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Martin Lindstrom

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy Hardcover – October 21, 2008

by Martin Lindstrom (Author), Paco Underhill (Foreword)

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How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today’s message-cluttered world? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds, we’re barely aware of them?

In BUYOLOGY, Lindstrom presents the astonishing findings from his groundbreaking, three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy. Among his finding:

Gruesome health warnings on cigarette packages not only fail to discourage smoking, they actually make smokers want to light up.

Despite government bans, subliminal advertising still surrounds us – from bars to highway billboards to supermarket shelves.

"Cool” brands, like iPods trigger our mating instincts.

Other senses – smell, touch, and sound - are so powerful, they physically arouse us when we see a product.

Sex doesn't sell. In many cases,people in skimpy clothing and suggestive poses not only fail to persuade us to buy products - they often turn us away .

Companies routinetly copy from the world of religion and create rituals – like drinking a Corona with a lime – to capture our hard-earned dollars.

Filled with entertaining inside stories about how we respond to such well-known brands as Marlboro, Nokia, Calvin Klein, Ford, and American Idol, BUYOLOGY is a fascinating and shocking journey into the mind of today’s consumer that will captivate anyone who’s been seduced – or turned off – by marketers’ relentless attempts to win our loyalty, our money, and our minds. Includes a foreword by Paco Underhill.

Print length

241 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Doubleday
Publication date

October 21, 2008
Dimensions

5.83 x 1.02 x 8.51 inches
ISBN-10

0385523882
ISBN-13

978-0385523882
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A page-turner"
-Newsweek

" Lindstrom dishes up results, alongside a buffet of past research, with clear writing and deft reasoning."
-Fast Company

“Lindstrom … has an encyclopedic knowledge of advertising history and an abundance of real-world business experience”
-The Washington Post

“Martin Lindstrom, the boy wonder of branding, tells that the future of shopping is all in the mind”
-The Sunday Times (UK)

“Shatters conventional wisdom”
- CNBC

"...brings together a great many strands of research to build a fascinating case. The writing is snappy and the book’s a page turner"
-BBC Focus Magazine

“Lindstrom's research should be of interest to any company launching a new product or brand”
-USA Today

"Lindstrom...has an original, inquisitive mind...His new book is a fascinating look at how consumers perceive logos, ads, commercials, brands, and products."
-Time

“When someone tells you that a book is a "page-turner," you probably think of the latest top-list best-seller. Now you'll think of Buyology….Pick up a copy of this book and get one of those highlighting thingamajiggies before you fix your ad budget for the new year. "Buyology" is definitely money well-spent.”
-The Eagle Tribune

“An entertaining and informative tome”
-The Seattle Examiner

“Why do rational people act irrationally? Written like a fast paced detective novel, "Buyology" unveils what neuromarketers know about our decision making so we can buy and sell more insightfully."
- Dr. Mehmet C Oz Professor of Surgery, Columbia University, and author of YOU -The Owner’s Manual

“Move over Tipping Point and Made to Stick because there’s a new book in town: Buyology. This book lights the way for smart marketers and entrepreneurs.”
-Guy Kawasaki, Author of The Art of the Start

"Martin Lindstrom is one of branding's most original thinkers"
-Robert A. Eckert, CEO & Chairman, Mattel, Inc.

“Lindstrom takes us on a fascinating journey inside the consumer brain. Why do we make the decisions we do? Surprising and eye opening, Buyology is a must for anyone conducting a marketing campaign.”
-Ori Brafman, author of the bestselling book, Sway

"Full of intriguing stories on how the brain, brands and emotions drive consumer choice. Martin Lindstrom’s brilliant blending of marketing and neuroscience supplies us with a deeper understanding of the dynamic, largely unconscious forces that shape our decision making. One reading of this book and you will look at consumer and producer behavior in an entirely new light.”
-Philip Kotler, Ph.D., S. C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

"A riveting read. Challenging, exciting, provocative, clever, and, even more importantly, useful!"
-Andrew Robertson, CEO & President, BBDO Worldwide

Lindstrom can be a charming writer. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of advertising history and an abundance of real-world business experience

About the Author

MARTIN LINDSTROM was voted one world's 100 most influential people of 2009 by Time Magazine for his work on neuromarketing. With a global audience of over a million people, Lindstrom,one of the world's most respected marketing gurus, spends 300 days on the road every year, advising top executives of companies including McDonald's Corporation, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Microsoft, The Walt Disney Company and GlaxoSmithKline. He has been featured in The Washington Post, USA TODAY, Fast Company, and more. His previous book, BRANDsense, was acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best marketing books ever published.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Not surprisingly, the smokers were on edge, ﬁdgety, not sure what to expect.

