Customer Reviews

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

5 star:		(99)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(27)
1 star:		(31)

 

 

This book has a very interesting premise - using MRI to examine, not cognition, memory, or emotion, but advertising. And some of the results are rather interesting. For example:

- Negative messages (anti-smoking ads, say) can activate desires just as easily as positive ones.
- Strong brands can activate the same brain centers as do religious topics.
- Indirect advertising (the coke glasses sitting in front of the American Idol judges) can be more effective than direct advertising.

Probably the biggest takeaway is that what people say and how they really feel are not the same. Actually, having written all this out, I'm not sure that these results really are all that unexpected and interesting after all. ;^)

My biggest beef with the book is how thin it is beyond the basic reporting of results. Yes, it actually is over 200 pages (just barely), but there is an awful lot of padding in there. Part of that is going over some very basic ideas (subliminal advertising, e.g.) ad infinitum, but also being extremely anecdotal. I like anecdotes, and feel they make for a great read, but the author really goes overboard - especially when it comes to anecdotes about himself.

In fact, the author's ego really gets in the way here. Here are some samples:

"But this study wasn't going to come cheap, and I knew that without corporate backing, it was dead in the water. But when I get an idea in my head that keeps me up at night, I'm persistent. Politely pushy, you might call it. Those twenty-seven messages on your answering machine. They're all from me (sorry)."

and

"By way of profession, I'm a global branding expert. That is, it's been a lifelong mission (and passion) to figure out how consumers think ... If you look around, chances are you'll find my branding fingerprints all over your house or apartment ... As a branding expert and brand futurist (meaning that the sum of my globe-hopping experience gives me a helicopter view of probable future consumer and advertising trends) ..."

and

"I've been told more times than I can count that my appearance is as unconventional as what I do for a living ... My features [he has a baby face], my raked-back blond hair, and my habit of wearing all black give a lot of people the impression that I'm some kind of quirky child evangelist, or maybe some precocious, slightly wired high-school student who got lost on the way to the science lab and ended up in a corporate boardroom by mistake. I've gotten used to it over the years. I suppose you could say it has evolved into my brand."

Overall, the tone of the book is more one of simply trying to drive business (including a URL to his site in the book's last sentence) than actually reporting anything seriously. A little sad, given the premise and all the hype and expectation the author tries to generate.

This also brings up the issue of ethics, which the author barely touches on. Apart from the issue of the book being basically a long infomercial, I also wondered about the intrusiveness and manipulation that would be inherent in applying some of the findings. It really only gets an oops-almost-forgot two sentences at the end of the book:

"Because that is a world in which we, the consumers, can escape all the tricks and traps that companies use to seduce us to their products and get us to buy and take back our rational minds. And I hope that by writing Buyology, this is the world I have helped bring about."

A much better read would be Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters - same large topic, but much more interesting, informative - and modest.

This is the first book in a long time I felt like taking back, and demanding a refund.

Filled with common-sense observations inflated with info-mercial style prose, it's a shadow of the scientific study it claims to be.

Each chapter pounds you with juvenile "imagine this!" scenarios, while providing little scientific backing for the author's conclusions. After each disappointing narrative, he promises the next chapter has "groundbreaking new science!" Clearly, he has mastered the art of hype, for that's mostly what this book is.

Those looking for information on motivation and thinking patterns will be best served to look elsewhere.

This book was 50% review of other brands and ad campaigns, 30% bragging about how cool the "experiments" were, 10% new data that was only semi compelling, and 10% telling you what they just told you.

If they really stretched it, this should have been a 3 page article in a reader's digest. Maybe a 1,000 word article in the WSJ.

The most interesting thing I learned was about "mirror neurons" and how our brains imagine, e.g., eating an apple when only watching someone else do it. But that is not enough for a whole book. There were other tidbits but not worth the $ or effort to learn them.

I bought this book on tape along with "Tribes" by Godin. Audible is giving that one away for free. I would have paid $20 for Tribes and nothing for Buyology. It's almost as if the author of Buyology said "well since I have spent all this money for research I guess I should write a book."

Buy ology is a well-crafted book organized around a series of fMRI studies of the brain. The premise is to explore the connection between marketing and neuroscience to understand why we buy. The premise is full of hype as Lindstrom explores connections between sight, sound, smell, sports, sex and religion and the brain.

Positioned in this way, the book should be a headline grabbing set of findings that change the way we think about brands, our purchasing decisions and the messages with which we are bombarded every day. Unfortunately, the conclusions of the brain studies are largely predictable and refine rather than revolutionize marketing and neuroscience. This makes the book a better magazine article rather than a 200+ page book.

Unless you are marketing professional or someone who has this as your hobby, your time would be better spent looking at other books that cover the same subject area with more detail and more science. I found Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee's Book "ON intelligence" and Daniel Pink's "A whole new mind" to be better books on the connections between neuroscience and social interactions.

