📚 My Top 3 Marketing Book Picks for 2025
Are you looking for books on marketing, strategies and sustainability? Here are my 3 recommendations for your path to strategic and sustainable marketing success in 2025. With a special offer...
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter of FUTURES. Thank you so much for reading along 💚 If you want to learn strategic marketing from me, then my Simple & Sustainable Marketing Academy is the perfect fit for you.
There are just 7 tickets left for the start on February 13th!
Happy New Year!
After a break of almost 4 weeks and an exciting, thrilling and relaxing trip through Brazil, I am officially back at my desk today (bom dia 🇧🇷).
It has now become my little ritual to share my book tips at the start of the year. So here are my current top 3 recommended reads on marketing, strategies and sustainability.
These books inspired me last year, gave me new ideas and sharpened my focus on certain issues. Maybe they will do the same for you?
The 3 books I recommend this time are:
1️⃣ Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution by Uri Levine
2️⃣ Sustainable Marketing: The Industry’s Role in a Sustainable Future by Paul Randle & Alexis Eyre
3️⃣ The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark & Carol Pearson
The latter was my favorite book from 2025!
Here are a few impressions from the books:
1️⃣ Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution by Uri Levine
Perfect for:
Innovation managers and startup founders who want to develop better solutions by focusing on the right problems.
Uri Levine, Co-Founder of Waze (the traffic app that all Uber drivers use), shares his most important insight in this book:
Successful innovations do not come from falling in love with a solution, but from a deep understanding of a problem. Using many examples from his own career, he shows how to identify problems that are worth solving.
9 out of 10 start-ups fail.
Because they hastily develop solutions for which there is not (yet) a market.
In his book, Levine advocates really listening to customers first and understanding at a deep level the true need for which solutions are being sought.
The first step for a company or a new product should always be a diagnosis with the following questions:
How big is the addressable market? How many people have this problem? How many businesses suffer from this issue?
How painful is it? Pain can be measured by one or both of two factors: amplitude (really, really painful) or frequency (how often we suffer from it). Once you define your problem, go back to the matrix and see where it fits).
Uri Levine
Anyone who knows me knows that I have been working with this approach in my marketing strategies for a long time. I have already written an article about it here:
And another exciting takeaway for me from the book is captured in this quote, which is about marketing KPIs:
The most important metric is... retention. Everything else, like customers willing to pay and partnerships with third parties are important, but if you customers don't stick with you and don't keep using your product that means you don't create value for them, and that you will die.
Uri Levine
2️⃣ Sustainable Marketing: The Industry’s Role in a Sustainable Future by Paul Randle & Alexis Eyre
Perfect for:
Marketers and sustainability managers who want to understand the fundamental challenges and opportunities of sustainability in marketing.
Marketing and sustainability - is that even possible?
Yes!
The two authors of “Sustainable Marketing” show how marketing can play a key role in building a more sustainable economy.
They present both strategic frameworks and concrete tactics that can be implemented immediately.
Paul Randle and Alexis Eyre shed light on the responsibility companies have when it comes to positively influencing consumer behavior and promoting sustainable values at the same time.
Marketing has a huge responsibility to shoulder. The engine of growth in our global economic machine, it catalysed the Great Acceleration and currently shows little sign of stopping. It’s the dinosaur at the end of the Cretaceous period staring at the metorite as it crashes into the planet thinking “that’s going to ruin my outdoor campaign!”.
Alexis Eyre & Paul Randle
With a clear, entertaining and helpful analysis of trends, examples and case studies, the book offers an exciting new perspective on the role of marketing in a greener future. It challenges us to think long-term and use marketing as a driver for real change.
Special Highlight: The Sustainable Marketing Compass, which the two present in the book, offers a strategic framework that helps companies to combine sustainable goals with effective marketing strategies while balancing values, responsibility and impact.
I had the honor to interview them in my podcast where we also talk a lot about the book - here are the links to Apple Podcasts and Spotify:
3️⃣ The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark & Carol Pearson
Perfect for:
Brand strategists who want to understand why some brands have a magical appeal to people and how they can apply this themselves.
This book was my favorite book from 2024!
It combines the depth psychology of Carl Jung with modern brand management.
I even wrote my own article about the model of archetypes in strategic marketing:
Mark and Pearson show how brands can use timeless archetypes to build an emotional connection and create a competitive advantage. From the Hero to the Outlaw, each archetype model provides brands with a clear strategy on how to emotionally anchor their values and messaging.
This book is a blend of psychology, storytelling and marketing strategy that helps to make brands not only visible, but also tangible. It is particularly exciting for anyone who wants to understand the emotional power behind great brands and harness it for themselves.
I found the analysis of well-known brands and their archetypal patterns particularly helpful. The concepts presented are both theoretically sound and practically applicable, which also makes the book a valuable tool for brand positioning for me.
“Marketing without a system for managing meaning is analogous to ancient navigators trying to find port in treacherous seas on a starless night. What they need is an enduring and reliable compass - a fixed place that illuminates both where they are and where they must go. For marketers, the theory of archetypes can act as this compass.”
Margaret Mark & Carol S. Pearson
⭐️ Special: Identify your brands archetype
Do you want to find out which archetype can shape your brand and discover how you can use it to build a deeper connection with your target group and communicate your messages more clearly and powerfully?
I can help you with that!
Here is a brief overview of how I work with my clients in an archetype workshop or mentoring session:
Diving into the brand DNA
Understanding your own target group
Selecting the brand archetype with methods
Telling archetypal brand stories as tests
Implementation of the archetype in all communication channels
If you would like me to guide you, just send me a quick email and I will be happy to help you and your brand - be it with marketing mentoring sessions or your own Strategy Lab workshop.
That's it - in three weeks I will send you my next Marketing Deep Dive post.
Have a nice start to the new year and thanks for reading along,