Barely noticing the rain and overcast skies, they clumped together outside the medical building in London, England, that houses the Centre for NeuroImaging Sciences. Some were self- described social smokers–a cigarette in the morning, a second snuck in during lunch hour, maybe half-a- dozen more if they went out carousing with their friends at night. Others confessed to being longtime two-pack-a-day addicts. All of them pledged their allegiance to a single brand, whether it was Marlboros or Camels. Under the rules of the study, they knew they wouldn’t be allowed to smoke for the next four hours, so they were busy stockpiling as much tar and nicotine inside their systems as they could. In between drags, they swapped lighters, matches, smoke rings, apprehensions: Will this hurt? George Orwell would love this. Do you think the machine will be able to read my mind?

Inside the building, the setting was, as beﬁts a medical laboratory, antiseptic, no- nonsense, and soothingly soulless–all cool white corridors and ﬂannel gray doors. As the study got under way I took a perch behind a wide glass window inside a cockpit-like control booth among a cluster of desks, digital equipment, three enormous computers, and a bunch of white-smocked researchers. I was looking over a room dominated by an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, an enormous, $4 million machine that looks like a giant sculpted doughnut, albeit one with a very long, very hard tongue. As the most advanced brain- scanning technique available today, fMRI measures the magnetic properties of hemoglobin, the components in red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body. In other words, fMRI measures the amount of oxygenated blood throughout the brain and can pinpoint an area as small as one millimeter (that’s 0.03937 of an inch). You see, when a brain is operating on a speciﬁc task, it demands more fuel–mainly oxygen and glucose. So the harder a region of the brain is working, the greater its fuel consumption, and the greater the ﬂow of oxygenated blood will be to that site. So during fMRI, when a portion of the brain is in use, that region will light up like a red-hot ﬂare. By tracking this activation, neuroscientists can determine what speciﬁc areas in the brain are working at any given time.
Neuroscientists traditionally use this 32-ton, SUV-sized instrument to diagnose tumors, strokes, joint injuries, and other medical conditions that frustrate the abilities of X-rays and CT scans. Neuropsychiatrists have found fMRI useful in shedding light on certain hard-to-treat psychiatric conditions, including psychosis, sociopathy, and bipolar illness. But those smokers pufﬁng and chatting and pacing in the waiting room weren’t ill or in any kind of distress. Along with a similar sample of smokers in the United States, they were carefully chosen participants in a groundbreaking neuromarketing study who were helping me get to the bottom–or the brain–of a mystery that had been confounding health professionals, cigarette companies, and smokers and nonsmokers alike for decades.

