Reddit mentions: The best market research business books

Hey, I think I'm in a sort of similar situation, I recently finished my bachelor in Communications and after taking an analytics course, realized that I wanted to go into marketing research/analytics.

Here's my point of view from several months of exploring different avenues to get to the career that I want:

• I can go back to school for a one year post-graduate certificate, where I will be taught theory and most likely will have to do a 4 months work placement of some sort where I'm not guaranty to actually learn or gain experience + there is the cost of the education (I don't know what your situation is, but in my case it's even more expensive because I am considered an international student).
  
• I find an internship on my own, in a company in which I share the same values with and know would be the perfect learning environment for me, plus there is an opportunity to grow. After that, once you get the internship, work your hardest to show that you want it and you're good at it. Now while doing that, never stop learning about marketing and reading marketing and business intelligence blogs or articles, as well as practice your excel skills if you can. I really feel like the hardest part here is to get your foot through the door. You do have a business background tho, so it should be easier to find an entry-level position or internship in marketing.
  
  I feel like everything you would be learning from degree or certificate where you physically have to go to class would be the same as taking a Coursera or a certification from DMA.
  
  I just found this book too, it's really useful if you want to refresh your memory about excel and see how you can use it for marketing.

Okay, I'll give it another shot and try to get at least to the newer botanical and potions stuff you mentioned earlier. I definitely sympathize with revisiting old code, it's always a roller coaster ride.

Also I can suggest a couple good UI/UX books if you want a step up on that front: User Experience of One, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, and UI Is Communication. They won't make you the best UI/UX designer in the world, but they might give you a better understand of the goals of UI and how they relate to the people using them. Understanding what people need out of a UI (which is often different than what they say they want out of a UI) goes a very very long way towards longer interaction periods. Good luck!

Edit: also feel free to hit me up if you want to talk more about UI/UX (or any dev-related) stuff. I'd be happy to help out.

​

1. In my SaaS startup world, your product should do one of two things: save customers' money or save them time. If you save them money, that's straightforward, you charge a % of the amount you save the customer. On the other hand, if your product saves a developer 1hr of time a month (based on your estimate), you can say 1hr of a developer's time is $100, so I'm going to price product at 10% of that, i.e. $10 a month. Also, look at established competitors who offer similar value to your product, that gives you a good benchmark for pricing your product. So, in summary: price product at % of value to customer or based on market price of competitor product offering similar value.
   
2. In an early stage startup, the founder does the pricing. For medium stage startups, a product manager would have the responsibility to price product. For large companies, there's often a pricing team that does sophisticated modeling to come up with pricing.
   
   ​
   
   I found the following book very useful to come up with a framework for pricing decisions: Monetizing Innovation. https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design-Product/dp/1119240867/.

My go-tos are the core texts from the Chartered Institute of Marketing's metrics module.

• Measuring Marketing: 110+ Key Metrics Every Marketer Needs
  
• Key Marketing Metrics: The 50+ metrics every manager needs to know.
  
  For fundamental marketing stuff, I always recommend HubSpot's Inbound Marketing certification and as somebody else mentioned, Google Analytics certification.
  
  I'm kind of an all-rounder, but in my experience, higher uppers want sexy tactics and sales - I've found there's not much patience for numbers and what they mean to get to said sales, or using data to do things better or more efficiently.
  
  What I'm getting at is that your knowledge of data is one thing, but translating it for presentation so other stakeholders see the relevance is half the challenge, so I'd suggest looking into marketing dashboards in particular.
  
  Best of luck!

Hello My Name is Awesome is a great and relatively cheap book to start with firm naming. Too much to summarize, but the author does a pretty good job with some free materials at her website below.

http://eatmywords.com/tips/

Alexandria is great and helped me with my own rebranding. Not cheap to get her on the phone, but definitely check out her stuff!

ON IOP VS. OTHER CONSULTING ROLES

Have a look at ONETs job descriptions for Management Analysts and Market Research Analysts. Now compare it to the one for IO psychologists. You will get a clue of the large overlap and small differences in job descriptions.

Important differences include:

• projected job openings (800 for I/O psychologists of which nearly half are in academia, 151,400 for market research analysts and 208,500 for management analysts)
  
• typical qualification levels of incumbents (mostly bachelors for market analysts, mostly masters for management analysts and mostly PhDs for IOPs; and
  
• median salaries ($62K p/a for market research analysts, $77K for IOPs and $81K for management analysts)
  
  It is interesting to note that you can earn more with a masters as a management analyst than with a PhD as a IOP and not be far off what IOPs with PhDs earn as a marketing analyst with a bachelors.
  
  
  ON LANDING A JOB AS A CONSULTANT
  
  Now, you're an IO psychologists. I shouldn't need to tell you that to find work the most important things are to be smart, honest and well connected. For management analyst positions, masters degrees are plenty proof that you're smart enough. The big deal maker is going to be in the number of people who can hook you up with a job that trust you enough to hook you up.
  
