Top Shelf Reading Picks:

Last month I picked David Vinjamuri’s book, Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Created Extraordinary Brands, as one of my must-reads for the year. So I asked him to return the favor and send us a few of his favorites. I haven’t read any of these yet, but if you’ve read any of them, please fee free to give your own review in our comments section.

1. A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century  by Scott Bedbury. This is a work by a guy who saw both Nike and Starbucks grow from the ground up. He has as complete an understanding of branding as anyone I’ve ever read, and he is a much better writer than most.
2. The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers  by Douglas Atkin. Atkin asks a fascinating question: We talk casually about brands as cults, but are they really? Do they meet the sociological definition? Then he goes inside both real cults and cult brands to find out, as well as interviewing sociologists. He has some surprising conclusions.
3. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual  by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinburger. This 7-year old book accurately predicted how blogs would emerge and how the conversation between brands and consumers would be forever changed by the internet. It has a strident tone (and really does read like a manifesto), but it’s an excellent read.
4. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers  by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. This book directly answers the question: Should your business have a blog? It comes from two of the best-known bloggers online (Scoble worked for Microsoft) and is very easy to read.
5. Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People  by Marc Gobe. Marc is known as a guru on design, and he helps uncover how much of good branding is actually great design. This book not only changed the way I think about branding, it changed the way I invest in stocks.

Thanks, David. I’ve got a few of them on order at my local library.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Authors' picks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Author Picks by David Vinjamuri”

1. Terry Finley Says:
   February 18th, 2008 at 8:55 pm

   Looks like some great books to explore.

   thanks

2. Tsufit Says:
   February 29th, 2008 at 10:09 am

   Thanks for the heads up on Accidental Branding. Number 2 on David’s list, The Culting of Brands, is a very powerful book.
   Tsufit
   Author, Step into the Spotlight!–’Cause ALL Business is Show Business!

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