For a long time, I’d noticed how the prominently placed health warnings on cigarette boxes seemed to have bizarrely little, if any, effect on smokers. Smoking causes fatal lung cancer. Smoking causes emphysema. Smoking while pregnant causes birth defects. Fairly straightforward stuff. Hard to argue with. And those are just the soft- pedaled American warnings. European cigarette makers place their warnings in coal-black, Magic Marker—thick frames, making them even harder to miss. In Portugal, dwarfing the dromedary on Camel packs, are words even a kid could understand: Fumar Mata. Smoking kills. But nothing comes even close to the cigarette warnings from Canada, Thailand, Australia, Brazil–and soon the U.K. They’re gorily, forensically true-to-life, showing full- color images of lung tumors, gangrenous feet and toes, and the open sores and disintegrating teeth that accompany mouth and throat cancers.
You’d think these graphic images would stop most smokers in their tracks. So why, in 2006, despite worldwide tobacco advertising bans, outspoken and frequent health warnings from the medical community, and massive government investment in antismoking campaigns, did global consumers continue to smoke a whopping 5,763 billion cigarettes, a ﬁgure which doesn’t include duty-free cigarettes, or the huge international black market trade? (I was once in an Australian convenience store where I overheard the clerk asking a smoker, “Do you want the pack with the picture of the lungs, the heart, or the feet?” How often did this happen, I asked the clerk? Fifty percent of the time that customers asked for cigarettes, he told me.) Despite what is now known about smoking, it’s estimated that about one-third of adult males across the globe continue to light up. Approximately 15 billion cigarettes are sold every day–that’s 10 million cigarettes sold a minute. In China, where untold millions of smokers believe that cigarettes can cure Parkinson’s disease, relieve symptoms of schizophrenia, boost the efﬁcacy of brain cells, and improve their performance at work, over 300 million people,1 including 60 percent of all male doctors, smoke. With annual sales of 1.8 trillion cigarettes, the Chinese monopoly is responsible for roughly one-third of all cigarettes being smoked on earth today2–a large percentage of the 1.4 billion people using tobacco, which, according to World Bank projections, is expected to increase to roughly 1.6 billion by 2025 (though China consumes more cigarettes than the United States, Russia, Japan, and Indonesia combined).
In the Western world, nicotine addiction still ranks as an enormous concern. Smoking is the biggest killer in Spain today, with ﬁfty thousand smoking- related deaths annually. In the U.K., roughly one-third of all adults under the age of sixty-ﬁve light up, while approximately 42 percent of people under sixty-ﬁve are exposed to tobacco smoke at home.3 Twelve times more British people have died from smoking than died in World War II. According to the American Lung Association, smoking- related diseases affect roughly 438,000 American lives a year, “including those affected indirectly, such as babies born prematurely due to prenatal maternal smoking and victims of ‘secondhand’ exposure to tobacco’s carcinogens.” The health-care costs in the United States alone? Over $167 billion a year.4 And yet cigarette companies keep coming up with innovative ways to kill us. For example, Philip Morris’s latest weapon against workplace smoking bans is Marlboro Intense, a smaller, high-tar cigarette–seven puffs worth–that can be consumed in stolen moments in between meetings, phone calls, and PowerPoint presentations.5

It makes no sense. Are smokers selectively blind to warning labels? Do they think, to a man or a woman, Yes, but I’m the exception here? Are they showing the world some giant act of bravado? Do they secretly believe they are immortal? Or do they know the health dangers and just not care?
That’s what I was hoping to use fMRI technology to ﬁnd out. The thirty-two smokers in today’s study? They were among the 2,081 volunteers from America, England, Germany, Japan, and the Republic of China that I’d enlisted for the largest, most revolutionary neuromarketing experiment in history.
It was twenty-ﬁve times larger than any neuromarketing study ever before attempted. Using the most cutting-edge scientiﬁc tools available, it revealed the hidden truths behind how branding and marketing messages work on the human brain, how our truest selves react to stimuli at a level far deeper than conscious thought, and how our unconscious minds control our behavior (usually the opposite of how we think we behave). In other words, I’d set off on a quest to investigate some of the biggest puzzles and issues facing consumers, businesses, advertisers, and governments today.

For example, does product placement really work? (The answer, I found out, is a qualiﬁed no.) How powerful are brand logos? (Fragrance and sound are more potent than any logo alone.) Does subliminal advertising still take place? (Yes, and it probably inﬂuenced what you picked up at the convenience store the other day.) Is our buying behavior affected by the world’s major religions? (You bet, and increasingly so.) What effect do disclaimers and health warnings have on us? (Read on.) Does sex in advertising work (not really) and how could it possibly get more explicit than it is now? (You just watch.)
Beginning in 2004, from start to ﬁnish, our study took up nearly three years of my life, cost approximately $7 million (provided by eight multinational companies), comprised multiple experiments, and involved thousands of subjects from across the globe, as well as two hundred researchers, ten professors and doctors, and an ethics committee. And it employed two of the most sophisticated brain- scanning instruments in the world: the fMRI and an advanced version of the electroencephalograph known as the SST, short for steady-state typography, which tracks rapid brain waves in real time. The research team was overseen by Dr. Gemma Calvert, who holds the Chair in Applied Neuroimaging at the University of Warwick, England, and is the founder of Neurosense in Oxford, and Professor Richard Silberstein, the CEO of Neuro-Insight in Australia. And the results? Well, all I’ll say for now is that they’ll transform the way you think ab...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday; First Edition (October 21, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 241 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385523882
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385523882
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.83 x 1.02 x 8.51 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #827,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #703 in Marketing & Consumer Behavior
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Customer Reviews:
4.4 1,065 ratings

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Martin Lindstrom

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Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, a global branding & culture transformation firm, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries.

TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People,” and for five years running, Thinkers50, has selected Lindstrom to be among the world’s top 50 business thinkers. Among the companies he advises are Burger King, Lowes, Boar’s Head, Beverly Hills Hotels, Pepsi, Nestle and Google.