  So number 1 tip would be to start making connections in hiring positions asap. Find out who you need to know and then ask the people you already know to introduce you to those people, or at least to people closer to them. Imagine highly connected nodes in graphs, 6 degrees of separation and all that cool discrete math stuff about social networks.
  
  
  In terms of technical skills you should develop, I highly recommend Wayne Winston's books on Business Analytics and Marketing Analytics. You'll see that you already know most of that stuff.
  
  If you look at the tools and tech section you'll notice that everyone except maybe Business Informatics graduates has a shit ton of IT stuff to learn after school to be effective in the work place. A couple of certificates in relevant ITs will likely give you a leg up in the competition for entry level jobs.
  
  I'm planning to add Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert: SQL 2016: Data Management and Analytics and SAS Certified Statistical Business Analyst to my CV before the end of the year.

Below is a book I received in grad school, still use it sometimes to help write questionnaires. Good examples of different scales.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Writing-Questionnaires-Information/dp/0615917674

Green book has some interesting articles sometimes.

http://m.greenbook.org

If you're willing to dish out some dough, the Burke Institute is well known... better to have your employer pay for these though ;)

http://www.burkeinstitute.com

Feel free to message me if you have any questions, I'll try my best to help!

Not letting me look at the page :/ However, if there is a piece of advice I can give, I would consider changing the name. When branding names that are spelled wrong, "like using a K instead of a c, and missing an e" is an seo an SERP nightmare. You said this is just an example, but just giving you a heads up if you did decide to go with that name. Imagine customers trying to find you with such odd spelling? Not to mention, you are doing that because "creative marketing solutions" is already taken. That's not a good way to stand out. For anyone interested Hello My Name is Awesome is a great guide book that is light and really helps out a lot. I know this may have nothing to do with your situation, and your URL may be a placeholder, but this will hopefully be a word to the wise for anyone who comes across it. When you fix your website let me know and I will look it over for you.

• Jack

Just to build on this:

I couldn't make up my mind either, so I searched for these on the Amazon US site since I don't use Goodreads to see how reviews looked, etc. The resulting links, with the smile. prefix for charity aspect in case you make a purchase, are below. YMMV.


The Other F Word: 3.4

Business Development for Dummies: 3.5

Startup Mixology: 4.27

Starting a Tech Business: 2.67

The 4 Lenses of Innovation: 3.62

StartupLand: 4.01

All in Startup: 4.18

The Customer Funded Business: 3.73

Trend Driven Innovation: 4.38

Monetizing Innovation: 4.20

The Ways to New: 3.84

Startup Checklist: 4.10

The Art of Startup Fundraising: 4.11

Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 4.26

.

Not in the original list:

The Art of Opportunity: How to Build Growth and Ventures Through Strategic Innovation and Visual Thinking

I started an e-commerce company right before the dot-com crash (we launched in 2000) so I feel you.

As for what metrics to track, it really depends on your specific industry and how you run your business. If you can't get your books and CRM to talk to each other (odd since they're by the same company) I'm sure you could export data and crunch numbers in Excel.

Since you work off leads I would dig down to try to find data on some of the following questions:

• What was the average time to close a lead April 2015? Did it increase or decrease in April 2016?
  
• How do you track leads? Is it effective and accurate?
  
• How do you qualify leads? Could it be possible that even though you're getting 20% more leads, the quality of the leads has gone down? Look at the source of the leads (marketing, search engines, sales calls) and see if something has changed in your targeting, marketing, audience, etc that correlates to the change.
  
• Do some research into your customer trends. Create segments for customers that generate $25-50k profit a year and for those that generate < $5k profit. Look at the differences between the two. Are the # of leads in the 2nd group increasing and the 1st decreasing? Why? Make changes to target efforts on leads in the 1st group.
  
  Those are just some thoughts off the top of my head. As for resources, you might get some value out of reading The Lean Startup and Marketing Metrics.

Thanks for clarification re: Excel, you had me worried a bit! Moving forward, let's try to think of some things that may be on test...

Maybe they might provide you with a huge data table and ask you to do some things with it. It may/may not be in Excel. You might have to do an import.

Some things things to do with that data:

• Pivot Tables to analyze
• Random Sampling
• Advanced charting
• Data summarization forumlas
• Calculating confidence intervals
• etc.

I would Google around, try to find some books re: Excel + Market Research. Here is one:
http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Marketing-Research-Excel-Edition/dp/0135078229/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2

Good luck!

• VagueTicket
  
• Generic Ticket Place
  
• Tickets for Humans Not Animals
  
• TickTockHorray
  
• TicketMeOff
  
• Tick O’Rouney
  
• Tickets R US
  
• GetYoTicket
  
• TicketBucket
  
• TicketMaster
  
• TicketSlave
  
• TicketEmployee
  
• Panera
  
  EDIT: In all seriousness, here's a great book (thin and to the point) which provides a method of developing great names that are effective: Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick
  
  
• Here's a video interview of the author
  
• Here's a Sample Chapter PDF of the book
  
• Here someone made a helpful summary of the book that lists the method or principles
  
  I've used it (found it at the library) and it helped me name 2 brands.

