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Ask HN: Best intro marketing books?
5 points by BadassFractal on June 7, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
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!




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.


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.


"Start Small, Stay Small" by Rob Walling is my fav.

http://startupbook.net

Also I recommend reading as much Tim Ferriss as possible




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