Lindstrom is the author of seven books including several New York Times bestsellers that have been translated into 60 languages. The Wall-Street Journal praised his book Brand Sense as “one of the five best marketing books ever published,” and his book Small Data as “revolutionary,” and TIME called his book Buyology “a breakthrough in branding.”

Lindfstrom's much anticipated new book, The Ministry Of Common Sense is launching Jan 2021 - Pre-orders with free training packages available now.

Visit martinlindstrom.com/commonsense for more!

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is limited if not completely useless, because in most cases people simply don't know

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 3, 2017

Verified Purchase

Essentially, we rarely have any rational control over why we buy some products and not others. This is because our brain subconsciously chooses for us. Traditional marketing methods no longer work in our society and the reasons we think we buy are very deceptive. Martin Lindstrom’s, author of Buyology – Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, main objective is how neuromarketing will change marketing strategies in the future and help us understand the science behind why we buy in relation to the goal of marketers.
The main thesis of Lindstrom is expressed in how everything customers believe about why we buy is wrong. Traditional market research, which according to Lindstrom consists of people being directly asked why they made a particular purchase decision, is limited if not completely useless, because in most cases people simply don't know, or are not aware of what drives their purchases. Neuro-marketing is Lindstrom's answer and his novel certainly goes a long way towards testing his ideas, some common sense and some controversial. As a result, Lindstrom’s key arguments are put together as a series of experiments to prove, disprove, or explore theories revolving around what drives customers to buy or not to buy.
Product placement doesn’t work because we have to be emotionally engaged in what we see. Product integration, however, does work to an extent if it is continuously brought up, focused on and emphasized subtly. We can especially see this in the real world through visual advertising. Apparently, people remembered 2.21 ads in 2007 (pg.38). Ultimately, ads are so repetitive that our brains block it out. People no longer watch or listen to them, it is simply a break between television shows and movies. Companies are now turning to product integration within media and entertainment in order to involve their products in television and music.
Subliminal messaging is everywhere and still highly effective. However, the effectiveness of a company’s logo is dying and the future lies in mirror neurons and logo-free advertising. Lindstrom pushes the idea that logos can even reduce sales of a product for being too loud, causing the customer to mentally shut it out. This phenomenon is called “unconscious emotion” (pg.76). Our brains can remember and recall a visual or brand even before we have consciously realized what it is. Therefore, our brain decides we will buy something before we have even made the conscious decision to do so. For example, the company Marlboro uses everyday objects and styles, such as color schemes and similar symbols, in order to represent the appearance of a Marlboro ad/environment without flaunting their logo. We only need a visual image that reminds us of a product/brand for it to register in our brains and cause a reaction.
There is also a link between brands and rituals that exist along with an emotional attachment that stimulates us to buy. Rituals are common within our fast-paced society in an attempt for us to gain some control over our lives. Rituals within products give an “illusion of comfort and belonging” (pg.99). Customers also have a sense of loyalty to a preferred brand, similar to a religious feeling, for products such as shampoo, coffee, and cookies which encourages them to keep buying a specific product. For instance, Nabisco, the parent company who manufactures Oreo cookies, partnered with the “Got Milk?” campaign. This marketing strategy enables customers to associate a brand with a nationwide ritual of dipping Oreos into milk. This creates a sense of familiarity and unity, which ultimately furthers their sales.
Living in an overwhelming advertising world of advanced technology, we are highly over stimulated. This causes us to shut down part of our brain to protect it from the immense amount of advertisements. In Lindstrom’s experiment, he found that visual stimulation is more effective if combined with sounds and smell for a more complete experience of the product. He exposed the qualities of using multiple senses to improve a product’s “sensory brand” (pg.143). While sight is the most commonly used sense in marketing, sounds and smell can be far more effective for reaching customers– particularly when paired with visual elements. Color is also very powerful in connecting customers visually with a logo or brand because it can increase chances of recognition by 80%.
The discussion the author presents to support his discoveries along with real life examples are very insightful. The sections of his book on sensory branding I thought were most applicable to the real world. Many readers will be shocked by the fact that a logo is not an important aspect of the brand, rather our smell and sound associations can have a much stronger effect, but only if we are unaware of being advertised to. Another really interesting result a study came up with was that viewing cigarette advertising with morbid warnings wasn't an effective strategy toward smoking prevention. Experiment results indicated that when shown multiple images of cigarette packet health warnings, a “craving spot” within subjects’ brain was actually stimulated (pg.14). This experiment, despite almost all subjects claiming they were affected by the health warnings, produced results which suggested they weren’t. The warnings apparently had no effect on discouraging people from smoking; instead it increased their desire to. This demonstrates that what we say we think or feel, is often not mirrored by our brain. Apparently the billions spent on health campaigns are actually helping the tobacco industry as ten million cigarettes are sold every minute. We may think we understand why we buy, but looking closely at our brain suggests very differently.
However, Lindstrom doesn't generally explore possible interpretations for his findings. Whenever his hypotheses were confirmed, Lindstrom seemed content and only occasionally attempted to explain why it might be so. He also never includes the measures of actual behavior, being satisfied with only measuring the brain activity and asking various standard market research questions. The main problem I found with Lindstrom’s ground-breaking claims were that the results created a hype that the book fails to satisfy. Despite all the valuable information, he never explained how we could apply his theories to ourselves and the world around us. Even though it is not as ground breaking as it claims to be, I recommend that it is definitely still worth picking up, whether you are a market researcher, advertiser or a general reader interested in neuro-marketing.
In conclusion, what I have learned from this book is that we are irrational buyers when it comes to shopping. This is because the emotions triggered in our subconscious mind make up 90% of our purchase decisions compared to the 10% that is associated with our conscious rational brain (pg.195). Therefore, people can’t often explain why we prefer a particular brand for purses, sneakers, or electronic devices beyond stating the obvious attributes. Learning to become more aware of how unconscious desires motivate our buying behavior will become an important marketing tool and Buyology can certainly help in gaining such awareness. Although there is still much to discover about the science behind why we buy - neuroscience is leading the way.

