For me, the CMO is sacred title. It goes far beyond marketing and embodies a blend of leadership, vision, and execution. A successful CMO must excel in three core areas:

Providing thought leadership within the organization.
Acting as the ambassador of customers in the office.
Hiring top talent and building a cohesive team.

Everything else are just resume details.

So, how can you become a successful CMO? My answer is simple: read the right books. To lead effectively, you need to go beyond marketing and immerse yourself in diverse fields like sales, finance, customer care, leadership, supply chain, and HR. Understanding these disciplines will allow you to see the big picture and make informed decisions.

In this article, I’ve compiled 10 books that I believe every CMO should keep on their desk. These books have shaped my thinking, taught me valuable lessons, and offered perspectives that transformed the way I lead. Interestingly, even books with similar themes provided unique insights, making each one indispensable.

Here’s a quick excerpt from each book. Note that the order is purely random and doesn’t reflect quality or personal preference. Let’s dive in!

1. “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk” by Al Ries & Jack Trout

The book that taught me the value of being first in the minds of customers.

Many people believe that the basic issue in marketing is convincing prospects that you have a better product or service. Not true. If you have a small market share and you have to do battle with larger, better-financed competitors, then your marketing strategy was probably faulty in the first place. You violated the first law of marketing. The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in. It’s the law of leadership: It’s better to be first than it is to be better.

Being first in the mind is everything in marketing. Being first in the marketplace is important only to the extent that it allows you to get in the mind first.

Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products. Marketing is the process of dealing with those perceptions. What makes the battle even more difficult is that customers frequently make buying decisions based on second-hand perceptions. Instead of using their own perceptions, they base their buying decisions on someone else’s perception of reality. This is the “everybody knows” principle.

2. “Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen” by Donald Miller

The book that taught me who should be the hero of the story.

Customers don’t generally care about your story; they care about their own. Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand.

There are two critical mistakes brands make when they talk about their products and services. First, they fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive. Second, they cause their customers to burn too many calories in an effort to understand their offer.

There are three questions potential customers must answer if we expect them to engage with our brand. And they should be able to answer these questions within five seconds of looking at our website or marketing material:

What do you offer?
How will it make my life better?
What do I need to do to buy it?

People want your brand to participate in their transformation. Brands that realise their customers are human, filled with emotion, driven to transform, and in need of help truly do more than sell products; they change people. Starbucks changes people. Apple changes people.

3. “Ogilvy on Advertising” by David Ogilvy

The book that taught me the power of scientific ad writing.

There are no dull products, only dull writers.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that it is creative. I want you find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’

It will help you to recognise a big idea if you ask yourself five questions:

Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?
Do I wish I had thought of it myself?
Is it unique?
Does it fit the strategy to perfection?
Could it be used for 30 years?

Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another, second person singular.

4. “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future” by Peter Thiel

The book that taught me how to make competition irrelevant.

War is a costly business. The more we compete, the less we gain. Once you are 10x better, you escape competition.

There are two forms of progress. Horizontal progress means copying things that work — going from 1 to n. It’s easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. The single word for horizontal progress is globalisation. Vertical progress on the other hand means doing new things — going from 0 to 1. It’s hard to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. The single word for vertical progress is technology

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition. Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.

5. “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable” by Seth Godin

The book that taught me the importance of being remarkable.

Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It’s a Purple Cow. Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow.

Vanilla is a compromise ice cream flavour, while habanero pecan is not. While there may be just a few people who are unwilling to eat vanilla ice cream, there are legions of people who are allergic to nuts, sensitive to spicy food, or just plain uninterested in eating a challenging scoop of ice cream. The safe compromise choice for a kid’s birthday party is vanilla. But vanilla is boring. You can’t build a fast-growing company around vanilla.

The opposite of “Remarkable” is “very good.” Ideas that are remarkable are much more likely to spread than ideas that aren’t. Yet so few brave people make remarkable stuff. Why? Because they think that the opposite of “remarkable” is “bad” or “mediocre”. Thus, if they make something very good, they confuse it with being virus-worthy. Yet this is not a discussion about quality at all. If you travel on an airline and they get you there safely, you don’t tell anyone. That’s what’s supposed to happen. What makes it remarkable is if it’s horrible beyond belief or if the service is so unexpected that you need to share it.

6. “Building Strong Brands” by David A. Aaker

The book that taught me the vitality of brand equity and how to maintain it.

