Marketing Books: The 34 Best Picks to Read in 2025
Changes and innovations in the world of digital marketing arise all the time.
For this reason, keeping up with trends is essential for the success of your business—and Marketing Books can provide that.
These works can open doors to valuable knowledge for your learning and career development.
With that said, we’ve compiled the 30 best marketing books to read in 2025 (prices may vary depending on when you’re reading this article).
Let’s dive in!
Why Invest in Marketing Books for Your Career?
In addition to deeply exploring the subject of digital marketing—from its history to new trends—books offer an opportunity to become a self-taught professional.
Learning becomes dynamic, independent, and complete, while also versatile, as you can take books anywhere in print or digital formats.
30 Recommendations for the Best Marketing Books in 2025
Let’s get straight to the point. Below, you’ll find a brief summary of each of the 30 best marketing books in 2025!
1 – Marketing 3.0
The book Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit, written by Philip Kotler—dubbed the “father” of modern marketing—introduces a new concept of customers.
They are no longer merely clients but complex, multifaceted beings seeking products or services that meet their needs for participation, creativity, community, and idealism.
Important: this book is obsolete. You should read our article about Marketing 5.0.
2 – SPIN Selling
Written by Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling is based on 12 years of field research.
The book presents a complete sales methodology that works and can be applied in daily practice.
SPIN Selling answers questions like:
- Why do some sales approaches work while others don’t?
- How do you prepare for client meetings?
- How do you uncover what the client truly needs?
- How do you negotiate?
- How do you identify whether the sale will progress in future meetings or if you’re wasting your time?
3 – Reimagine
In Reimagine, Tom Peters urges readers to focus on the future and prepare for what lies ahead.
The author teaches how to seize future business opportunities and stay ahead of the competition.
4 – The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is a work that brought together two authors: Al Ries and Jack Trout.
The book presents 22 laws—the basic principles of marketing—that will transform your products or services into a global brand.
To spark your curiosity even further, here are the 22 laws:
- Leadership
- Category
- The Mind of the Consumer
- Perception
- Focus
- Exclusivity
- The Law of Scale
- Duality
- The Opposite
- Division
- Perspective
- Line Extensions
- Sacrifice
- Attributes
- Sincerity
- Uniqueness
- Uncertainty
- Success
- Failure
- Exaggeration
- Acceleration
- Resources
5 – Blue Ocean Strategy]
By W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy explores three traditional marketing strategies:
- Cost Leadership
- Differentiation
- Niche
The narrative of the book was based on a study of more than 150 companies from 30 different sectors.
The blue ocean strategy involves creating new spaces to grow without “predators,” distancing itself from the red ocean, which is characterized by competitiveness and market aggressiveness.
6 – Words That Work
Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear by Frank Luntz highlights the art of persuasion through language—oral or written.
The book emphasizes choosing words carefully to achieve your goals.
7 – The Long Tail
The author Chris Anderson bases The Long Tail on the thesis that market niches are becoming increasingly important.
He predicts that these niches will generate more results than the best-selling products.
Once again, the reader will encounter predictions and trends for the future.
8 – The Tipping Point
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell examines how small details can make a significant difference in your business.
The book answers the question: “What makes a product, service, or idea suddenly become popular?”
And you will be surprised by this secret.
9 – Marketing Management
Bringing together authors Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, the book Marketing Management – also known as “the marketing bible” – explains the important advances and practices in the field.
Unlike other books, this one offers an analytical approach to marketing, focusing on management and multidisciplinarity.
10 – Competitive Strategy
The book Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, written by Michael Porter, focuses on competitiveness.
The book teaches how a company can position itself in the competitive landscape of its segment by creating a competitive advantage – defined in terms of relative cost and prices.
Also read: Legal Marketing: 13 Digital Marketing Strategies for Lawyers
11 – Positioning
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout emphasizes creating a solid and unique image in the consumer’s mind.
12 – Services Marketing
Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy by Christopher Lovelock, Jochen Wirtz, and Miguel Angelo Hemzo explores achieving excellence in services through a combination of people management, cutting-edge technology, and top strategies.
13 – Managing Brand Equity
Written in the 1990s, the book Brands – Brand Equity by David Aaker addresses a now-familiar topic: brand management.
The author analyzes brand creation from the perspective of consumers’ perceptions.
14 – The One to One Future
The One to One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers highlights customer retention, differing from other books that focus solely on acquiring new customers.
