Outside In Banking

I read very few marketing books these days.  I’ve taken to outside-in reading for the same reasons I recommend outside-in banking—you can’t see what a fishbowl looks like from inside the fishbowl.  One antidote to fishbowl thinking is cross-discipline reading.  

These five books were all published during the first half of 2009.  None of them are about marketing per se, but they’ve all contributed to expanding the context of the market problems I encounter.

Spent
Geoffrey Miller
Why do we buy?  According to Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, we do it primarily to display our fitness for mating and friendship.  We advertise our fitness traits—health, intelligence, popularity, morality—through our clothing, homes, education, even the foods we eat.  Highly recommended.

Animal Spirits
George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
People seem to either love this book or hate it (always a good sign).  It depends on whether you’re a disciple of Keynes (love it) or Friedman (hate it).  The book argues that human attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral patterns—ignored in traditional economics—have a significant effect on the economy.  Case in point: the current recession.  It’s a quick, easy read and well worth your while.

How We Decide
Jonah Lehrer
As a subscriber to Lehrer’s blog, I was pre-disposed to enjoy this book, and I did.  Even though it covers some of the same ground as other books I’ve read, How We Decide brings it all together.  If you’re unfamiliar with recent developments in neuroscience, it will serve as a nice primer.  Particularly relevant to marketers is the finding that emotion makes decisions possible.

Wired to Care
Dev Patnaik
This book is about empathy, which Patnaik defines as the ability to walk in another’s shoes.  More specifically, it’s about using empathy as a way to connect with customers.  As companies grow, they tend to become isolated from their customers’ real needs.  They tend to look inward instead of outward.  This book provides a remedy.  It might just be my favorite of the bunch.

The Designful Company
Marty Neumeier
With The Designful Company, Neumeier advocates design as the key to transforming your company, and preparing it for the future.  His definition of design, however, is far broader than creating aesthetics.  His premise is that, by infusing the entire company with design thinking, it will be more fundamentally innovative and therefore better able to differentiate itself.  As one reviewer on Amazon put it, “He completely re-designs the idea of design.” 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 3:39 am and is filed under Bank Marketing, Branding, bank advertising. 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.