Brand identity is a unique set of brand associations that the brand strategist aspires to create or maintain. These associations represent what the brand stands for and imply a promise to customers from the organisation members.

Band identity structure includes a core and extended identity. The core identity — the central, timeless essence of the brand — is most likely to remain constant as the brand travels to new markets and products. The extended identity includes brand identity elements, organised into cohesive and meaningful groupings, that provide texture and completeness.

When consumers see a brand and remember that they have seen it before they realise that the company is spending money to support the brand. Since it is generally believed that companies will not spend money on bad products, consumers take their recognition as a “signal” that the brand is good.

Perhaps the most direct approach to moving a brand down is to lower its price. A sharp price reduction can indicate to customers that — as they may have begun to suspect — the brand really is not different from any other brand, and is therefore of average quality.

7. “Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It” by April Dunford

The book that taught me the recipe of right product positioning in the digital age.

Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about. Weak positioning diminishes the results of everything we do in marketing and sales. It’s like trying to make an omelette with rotten eggs — your cooking technique is perfect, but nobody wants to eat what you’re serving.

The signs of weak positioning:

Your current customers love you, but new prospects can’t figure out what you are selling.
Your company has long sales cycles and low close rates, and you’re losing out to the competition.
You have high customer churn.
You’re under price pressure.

Most products are exceptional only when we understand them within their best frame of reference. Sometimes a product that was well positioned in a market suddenly becomes poorly positioned, not because the product itself has changed, but because markets around the product have shifted.

8. “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger

The book that taught me the secrets of the most effective advertising channel ever— word of mouth!

One reason some products and ideas become popular is that they are just plain better. Another reason products catch on is attractive pricing. Advertising also plays a big role. However although quality, price, and advertising contribute to products and ideas being successful, they don’t explain the whole story. So if quality, price, and advertising don’t explain why one first name becomes more popular than another, what does? Social influence and word of mouth!

Word of mouth is more effective than traditional advertising for two key reasons. First, it’s more persuasive. Advertisements usually tell us how great a product is. But because ads will always argue that their products are the best, they’re not really credible. Second, word of mouth is more targeted. Companies try to advertise in ways that allow them to reach the largest number of interested customers but they often end up wasting money because lots of those people don’t need the product. Word of mouth, on the other hand, is naturally directed toward an interested audience. We don’t share a news story or recommendation with everyone but with people who we think would find that given piece of information most relevant.

We all have friends who are better joke tellers than we are. Whenever they tell a joke the room bursts out laughing. But jokes also vary. Some jokes are so funny that it doesn’t matter who tells them. Everyone laughs even if the person sharing the joke isn’t all that funny. Contagious content is like that - so inherently viral that it spreads regardless of who is doing the talking.

9. “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose” by Tony Hsieh

The book that taught me how should an obsessive customer service look like.

At most websites, the contact information is usually buried at least five links deep and even when you find it, it’s a form or e-mail address that you can only contact once. At Zappos we take the exact opposite approach. We put our phone number at the top of every single page of our website, because we actually want to talk to our customers.

As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer’s undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.

Most call centres measure their employees’ performance based on what’s known in the industry as “average handle time,” which focuses on how many phone calls each rep can take in a day. This translates into reps worrying about how quickly they can get a customer off the phone, which in our eyes is not delivering great customer service. Most call centres also have scripts and force their reps to try to upsell customers to generate additional revenue. At Zappos, we don’t measure call times and we don’t upsell. We just care about whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don’t have scripts because we want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection with the customer.

10. “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People” by Susan M. Weinschenk

The book that taught me the essentials of design psychology and user experience.

Andrew Bellenkes (1997) conducted research on expectations and found that if people expect something to happen with a particular frequency, they often miss it if it happens more or less than their expectations. They have a mental model of how often something will occur and they have set their attention to that mental model.

Assume that you have at most 7 to 10 minutes of a person’s attention. If you must hold attention longer than 7 to 10 minutes, introduce novel information or a break.

People will probably only pay attention to salient cues. Here’s what grabs attention the most:

Anything that moves
Pictures of human faces, especially if they are looking right at you
Pictures of food, sex, or danger
Stories
Loud noises

Decide what the salient cues are for your audience. Design so that the salient cues are obvious.

10 Books Every Marketing Leader Should Read

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