Do you read business books?

I try to, but rarely get past the index and the first chapter; the last business book I read all the way through was the insightful Good to Great by Jim Collins, which was based on a lot of original research. Most business books are magazine articles expanded to book length – literally so in the case of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson - and they don’t have enough real content to justify the several hours it takes to plough through them. I thought that The Tipping Point was good, but Blink wasn’t and I didn't bother with Outliers after I read a synopsis in The Observer. Don’t even get me started on Buy-ology, after three chapters Lindstrom had said very little except how cute he is and how much money he’d spent on brain scans. Yes and? Hall & Partners has a good scheme, they give you breakfast and present a 20 minute summary of the business book of the moment, perfect!

So why am I thinking about writing a book? Well I have a title I like, The Marketing Delusion, the main problem, apart from the actual writing, is that I can think of two ideas that fit under this title. The first idea would be to make explicit and examine the assumptions on which the marketing business is founded. I was inspired by a quote I came across in The Guardian from evolutionary biologist, Olivia Judson, “Of all the limits on expanding our knowledge, unexamined, misplaced assumptions are often the most insidious”. I could have a lot of fun with this from the narrow – e.g. what does market research really tell us, what does awareness really mean - to the very broad, e.g. what do we mean by creativity and why do marketing people never get to the top of companies, etc., etc.?

The second idea could more properly be called The Brand Delusion and there are two questions I’d like to try and answer:

1. Why and how is branding even possible, i.e. why do we assign meaning and feelings to inanimate objects and symbols?
2. What purposes do brands fulfil at the personal and societal levels?

The way I’d do this is by reviewing what scientific research, particularly psychology which was my degree subject, has revealed about these questions. I suspect that most academic research doesn’t address the brand directly, but there are several fields that could be relevant such as social psychology, psycholinguistics, evolutionary psychology, emotion psychology, neuroeconomics, and so on.

I’m not yet sure how to reconcile these two ideas, other than the slightly trivial one of including the brand delusion as one of the unexamined assumptions that fall into the larger set of marketing delusions. Maybe I should just write two books!