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Book Review

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 5, 2011

Verified Purchase

"Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why we Buy" by Mark Lindstrom is an eye opening look at the future of advertising and one's own subconscious. Lindstrom was driven to find out why people chose Corona over Budweiser or McDonald's over Wendy's. That is he wanted to know what was a consumer's "buy button" that persuaded them to buy one brand over another. The book overturns consumers' and even professional advertisers' convictions about the effects of advertising and the reasoning behind the choices people make. Lindstrom does all of this through the use of brain scanning technology such as fMRI machines to gaze into consumers' impulses and hidden desires that they may be unwilling to or unknowingly unable to voice. By looking at an fMRI scan of a consumer's brain, it allows scientists to see what parts of the brain a visual image they are looking at and/or decision they are making activates. This then allows science, not personal confessions, to reveal the "naked truth" about consumer behavior. Lindstrom calls the marketing practice that uses the fMRI technology to reveal consumer behavior "neuromarketing" and says that the key to understanding consumer behavior is to unlock what he calls "buyology" or the subconscious drivers of people's purchasing decisions.
Naturally, such power to unlock what motivates people to purchase a certain brand name or even to vote on a candidate is often approached with apprehension by the general public, if not disdain. Lindstrom, however, sees neuromarketing and the realities it reveals as a way for people to have more control, not less, because they too will understand why they would rather buy a Tiffany & Co. ring that comes in the iconic light blue box over the same ring at a lesser known store. He argues that now consumers can be more in tune about how advertisers might be targeting their "buy button." Lindstrom acknowledges the ability of companies to unethically use such revealing information about people's behavior but he also says that it gives companies a chance to bring more products and services to the market that better serve the public's needs and wants. Some of the areas that Lindstrom explores in his three year, seven million dollar neuromarketing research project is the effects and prevalence of subliminal advertising, how powerful are brand logos in reality, and does sex in advertising really work.
A classic example that Lindstrom gives about how consumers are not good at reporting how they really behave or feel is the study he did on the effects of cigarette health warning labels. The fMRI scans on a group of smokers showed that cigarette warning labels activated the nucleus accumbens, the part of the brain that lights up when people are craving something. This meant that not only did the health warning labels not deter smokers it actually encouraged them to light up a cigarette. Most smokers who were tested said that yes warning labels did work and that they were concerned about the negative health consequences. Yet, it turns out that the very thing that was supposed to reduce lung cancer and curb smoking, warning labels, is actually an enormously free and affective marketing tool for the tobacco companies.
Lindstrom further points out that people's brains are constantly flooded with information, most of which never makes it into our long-term memory and is simply discarded as superfluous. This process is ongoing and unconscious to the consumer. This is why product placement he says is a waste of company money. Unless the product has a fundamental part in the storyline, viewers simply tune out all the rest.
With eight out of ten new products failing within the first three months, traditional advertising techniques are not working. Lindstrom accurately realizes the importance of science research in revealing the truth about what drives and influences consumers. He says, "Marketers and advertisers... have spent over a century throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it will stick." On the other hand, Lindstrom and companies are now taking a more scientific approach that he calls neuromarketing to take out much of the guessing game in advertising. Though he acknowledges that neuromarketing cannot pinpoint exactly what triggers a consumer's "buy button," he hopes it will predict trends that will change the course of future commerce. Whether readers doubt that fMRI types of technology and neuromarketing can really reveal what drives consumer behavior or they fear its power will be unethically wielded, it is still an interesting transition in the field of advertising. The same technology used to detect cancer and psychological disorders is now being used to test the ability of company logos and religion to sway people's buying habits. This book is a necessity for anyone involved in the marketing business or whose company is spending millions of dollars on advertising every year.
However, one of the main advantages of "Buyology" is the book's ability to appeal to a wider audience. In order to be interested, enjoy, and learn something from the book, one does not have to be working at an advertising agency or be a marketing major. One simply needs to be a consumer. The science backing Lindstrom claims is sparse and presented in a way that anyone can understand. Also, while Lindstrom's long successful career as a marketing professional left him with a plethora of interesting experiences and insights to relay to his audience, his extensive use of anecdotes almost overshadows the science behind "buyology." Even though the book leaves some desire as to the scientific methodologies that would lend credit to his hypothesis, Lindstrom's life simulating examples to explain the implications and results of his experiments do make for an easy and captivating read that resonates with anyone who has ever watched a commercial or stepped into a store. Overall, this book is for anyone curious about the underpinning for doing what it is they do every day, make decisions and consume.