15 – Cyberculture
In Cyberculture, philosopher Pierre Lévy analyzes the impact of cyberculture on education, work, politics, and rights, offering valuable insights into digital marketing’s societal implications.
16 – The Bible of Digital Marketing
Written by Cláudio Torres, The Bible of Digital Marketing is a practical guide to understanding the role of the internet in implementing marketing, communication, and online advertising actions.
This book is a great choice for all audiences.
17- Permission Marketing
The book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends and Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin examines the importance of shifting marketing strategies from interruption-based logic to permission-based logic.
In other words, the author explores a marketing strategy where the customer opts to receive specific content because they find it relevant and useful.
18 – Free
In Free, author Chris Anderson explores the trend of cost elimination brought by the digital era.
With innovation at its core, Chris asserts that we are in an age where the economy can thrive on the idea of free offerings.
19 – Web Analytics 2.0
In Web Analytics 2.0, author Avinash Kaushik delves into the world of metrics analysis.
Beyond teaching the most important metrics, he explains strategies for selecting the most suitable analytics service for various businesses and needs.
20 – Traction
The book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares serves as a literal guide on how to increase the success rate of startups.
The authors discuss the concept of traction, which they see as a clear signal of company growth.
21 – Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
In his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk teaches marketers how to interact with customers in this new arena, including sales channels such as social media, websites, email, blogs, etc.
22 – The Power of Visual Storytelling
Packed with images and data, The Power of Visual Storytelling by Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio teaches how to drive business results through photos, videos, infographics, and more.
23 – On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
If you’re wondering how to write well, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser provides the solution.
24 – Everybody Writes
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley is a guide to attracting and retaining customers through content.
Starting with the idea that everyone has the potential to write, the author presents strategies applicable to online presences, including websites, social media, landing pages, email marketing, and more.
25 – Global Content Marketing
Pam Diner’s Global Content Marketing conveys its message in the subtitle: How to Create Great Content, Reach More Consumers, and Build a Worldwide Marketing Strategy That Works.
26 – 80/20 Internet Lead Generation
Finally, 80/20 Internet Lead Generation by Scott Dennison offers expert marketing advice on generating leads effectively.
The author adopts a strategic approach applicable to businesses across various industries.
Read also: 28 Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
27 – The Advertising Concept Book
It is very difficult to find marketing books that show, in practice, everything you need to do to launch a campaign.
Many try, but few truly succeed.
The Advertising Concept Book brings together the most interesting campaigns that Pete Barry, a legendary copywriter, created during his career.
He explains, step by step, everything that was necessary to take the campaign from an idea to reality.
What’s unique is that we see all these stages, including the initial sketches! Pete Barry even shares his first pencil drafts to help readers understand how every campaign starts from the same place: creativity.
The book is divided into 17 chapters and covers campaigns ranging from magazine ads to social media, passing through radio, video, TV, and everything else you can imagine.
It’s a fantastic book for those starting their career in Digital Marketing, as well as for industry professionals facing the challenge of creating campaigns they’ve never attempted before.
28 – The Boron Letters
Gary Halbert, considered one of the greatest copywriters of all time, made millions writing persuasive letters in the pre-digital age.
The Boron Letters shares his strategies and compelling call-to-action techniques.
Gary Halbert is considered by many as the greatest copywriter of all time.
He was responsible for generating millions in revenue by doing something that many digital marketers today are unaware of: direct mail.
Gary Halbert’s job was to write the best possible letter to his potential customers, who were then prompted with a CTA that typically included:
- The actual purchase;
- Product selection, in the case of a catalog;
- A completed coupon;
- A direct response;
- A quote request;
- And so on.
The thing is, Gary Halbert’s work went beyond just writing. In this book, he explains his exact process.
Everything began with the true gold of the operation: a segmented target audience list.
This was his most significant task: finding these lists with addresses in specific niches. For example, a list of people who had purchased a specific car model.
With this list in hand, Gary Halbert would create a product to sell. In this example, something like a customization manual for that car model.
Only then would the writing begin. After deeply understanding his audience and developing a product for them, the copywriter would write his first line.
This book is fantastic because of that. And it comes with a bonus: Gary Halbert wrote the entire book while in prison. It’s a collection of letters he wrote to his son, Bond, about marketing, copywriting, and life behind bars.
29 – The Robert Collier Letter Book — Robert Collier
If you’re looking for a book that focuses solely on letters, this is the ideal one for you.
Robert Collier’s collection includes nearly all the letters he ever wrote for direct mail.
The content is divided into several small chapters, organized by the purpose of the letters and the lessons he aims to teach with them.
