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Every year, authors and publishers send me hundreds of branded and business books for review. Together they cover the most important concepts that shape today's business world. With the help of my colleagues from The Blake Project, I dive in and take a closer look at each one. The most useful appear quickly and these books are read in full.

Upon request this week from a customer looking for book recommendations, here are ten of the most recent brand and business books that I recommend for digital strategy, brand strategy, brand management, brand storytelling, innovation, behavioral research, brand purpose, customer experience, marketing and finance, and business strategy.

I think you will find that everyone has a lot of actionable insights and is worth your time.

1. Digital Strategy: Think Like Amazon By John Rossman

"What would Jeff do?" Since John Rossman left Amazon to advise startups and businesses, this question has been asked countless times by executives who want to learn the "secret" behind Amazon's historical success. In this step-by-step guide, he gives 50½ answers from his experience as an Amazon manager and shows today's business leaders how they think like Amazon, how Bezos can act strategically and beat the competition in a way that doesn't affect anyone. Learn How To:

• Go forward to return to Day 1 and change the status quo.
• Become a platform company – with the right platform strategy.
• Create customer obsession – and give your customers superpowers.
• Experiment, fail, rinse and repeat.
• Decentralize your way to digital size.
• Master the magic of small autonomous teams.
• Avoid the trap of past positions.
• Make better and faster decisions.
• Use metrics to create a culture of accountability and innovation
• Use AI and the Internet of Things to reinvent the customer experience.

In addition to these targeted strategies, you'll get a rare glimpse of how Jeff Bezos and Amazon are taking a remarkably consistent approach to innovating, exploring new markets, and driving new growth.

Get your copy here: Think like Amazon, 50 1/2 ideas to become a digital leader

2. Behavioral research: The behavioral business of Richard Chataway

If you are in business, you are in business of behavior – and if a business does not affect behavior, it will not succeed.

We have learned more about our behavior in the past 50 years than in the past 5,000 years. This book shows how behavioral research has revolutionized our understanding of how people really think (or not) – and how we can use this knowledge in our company to influence behavior and achieve competitive advantages.

Get your copy here: The Behavior Business

3. Brand management: Jerome Conlon's brand bridge

The task of marketing is to create a brand from the product and convert it into a symbol. By converting the material and immaterial advantages of the product into symbolic meanings, images and feelings, marketers create a brand bridge that is loved and desired and that is willingly crossed to get to the “other side”. The meanings, images and feelings that advertising connects with branded products create the attractive (or preferably irresistible) symbolic identity that is experienced by consumers. This is the brand bridge.

Get your copy here: The Brand Bridge – How to build a deep connection between your company, your brand and your customers

4. Brand strategy: brand hacks by Emmanuel Probst

Successful brands help us to make sense. In this process, the brands become meaningful in and of themselves. Brand Hacks takes you on a journey of discovery, shows why most advertising campaigns fail, and examines the personal, social, and cultural meanings that successful brands have for everyday consumer life.

Most importantly, this book shows you how to use simple brand hacks to create and build brands that make sense even on a limited budget. Brand hacks is supported by in-depth research into consumer psychology, interviews with industry-leading marketers, and case studies of major large and small brands.

Get your copy here: Brand Hacks: How to boost your brand by fulfilling the human search for meaning

5. Brand storytelling by Miri Rodriguez

Despite understanding the essential storytelling techniques, brands continue to explain how their product or service can help the customer, rather than showing how the customer's life has changed as a result. Brand storytelling sums up business loyalty, consumer behavior and engagement as a business strategy: using storytelling to trigger the emotions that drive people. It provides step-by-step guidance to evaluate, disassemble and rebuild a brand story, transform the brand from a "hero" mentality to a "sidekick" mentality, and position the customer as an important influencing factor to motivate the audience .

Brand storytelling, written by Microsoft's award-winning storyteller Miri Rodriguez, is a clear, actionable guide that goes beyond content strategy, simplifying the beginning, evaluating success, and ensuring consistent branding across all departments.

