Non-Marketing Books for Marketers

I am an avid reader. I read about fifty new non-fiction books each year. My home library contains more than eight thousand volumes, most of which I have read. Having read my share of brand management and marketing books, I can attest to the fact that most of them rehash stuff that has already been said many times before. Having said that, I think marketers can gain insight that will help them with their careers from non-marketing books. Here is my list of interesting non-marketing books for marketers. It includes the following topics and genres - behavioral economics, propaganda and persuasion, understanding American history and values, how personal identity and labels work, power and influence, insights from religious experience, insights from politics, and business models and business strategy.

• Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaylor
• Predictable Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Irrational Exuberance by Robert J. Schiller
• SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson
• The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the 21st Century by Richard M. Perloff
• The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives by Shankar Vedantam
• Snoop: What Your Stuff Say About You by Sam Gosling
• Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau
• American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
• The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony
• The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
• The Prince by Nicole Machiavelli
• The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche 
• The Great and Only Barnum: The Tremendous, Stupendous Life of Showman of P. T. Barnum by Candace Fleming
• The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
• The Future of Illusion by Sigmund Freud
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel
• the four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google by Scott Galloway
• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
• Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jerad Diamond
• Political Ideologies and Political Philosophies by N. B. McCullough
• The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life by Evanash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff
• Co-opetition by Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff

For a listing of my nine favorite brand management and marketing books, click here. To order my Brand Aid book, click here.