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Ask HN: Best intro marketing books?

5 points by BadassFractal ↗ HN
Hello HN,

I just recently wanted Drew Houston's talk at Stanford where he mentions that early on in his career he had to learn a lot of different disciplines such as sales, marketing and so on.

I figured out that I need to understand a lot more about marketing than I do now (zero) and I need a good place to start. I think Drew mentioned Guerrilla Marketing as his first text, but I was hoping that you guys might recommend something even better to me.

What should my first intro marketing book(s) be? Seth Godin's stuff? Guerrilla Marketing? Others?

Thank you!

3 comments

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cdvonstinkpot
There's so many Guerilla Marketing books out there that it's easy to get lost reading forever with no return on your time investment. I found one Guerilla Marketing book that's like a 'best of' called "Guerilla Marketing Remix- The Best Of Guerilla Marketing" By Jay Conrad Levinson & his wife.

The Guerilla Marketing Handbook by Seth Godin seemed so dated it was hard to get through, but there were some gems in there. I think Seth's book 'Permission Marketing' is a classic & doesn't get old (not yet at least), I learned alot there. Purple Cow & Free Prize Inside are my favorites of his, still marketing I guess.

Good luck.

ivv
After some 15 years in advertising and countless books, I now recommend Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends...", of which many modern ad/marketing books are poor derivatives. I'd also add a book on marketing metrics; an Amazon search will bring up a number of them, all fairly similar. If you are interested in specific advertising tactics, I'd start with a book about writing direct-response copy because that's the most replicable and hence useful knowledge.