Get your copy here: Brand Storytelling: Put customers at the center of your brand history

6. Brand purpose: Grow the cake Alex Edmans

What is a responsible business? It is well known that it is one that sacrifices profit for social outcomes. While serving society is vital for businesses, they also have a duty to make profits for investors – savers, pensioners, and pension funds. Using the highest quality evidence and real-world examples from different industries and countries, Alex Edmans shows that it is not an either-or choice. Businesses can create both profit and social value. The most successful companies do not aim directly at profit, but are driven by purpose – the desire to serve a social need and to help improve people. The book explains how to put goals into practice so that they are more than just a mission statement, and discusses the crucial role of working with a company's investors, employees, and customers. Strict research also reveals surprising results on how executive compensation, shareholder activism, and share buybacks can be used for the common good.

Get your copy here: Grow The Pie, how great companies deliver both purpose and profit

7. Business strategy: networked strategy By: Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terweisch

What if there was a way to turn occasional, sporadic customer transactions into long-term, ongoing relationships while dramatically improving operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing tradeoffs between superior customer experience and low cost?

This is the promise of a networked strategy. New forms of connectivity that involve frequent, smooth, and tailored interactions enable companies to anticipate customer needs now or even before. At the same time, companies can use these technologies to create new business models that offer customers more value. Networked strategies are a win-win situation: customers get a dramatically improved experience while companies increase operational efficiency.

In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of networked strategies as a new source of competitive advantages. Using detailed examples from companies in sectors such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit organizations and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four ways: response to requests, curated offer, behavior of trainers and automatic execution – to convert episodic interactions into continuous relationships . The authors show how each path creates a competitive advantage, and then guide you through the critical decisions to create and implement your own connected strategies.

Get your copy here: Connected Strategy: Establishing continuous customer relationships for competitive advantages

8. Marketing and Finance: Financial Dimensions of Marketing Decisions By David Stewart

This book has long overdue insights for the marketing community about linking marketing activities and their results to the company's financial performance. The theme of the book is that the marketing function must justify its activities and use of resources in terms of their financial contributions to the company. The book focuses in particular on how marketing activities generate cash flow, growth and other financial benefits for the company. This perspective provides a framework for long-term investments to assess and classify funding for proposed projects.

Get your copy here: Financial dimensions of marketing decisions

9. Innovation: Costovation By Steve Wunker and Jennifer Law

Costovation solves the dilemma of spending less and innovating more. The book's revolutionary approach extends the definition of innovation beyond products to the business model itself. With Costovation, you let go of assumptions, take a new look at the market, and focus tirelessly on what customers really want.

The book contains numerous examples and interactive exercises and examines strategies for cost innovations that work for large and small companies alike. From open innovation and cost sharing to simplifying products to converting waste into new offerings, readers will learn how competitors cut niches, protect positions and dominate industries.

Innovation and cost reduction are not opposites. Together, they offer untapped opportunities to outwit and undercut competitors.

Get your copy here: Costovation

10. Customer Experience: Building Brand Experiences By Darren Coleman

Maintaining brand relevance is fundamental to corporate success and an increasing challenge for high-level marketing professionals. In the past, many have reacted with product or price-based competition, but so far a brand can only do this if it is about maintaining long-term relevance. Research shows that consumers are actually driven by emotions and positive brand experiences have the power to promote engagement while offering countless options for differentiation from the competition. By building brand experiences, managers and executives can achieve this and create tailor-made, relevant experiences that appeal to consumers and increase brand performance.

Practically structured according to the brand experience blueprint, Building Brand Experiences offers step-by-step instructions for building effective brand experiences based on proven tools, templates and well-founded research. Building brand experiences combines expert knowledge and real-world examples in an anecdotal and digestible manner, and is the essential guide to creating relevant experiences that consumers will love to improve brand engagement and increase results.

Get your copy here: Build brand experiences

What brand and business books do you read? Please let us know in the comments.

At The Blake Project, we support clients from all over the world at all stages of development. Redefine and articulate what makes them competitive in critical moments of change through online strategy workshops. Please email us for more.

Brand Strategy Insider is a service from The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy that specializes in brand research, brand strategy, brand growth and brand building

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