Some of my favourite reads

A BOOK that seems to me unfairly ignored in the current vogue for ‘behavioural economics’ is Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Perhaps it was too early (1984), and perhaps it seems too simple to be truly clever, but its six main themes – social proof, scarcity, consistency, reciprocation, liking and authority – make it exceptionally useful.

Another book I find myself continually recommending to people is Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: The Power of the Adaptive Unconscious. Like Cialdini, Wilson is a scientist who not only knows his field inside out but can explain it to the lay reader in clear, entertaining prose. The same is true of Daniel Schacter (Searching for Memory), Ernest LeDoux (The Emotional Brain), and Antonio Damasio.

Damasio’s Descartes’ Error is justly celebrated but, I suspect, not always actually read. It’s the toughest of the books that I’ve mentioned because his subject – neurophysiology, or the way brain and body work together – is complicated. But all these books are worth reading, because together they will change the way you think about how people process information and make decisions. For anyone who works in marketing or advertising, that ought to be time well spent.

Alongside this shelf of psychology, I recommend two books that have had a powerful influence on my thinking about advertising. The first is Pragmatics of Human Communication by Paul Watzlawick and others (1967). Don’t be put off by the dry-sounding title, because it’s highly accessible. Watzlawick was a psychotherapist, who transformed the concept of communication from just the sending of ‘messages’, to everything that goes on between human beings.

The book shifts our focus from words to behaviours, from the content of what’s said to how and why it’s said, and to its consequences. And, although it never mentions advertising, it all makes huge sense applied to marketing communications.

Finally, one important book that is actually about advertising, though written by a journalist more than 50 years ago, is Martin Mayer’s Madison Avenue USA (1957). Mad Men may be a great soap opera, but it never suggests the extraordinary intellectual energy and sense of exploration that was going on in US advertising in the 1950s. That was an era that still shapes our thinking and our behaviour today, and that every advertising professional should therefore understand.