Quarterly customer marketing recommended reading [part 4]

Posted by Nick Venturella

A quarterly list of 3 books to read to help improve your B2B customer marketing knowledge and skills.

Here are last quarter's recommended books, in case you missed them.
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Here's how it works:

• Three books listed at a time (read one a month)
• The books are shared in a particular order to help you build upon the concepts of the previous book (so be sure to go back and read the books from previous lists if you haven't gone in order).
• Read the books, take notes, highlight useful passages, apply what you've learned in your customer marketing work and analyze what is working and not for your organization - tweak and repeat.

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​Carrie Melissa Jones and Charles Vogl's, Building Brand Communities, is probably the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of building an organic business/brand community that cultivates true partnership with an organization’s customers. This book breaks down how to start, grow, and leverage brand communities to partner with your customers and build something bigger and better, together. If you’re a customer marketer, CX professional, advocate marketer, customer engagement specialist, community moderator, or any other role that touches customer communities linked to your organization, then you will want this book on your shelf.

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​Anthony Kennada’s book, Category Creation, shares the author’s personal experience in developing Gainsight into a category leading brand by partnering with customers, employees, and investors to help all foster a feeling of ownership, exclusivity, and community around the brand. Kennada’s experience along with tons of case studies and examples from other tech brands showcases how making your brand stand out as a category leader in its own space helps brands gain fans and larger market share. This is useful information as you think about the larger customer/employee community/experience you want to build for your organization.

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​If you work in any sort of tech space, or really any business for that matter, I recommend reading Emily Chang’s, Brotopia. The book exposes much of the toxic culture created by many tech organizations in Silicon Valley. Chang sheds light on the aggressive, misogynistic world of many tech companies in an effort to inform others and help change the narrative with better actions. As a male in the tech industry, this book was helpful in bringing to consciousness ideas, concepts, and actions I need to take to be a better ally to women in tech and elsewhere. In general, this book is useful for anyone cultivating communities of individuals around a shared purpose – employees, customers, partners, vendors, etc. – DEI is important, and simply being a humane human is even more so.

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​Happy reading!  Tune in next time for another set of book recommendations!