shows how brands can fulfill various valuable functions, such as acting as a source of trust or a predictor of quality.
5. The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers — the author and marketing expert, Douglas Atkin, has spent years researching both full-blown cults and companies that use cult-branding techniques. In this title, he explains exactly how brands like Harley-Davidson, Apple, Nike, and Ben & Jerry’s make their customers feel unique, important, and part of an exclusive group — and how that leads to solid, long-term relationships between a company and its customers.
Struggling with creativity, and, in addition to clearing your head during your days off, want an extra dose of creativity?
6. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration — What better way to get your creative juices flowing rather than learning from the best? From a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios comes an incisive book about creativity in business and leadership for readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath. Need we say more?
7. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die? — So now you have your perfect creative communication strategy, let’s say, what is the secret to selling and pitching your idea? In this book, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions and reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”
What makes people tick? What makes them successful? Here are some answers and secrets on how our minds work:
8. Thinking, Fast and Slow — The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies. In this path-breaking book, Kahneman shows how the mind works and offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and personal lives — and how we can guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble.
9. Outliers: The Story of Success — In this book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers” — the best and the brightest, the most famous, and the most successful. He asks the question: What makes high-achievers different? He answers that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: That is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.
What other titles should we include on our reading list in the next couple of weeks?