For instance, in the chapter “How to Hook Your Letters,” Collier includes only the letters with the most intriguing hooks from his career.
As Collier states in the preface, this book is not for beginners. It’s intended for people who already understand the power of copywriting and want to see practical examples of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s an excellent book for experienced copywriters, with hundreds of examples of what worked for Collier in his time.
Of course, much of it may not work the same way in digital marketing, but it’s still worth exploring the examples.
30 – Ogilvy on Advertising
This book deserves an honorable mention, especially since it only got its first Portuguese edition in 2023.
Originally titled Ogilvy on Advertising, the book delves into the main concerns that David Ogilvy, co-founder of Ogilvy & Mather — now simply Ogilvy — had when launching a campaign.
However, the book dates back to the 1960s/70s, the golden age of traditional advertising on Madison Avenue, N.Y.
What’s fascinating is that, upon reading it, you’ll realize that much of what Ogilvy emphasized remains fundamental even in digital marketing today.
Ogilvy helped popularize the idea of control groups, which at the time (and even today, though less prominently) were the method for testing before the advent of more advanced A/B testing.
He also extensively discusses the importance of understanding the target audience when creating campaigns and the best methods for conducting marketing research.
Much of what he discusses is still applicable today. However, for an easier transition, there’s another interesting book:
31 – Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age — Miles Young
Miles Young did an excellent job of relating everything Ogilvy discussed in his original book to the digital era, covering platforms like YouTube, social media, SEO, blogs, Inbound Marketing, and more.
This work is crucial for truly understanding how to apply Ogilvy’s timeless principles to digital marketing strategies.
Ogilvy was speaking within a very specific historical context. He dedicated several chapters to control groups, for instance, which are barely used today, even in offline marketing strategies.
How can we turn this into actionable insights for 2025? By understanding what it takes to achieve the same results in the digital era.
This is the purpose of this book: to translate Ogilvy’s insights for the digital age. And in our opinion, it does so brilliantly.
32 – Madison Avenue U.S.A. — Martin Mayer
Speaking of Madison Avenue, this marketing book is fantastic for understanding where we came from and how we got to where we are today.
It’s a dense, journalistic work that seeks to uncover the origins of advertising and the development of “new” concepts for the time, such as copywriting, the importance of design, branding, and more.
The book even covers how agencies emerged in the marketing world: by buying all the advertising spaces in newspapers.
If you wanted to advertise at the end of the 19th century, you had to go through agencies because they had exclusive deals with newspapers and magazines.
Over time, this dynamic shifted, and agencies gained a new prominence: creativity.
It’s a book well worth reading, despite being a bit challenging to find.
33 – Inbound Marketing — Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan
This book is one of the most significant examples of demand generation in contemporary marketing.
Shah and Halligan are the founders of HubSpot, one of the largest digital marketing platforms in the world.
The key point of HubSpot has always been organizing marketing efforts to generate leads, nurture them, and ultimately convert them into customers.
This sales pipeline had no name before they launched both HubSpot and this book.
Why is it called demand generation? Simple: HubSpot is a system built to house Inbound Marketing. And if no one knew what Inbound Marketing was, how could they sell it?
Through this book, Halligan and Shah set the standard for how digital marketing has been done for decades. In fact, even today, we follow the marketing principles they established in this book, with some variations and updates.
34 – Scientific Advertising — Claude C. Hopkins
Scientific Advertising is a book written in the early 20th century, offering a step-by-step guide to understanding marketing as a science, almost exact in nature.
At the time the book was written, each brand advertised in its own way. Methods were scattered and confusing, and often largely ineffective.
Hopkins began his career as a door-to-door salesman and was one of the first to understand that marketing isn’t about products—it’s about relationships with people.
The more you prioritize people and their needs over products and their conveniences, the more effective marketing becomes.
For example, Hopkins would personally pay, using his agency’s money, for extra stock of his brands’ products at the point of sale. He would buy these products himself and leave them on the shelves.
Why? To ensure a customer trial. Buy it, and if you don’t like it, return it. No questions asked, no hassle. Just return it.
This type of strategy was highly unconventional at the time. And it was precisely this innovation that made Hopkins one of the biggest names in advertising during that era.
What did you think of our selection of the best marketing books to read in 2025?
There’s a lot of great material here, plenty of dense reading, but also some very basic, easy-to-understand books that will simplify your grasp of key concepts.What’s your favorite marketing book? Let us know in the comments. Thanks for checking out our list!