Each chapter in Buy ology follows a similar pattern. The start sets up the issue, for example are brands as strong in peoples minds as religion. Then the author spends 20 or so pages providing review and opinion on the subject area. This part often repeats materials, stories, and findings found in every marketing book. Yes the usual suspects are quoted here "Apple's 1984" ad and the like. Finally in about a half a page, Lindstrom give the example -often based on a very small sample size - of the experiment. Then there is a rationalization of the findings that in the end maintains the status quo in marketing. For example: Brand placement in movies is more effective when the branded product in question is being used as part of the story rather than just appearing in the story. OK got it.

I do not have a problem with the science; its very interesting and I am sure is solid science. But the build up around the hypothesis, the rehashing of the issue and the not so revolutionary results make this a book to pass on in my opinion. In other words the hype and the verbosity definitely get in the way.

I am sure that this book will get much play in the media as it pits marketing against religion, sex against sales etc. It looks like this will play out along the same lines as Freakonomics - focusing on a single issue to drive controversy and attention. If you are interested in marketing, then you will most likely buy the book anyway. If you're like me and have a casual interest, then please be advised.

I bought the CD of this book on impulse from a bookstore. I wish I had consulted the amazon reviews, for while the average rating is high there was enough meat in the low reviews that I would have likely left this alone.

I won't repeat what a number of reviewers have covered in more detail: that there is very little content and the presentation is tedious and self aggrandizing.

I will make two other observations: the first was how little they got for their multimillion brain image study. My 17 year old son was listening to part of it with me in the car, the part where they made the amazing discovery that Coca Cola was getting more value from their product placements on American Idol than Ford was getting for their commercials. My son told me "yeah, I read about that in a Foxtrot comic."

The second is that he did do a very good job of marketing a very marginal book. Maybe that could be his sequel: how to fluff up a magazine article's worth of content into a best seller.

I borrowed this book from my sister, hoping to read a couple of pages and purchase the book if I find it, at the very least, interesting. Alas, but sorry Amazon no purchase from me this time, and glad to have saved my money.

I've worked in branding myself and have performed marketing research over the past few years, and while reading this book, I cannot help but feel that this guy has just embarrassed our profession. To be fair, there are a handful of good points readers can learn from this book, but the final take away is just a mountain full of doubt, disgust and high praises of the author to himself.

The good points:
He exposes neuro marketing and made the reader aware of what is really going on inside a person's head when making the decision to purchase. However, this could've taken ten pages or less.

"Some" of the bad points:
Too many words. Most of the one-star reviews are REALLY TRUE. So I will not reiterate any of those.

And here is where my doubt lies.
1. Lindstrom spends 300 days on the road every year. Anyone in research knows that a considerable amount of time is spent doing the actual research. He is a tourist and a travel bug, and mentions this every so often in the book which makes me think that he is trying too hard to impress the reader with his lifestyle rather than his findings.

2. Whenever I read through a "research", I always check the footnotes and bibliography. It seems that his "findings" is just a collection of SECOND HAND INFORMATION taken from different websites and books. I just cannot find anything in the book that is authentically his.

3. Any researcher exposes their own doubts or at least mentions a small number of error. But this guy talks as if he is infallible!

4. The findings are not impressive, fascinating nor shocking. He tries too hard to tell the reader who he knows and where he's been. The last sentence on the page of ACKNOWLEDGMENTS reads, " I feel like I'm at an Academy Awards ceremony - where's the statue?"

In conclusion, if Martin Lindstrom really knew what he was talking about, he would have known that his readers, when submitted to an fMRI brain scan, would produce negative reactions to this book...and would have never written it this way.

If he cut out the part at the beginning of every single chapter about how ground breaking his lastest experiment would be, I'd guess the book would be about 3/4 of it's length. Remove every sentence about how amazing the author himself is (apart from the study) and you'd probably have 70 pages. The only thing that kept me reading was the promise of some sort of never before learned lesson that never quite revealed itself.

This book was OK. I'm not sure I was really the target market for this short little something called a book. I like to read business books that a small business owner can get something out of. As far as I am concerned, this book is one for marketing professionals in LARGE companies that rely on traditional advertising as their marketing vehicle of choice. We all know that advertising is such a waste of money. And to read a book on how to get a little more value out of valueless advertising seems to me to be a waste, too. But that's just me. This book has an introduction and the following 11 chapters:

0. Introduction
1. The largest neuromarketing study ever conducted
2. Product placement, American Idol, and Ford's multi-million dollar mistake
3. Mirror neurons at work
4. Subliminal messaging, alive and well
5. Ritual, superstition, and why we buy
6. Faith, religion, and brands
7. The power of somatic markers
8. Selling to our senses
9. Neuromarketing and predicting the future
10. Sex in advertising
11. Brand new day

Before I started reading this book I thought it would be about "Why consumers buy." But after I scoped out the book jacket, the Intro, and skimmed the book, I quickly came to realize the book was simply a report of the findings from a pretty big neuromarketing study. You may ask: What is neuromarketing? Well, one source online says it is "a new field of marketing that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and effective response to marketing stimuli." I say it is the study of how people react to advertising messages.