I recommend you a book for choosing a name: http://www.amazon.com/Hello-My-Name-Is-Awesome/dp/1626561869
it is fun to read an gives you a general framework about the process that you need to follow to find a good name. Hope it helps :)

I love this book for a naming process: https://www.amazon.com/Hello-My-Name-Awesome-Create/dp/1626561869

For Zeda Labs, it took me forever. I've cycled through a dozen names over the years, never feeling like one was truely, 'me.' For clients, I could come up with something in 30-40 hours usually, but for my own thing it took FOREVER. I kept at it though.

How the name came about is one of my friends posted this on instagram and the meaning aligned with our values, was easy to spell and pronounce, so thus Zeda Labs was born.

Consumer Behavior Solomon, Tested Advertising Methods Caples, Scaling Up for the businesses processes to support growth from good marketing :)

you can get lots of great ideas online. Check out SideHustleNation.com -- the are lots of good podcasts to listen to from this site. I am especially motivated by this one: http://www.sidehustlenation.com/how-to-quit-your-job-this-year/

You might also want to look into some cheap Kindle books on the same subject to get some ideas. At first glance, here are some that I found:
http://www.amazon.com/Side-Hustles-You-Can-Start-ebook/dp/B00OPC5DMO/

http://www.amazon.com/Side-Hustle-Blueprint-Without-Leaving-ebook/dp/B00OPN3EOC/

http://www.amazon.com/Build-Create-Products-Passive-Income-ebook/dp/B00LTWLSE0/

(I haven't read any of those books, but they seem to fit what you're looking for, and there were a lot of others out there too)

Thank you friend! A little word of encouragement goes a long way. Indeed I focus more on probability and stats, rather than whole other stuff. I did few courses on probability and stats and it helped me a lot of course. But then I want to implement some model from an article or book and sometimes it's hard to get through all the formulas and logic to turn into working script.

Edit:
An example of book that I'm trying to understand now https://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Statistics-Marketing-Peter-Rossi/dp/0470863676.

Pricing is a huge topic so it's usually covered through multiple books.

Utpal Dholakia is a marketing professor at Rice. You can request a free PDF copy of his book on pricing from the book website: http://utpaldholakia.com/book/

Another free book on zero pricing: http://blogs.ft.com/tech-blog/2009/07/wired-editors-book-on-free-is-free/

A lot more technical book edited by Vithala Rao from Cornell. The book is not free:
https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Marketing-Reference-Handbooks-Management/dp/1849804419

Nah. You're going to need a good title to pitch in any case. Clarity about genre and tone should be near immediate, and it should avoid various traps ("The Rural Juror").

There's methodologies for this, and they're different from most writing processes. For one thing, competitive analysis and relative positioning are a big deal.

This book has an evaluation framework that helps guide decisions using rules other than "this feels good".
https://smile.amazon.com/Hello-My-Name-Awesome-Create/dp/1626561869

Not sure if you would touch R for writing the survey, I only use it for post-survey analysis. The book Modern Marketing Research gives a lot of great insight into how to write surveys, especially is you are using it for a business application. I would also check out the Marketing Scales Handbook. They are the leaders in terms of opinion measurement.

I have a book titled The User Experience Team of One which sounds helpful.

However, I have not had time to read it yet!

Alex Wong's Keyword Research hacks & KDP Rocket are pretty much what you need to get your AMS Ads running properly no matter your genre.

​

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Keyword-Research-Hacks-Optimization-ebook/dp/B06VSS53JQ/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=alex+wong&qid=1557198172&s=digital-text&sr=1-6

Sure, I wrote a whole book on the subject (free on kindle unlimited): http://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Keyword-Research-Building-Profitable-ebook/dp/B015HJTLOO/

I have a video on a previous iteration, which is a little dated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8tqSgxwv8I

One of my colleagues recommended this book: [Netnography methods book] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1446285758/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484178506&sr=1-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=netnography+kozinets&dpPl=1&dpID=51xf%2BX3f7IL&ref=plSrch)

This one is solid: Marketing Analytics: Data-Driven Techniques with Microsoft Excel

Check out Alexandra Watkin's stuff: http://www.amazon.com/Hello-My-Name-Is-Awesome/dp/1626561869

Also, I'm selling justlearn.co

Literaturempfehlung: http://www.amazon.de/Multivariate-Analysemethoden-anwendungsorientierte-Einf%C3%BChrung-Springer-Lehrbuch/dp/3642164900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377811521&sr=8-1&keywords=multivariate+analysemethoden

Visual Analytics with Tableau https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119560209/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_4DkNDbP5KG45H

Monetizing Innovation.
The Art of Startup Fundraising.
Starting a Tech Business.
The Startup Checklist.

I think you know where I'm going with this now.

Request: https://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Marketing-Research-Joseph-Hair/dp/0078028817
ISBN: 0078028817

Or newer edition: https://www.amazon.com/eBook-Essentials-Marketing-Research-Joseph-ebook-dp-B01LX2MWIE/dp/B01LX2MWIE/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
ISBN: 0078112117