Recently, I was asked to share some marketing podcast recommendations. Rather than sticking strictly to industry-focused shows, I believe it’s far more valuable to explore podcasts that expand your understanding of how the world works.

Many so-called marketing podcasts simply repackage familiar tactics, offering little genuine insight.

The podcasts that have shaped my thinking most over the past few years rarely appear on “essential marketing listening” lists. They’re about policy failures, infrastructure economics, political communication, behavioural science, and why good intentions often produce terrible outcomes.

They teach how systems work, how incentives shape behaviour, and why most problems are more complex than they look. These insights apply directly to marketing, which is fundamentally about understanding decisions within systems.

Recommended accompaniments for all menu items are long walks, commutes, or any journey where you can actually concentrate.

1. Cautionary Tales

Tim Harford examines disasters—not to entertain, but to extract the patterns that lead to failure. Each episode follows a specific catastrophe, then methodically unpacks the decisions, incentives, and systemic factors that made it inevitable.

Marketers benefit from understanding how organisations make decisions under pressure. The Challenger disaster shows how hierarchies suppress critical information. The Ford Pinto illustrates ethical trade-offs. The financial crisis illustrates how rational decisions can lead to disaster.

These aren’t just cautionary tales about avoiding mistakes. They’re blueprints for understanding how complex systems behave, how information flows through organisations, and why the obvious warning signs are often ignored until it’s too late.

Marketing decisions rarely have life-or-death stakes, but they often follow similar patterns: pressure for results, short-term incentives, and the ignoring of inconvenient data.

2. The Abundance Agenda

Housing policy, infrastructure, and planning seem niche. They’re really lessons in how systems create or destroy value, how incentives shape outcomes, and how regulations cause problems they’re meant to prevent.

Each episode examines a challenge, such as Britain’s housing shortage, high project costs, or the impact of planning laws on growth. The insights reach beyond urban planning.

Why new developments meet opposition mirrors why innovation faces resistance in businesses. Small delays, when they compound, can lead to overruns, explaining why marketing projects often go over budget.

Learning why things don’t happen is often more valuable than learning why they do. This show demonstrates that systems often resist change, even when it’s beneficial.

3. Strong Message Here

Political communication provides a fascinating laboratory for examining the gap between what communicators intend and what audiences actually perceive. This podcast dissects that gap with precision and occasional humour.

Each episode analyses a political message—its language, framing, and what the communicator thinks will resonate. More importantly, it looks at why much of this fails with audiences.

These lessons apply directly to marketing. Both politicians and marketers must persuade uninterested audiences to take action. Too often, both end up talking to themselves, rather than to their audience.

The discussions of focus group findings versus real-world reactions should be required listening for anyone writing customer messaging. The language we use matters less than we think. The clarity with which we use it matters considerably more.

4 podcasts actually about marketing

If you insist.

4. The Uncensored CMO

Jon Evans interviews CMOs and marketing leaders about the actual work of marketing leadership—building teams, managing budgets, navigating organisational politics, and making decisions with incomplete information.

The conversations admit what most marketing content avoids: much of the work is difficult, uncertain, and involves guesswork. Guests discuss what worked and what didn’t, offering context instead of curated tales.

The best episodes examine specific challenges: How to justify marketing spend to a sceptical board, how to build credibility in a new role, how to balance short-term performance pressure with long-term brand building. These are the conversations marketing leaders actually have, rarely the ones they present publicly.

5. Consumer Behaviour Lab

The Consumer Behaviour Lab (co-founded by Richard Shotton, author of The Choice Factory) applies behavioural science research to brand strategy and marketing challenges. Each episode examines specific psychological principles and illustrates how they are applied in practice.

Recent episodes have explored how BMW utilised the fresh start effect to influence new drivers, what Halloween candy reveals about choice and reward, and how behavioural science enhances agency pitching. The podcast also features interviews with behavioural science practitioners and authors, translating academic research into applicable insights.

The format is straightforward: identify a behavioural principle, explain the research behind it, and show how brands have applied it successfully. No speculation about what might work—just documented cases of what has worked and why the psychology made it effective.

6. Call to Action

Gasp agency’s podcast features practitioners who’ve completed projects worth discussing—not for self-promotion, but for the learning value they offer. The format respects listeners by focusing on substance rather than personal branding narratives.

Conversations explore challenges, solutions, and outcomes without the usual fake certainty. Guests can admit failure, discuss constraints, and make the insights more useful than polished case studies.

The episodes work because they treat marketing as a craft rather than magic, focusing on the decisions and trade-offs involved in actual work rather than the simplified narratives we tell afterwards.

7. Browse Basket Buy

Just a plug for the podcast I’m making right now because I can.

Learning beyond the discipline

You’ll notice these podcasts won’t provide frameworks for guaranteed growth or tactics for immediate results. Instead, they offer something more valuable: clearer thinking about how systems function, how people make decisions, and why most straightforward answers fail to account for complexity.

The best marketing ideas come from outside your field. Learning why infrastructure projects fail teaches you about organisational inertia. Studying political communication shows the gap between intent and reception. Policy decisions reveal how incentives unpredictably shape behaviour.

Once you see the patterns, applying them to marketing is simple.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.