Today most marketers (except those selling commodities from large companies) try to minimize wasting their marketing dollars on advertisements. If you are like most marketers, then this book will probably be a waste of time and money for you to consider. Get back to focusing on your Internet Marketing, Personal Networking, Book Authorship, semnars, and workshops. But if you rely heavily on advertising in magazines, newspapers, television, and online, then get this book and study it. It's pretty well written and kind of informative. 3.8 stars!

Some excellent revelations, but laboured the point too much with anecdotal examples throughout. I felt the whole book could be summarized to about 50 pages. Still, definitely worth buying.

Why I don't buy Buy-ology?

Sydney-based author Martin Lindstrom's Buy-ology might have made a brief appearance on the New York Times bestseller list in November but by my standards and those professional marketers, strategists and critics of neuroscience around the world, its a mishmash of spectacularly insubstantial claims drawn from a single set of research experiments backed by cribbed online references and enthusiastic, anectdotal and sometimes annoying marketing evangelism. ''

The whole premise of Buy-ology is that brand and purchase decisions are not made on any rational basis but by stimulation to certain sections of the brain. Lindstom's neuromarketing experiments use two types of brain-scan technology - functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and SST, an advanced form of electroencephalography (EEG) - to test how various marketing stimuli can affect the subconscious. While the book quotes a number of well known research studies and runs to over two hundred pages, less than a quarter is actually devoted to detailing and recording the results of its four experiments, its the entire basis for his argument.

So here's the four earth shattering results Lindstrom claims may set off "the biggest branding revolution in 50 years". It will save you buying this book.

The first experiment, using SST-ECG measured the impact of product placement in television programming and finds that " we have no memory of the brands that don't play an integral part of the storyline of a program". The second, using fMRI on cigarette smokers, tested the effects of "overt, direct and visually stimulating images" and its relationship with subliminal advertising, finding that its iconography and images themselves not logos that actually stimulate purchase behaviour. The third experiment using fMRI tested whether "sports, and sports heroes activate the same areas of the brand as religions did" showed "the emotions we experience when we are exposed to strong brands" is similar if not "almost identical" to the emotions generated by religious symbols. Finally, his fourth experiment, using fMRI on an unknown number of subjects (Lindstrom forgets to tell us how many participated in half these experiements) was designed to "determine whether a signature sound - like the Nokia ring tone - makes a brand more less attractive". The shocking result: most brands do well when "sound and vision are combined in a congruent way". Unless you're Nokia because after a decade or so of use, its ringtone now has a strong aural disassociation. Lindstrom found this result so disturbing he had to give the company a call and tell them!

Lindstrom claims all these "controversial" and "spectacular" findings come from a three-year, $7 million experiment testing 2081 volunteers in the US and Europe (he says they were also from Japan and China but I can't find these in the results). Buy-ology doesn't substantiate either the costs or the length of the study period. For example, the commercial cost of fMRI can be around US$525 per hour with standard scans taking around an hour. New fMRI scanners cost anywhere between US$1m and $2.3m and portable scanners around US$2m, so perhaps he had to buy a scanner or two but I seriously doubt this. The point is that he only conducted three fMRI experiments on at least 65 people. Also the standard cost of an ECG scan in the US can range from U$100 to more than $500, depending on the purpose and type of test i.e., asleep or awake, invasive vs non-invasive electrode implantation. Lindstrom's was non-invasive and his 400 subjects were awake. You do the math.

Untested is Lindstrom's discussion of mirror neurons, behavioural priming and somatic markers, which he tries to draw a line from his own experiments via some scholarly studies he found online. But Lindstrom's experiments do attract an even bigger question about neuroscience and marketing - whether this kind of research is actually a useful predictor of behaviour. Lindstrom might be fairly certain of this science but most critics of the use of such limited research insist it's too early in the field of neuromarketing to draw these kinds of absolute conclusions. According to Sheffield University School of Psychology Professor Lawrence Parsons, "we don't really know what we are seeing when we watch the brain work. Is it the thing itself - the thought, the flash of insight - or just an aspect of it, the bark rather than the dog?"

It's clear to me Lindstrom's claims require substantial research to draw any proveablel link between the outcomes of these experiments and predictors of future purchase behaviour. Right now his results just show a degree of correlation between stimulation and behaviour, they don't prove a single basis of causation.

Last year I read a New Yorker article on the roots of psychopathy, describing how researchers have being using a portable fMRI scanner to scan the brains of US prison inmates to uncover the basis of psychopathy. It suggests that if a "biological basis for psychopathy could be established" then pharmacological treatments could be developed. Might not similar treatments be developed for behaviours such as impulse buying and mall rage? These experiments have been conducted for years and have drawn the kinds of accusations which put them in the same category as nineteenth century phrenology. Yet, unlike Lindstrom, none of these researchers dare draw any final conclusions. The field, like neuromarketing is so new, researchers believe they will need more to spend the next ten years and maybe another 10000 scans linked to prisoner DNA, biographical data and case histories before anyone thinks the data makes sense.

In one interview last year Lindstrom said, "If I wrote a serious, heavy book, no consumers would read it" and a trawl through Amazon reader reviews on Buy-ology will confirm that. A Some advertising agency planners might like this book and a few business and industry people might be gobsmacked, but you won't read anything here you don't already know already or can't find online.