Reading List for Arts Marketers

I went to the NAMP Conference in Charlotte a week or so ago. I was very pleased that the folks from Baker Richards, Group of Minds, and University Musical Society had a panel to discuss pricing and marketing in light of the latest work being done on consumer psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics.

Luckily for me, I had read many of the books they cited, and I'm real rah-rah about the whole set of concepts.

Later, while running my mouth for some very patient folks I was fortunate to have dinner with, I got a couple of requests for my reading list - which more or less corresponds with what was said during the session.

Anyway, here it is. I roughly categorized it. I put the books in the order you should read them if you're low on time. Some flow from others. The categories are not ordered. That's up to you.


Behavioral Economics/Psychology
  • Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
  • Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler
  • Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
  • Everything is obvious once you know the answer, Duncan Watts
  • Priceless - the myth of Fair Value by William Poundstone
  • The Honest Truth about Dishonesty; Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. His TED talks are great.
  • This is a little tangential, but Everyday Design by Donald Norman gives a lot of insight into user friendliness, and he expands it to incorporate advances in behavioral psych in "Emotional Design" (his second book)
  • How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker. It's long, and it's mostly neuroscience and neurobiology, but it reinforces and explains some deeper evolutionary concepts, and concepts of the mind that relate directly to the other works (plus a lot of other stuff about the brain)
Stats, analysis, flaws in thinking based thereon
  • The Drunkard's Walk, Leonard Mlodinov
  • The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver
  • Subliminal, Mlodinov
  • The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dorner
  • The Black Swan, Nicholas Taleb
Related in general
  • Traffic - Why we drive the way we do and what it says about us, Tom Vanderbilt
  • Critical Mass, Philip Ball
  • The shallows, Nicholas Carr - a little sobering, looks at how the information technologies we use literally change how our brains work
  • The Information, James Gleick - covers the theory of information
Totally random selection that has nothing to do with those, but pokes a hole in Classical Economics (my favorite whipping boy)

  • Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber
Short, fun, sort of related
  • Fooling Houdini, Alex Stone - it's got a lot of fun autobiography, and is mostly about magic tricks, but refers to the same kinds of mechanisms that the other books do in a different context. A good spacer for after you digest "Black Swan" or "How the Mind Works."

A lot of my reading list comes from listening to Radiolab and To the Best of Our Knowledge on public radio. The rest are from watching TED talks, and there's a lot of overlap. There are a couple I just stumbled upon. I liked hearing the authors talk about their work first, since it gave me a voice and a foothold on the work.

You might want to jump back and forth between the categories - back to back, you start reading stuff that sounds repetitive, but in the end, I think it helps me retain the information.

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