Fun and Useful: April Fools' Day Book Picks for Marketers

[[email protected]]

Content
1. Freakonomics by S. Levitt and S. Dubner
2. "A Lot of Numbers: Analyzing Big Data with Excel" by John Foreman
3. "Statistics and cats". V. Savelyev
4. "Crossfit of the Brain" by Igor M. Namakonov
5. "Gamification in Business and Life" by M. Bronnikova, I. Nefedyev
Often, books on marketing, economics, analytics and other related fields are dry and academic. Especially for April 1, we have collected for you several interesting publications. And although they write about serious things, these texts make you smile and think, because the authors do not fail their sense of humor.

1. Freakonomics by S. Levitt and S. Dubner

An MIT PhD and former editor of The New York Times telegram best of vietnam Magazine has written a book about the subtle and paradoxical connections between everyday facts and their impact on the economy.

For example, in the 1970s, blood donors in the United States began to receive financial compensation. The moral incentive was backed up by an economic one. It would seem that donors would now line up. However, instead, medical centers faced a sharp decline in the number of people willing to donate blood. People believed that money devalued their noble act of mercy, and the procedure of drawing blood was too painful a way to make money.

This book will be useful primarily to those who work in the creative economy, want to go beyond the generally accepted judgments and “jump out of the short pants of traditional thinking,” as German Gref writes in the preface to the publication.

2. "A Lot of Numbers: Analyzing Big Data with Excel" by John Foreman

Big Data is a fashionable and complex term today. It has acquired a certain air of elitism: they say that mastering the skills of working with big data requires a special education. John Forman disproves this myth and proves that an ordinary Excel can cover most of your tasks with big data.

The author shares techniques that are suitable for both the owner of an online store and a large wholesale warehouse. But the book's greatest asset is its language. Forman does not intimidate the reader with complex terms, but explains everything on his fingers and with appropriate humor. Sometimes, of course, the sense of humor alternates with a subjective sense of taste. Here, for example, is one of the quotes:

"Never use pie charts! And especially not the 3D pie charts that Excel offers you. Don't you dare disobey, or my ghost will haunt you after I'm dead! Pie charts are ugly, don't relate well to the data, and their 3D effect is about as aesthetically pleasing as the seashell pictures on the wall of my dentist's office."

3. "Statistics and cats". V. Savelyev

Statistics in business helps save money and open new markets. But not every businessman understands its basics. Many people think that it is too complicated a subject, and the correlation matrix and factor analysis are some kind of scary beast. Vladimir Savelyev believes that this is not so, and statistics itself can be "soft and fluffy". The main thing is to know how to teach science. Practice on cats.




4. "Crossfit of the Brain" by Igor M. Namakonov

Creativity is the driving force of marketing. A cool idea will save any production and save the budget for promotion. How to come up with such ideas? Igor M. Namakonov wrote a textbook of 23 exercises that will prepare the reader to solve non-standard problems. The specificity is that this is not a collection of tasks for ingenuity, but a set of daily intellectual and physical exercises. For example: turn on the timer on your smartphone for 10 minutes and come up with the maximum number of options for the non-targeted use of a simple paper clip. Did it work? Let's move on to the next one: plank, press and twists to saturate the blood with oxygen.