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Mike

How customers relate to and buy your products!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2023

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Helps a student or a marketer understand the many elements to a product purchase and why customers pick one product over another!

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AK

Some valid insights but definitely does not deliver on the 'how everything we believe on why we buy is wrong' promise

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 3, 2010

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In fact - pretty much everything people, who have been involved more than superficially in branding and marketing think about how people buy, is confirmed as right by the book.

The idea of neuromarketing is definitely appealing and the process of supplanting relatively basic survey type attitudinal research with a version of the approaches the author suggests (fMRI / SSL) is definitely valid and much to be recommended. Some of the insights so derived at the beginning of the book are pretty interesting.

Unfortunately the author does not dwell on how to apply th methods or go into sufficient detail on that part but launches into several 'myth-busting' episodes, which show more the author's lack of knowledge of the state of knowledge in psychology and consumer behaviour than that readers have unfounded preconceptions.

The author confounds the problem by first claiming how all survey based attitudinal research is largely useless and then proceeds to use only this type of data for several of the chapters to prove points later on in the book (for instance on the selling power of sex). I am not per se disagreeing with the conclusion that sex does not sell but the way this conclusion was reached was relatively dubious.

At the end of the day this is more about being a promotional tool for the author as a guru and his consulting services than it is a real scholarly or deeply insightful book. In addition to some interesting parts early on, I see the main benefit of it as a tool for nudging some dinosaurs still present in marketing departments to start thinking in the right direction - i.e. towards using proven tools that actually work, rather than tools that have always been used 'around here'.

There are some aspects of the book, which are particularly galling and which made me lower my rating from an otherwise possible 3 to 2 stars. First of all, the author seems largely blissfully unaware of research efforts predating him. Looking at something as old as Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man a lot of the same principles were known even back in 1962 - not from neuromarketing, for sure, but from direct marketing, where response to campaign stimuli could be measured directly and easily even back then. A lot of biases and heuritics described herein can be read about in much more detail (and more correctly) in something like Choices, Values, and Frames . The list goes on and on. Ignoring all the preceding research, which shows the same points and with ample empyrical evidence to back it up and claiming that the author was the first one to join the scientific method and marketing is laughable and simply detracts from the author's credibility.

On top of that he often gets caught in his own gurudom to the extent where judgements are passed without any justification, just because he finds them intuitively appealing (examples such as the tyre industry one have demonstrably been proven in research to be wrong). And then there is the general level of sloppiness creeping in, unbefitting to a brand expert - Toyota Scion anyone? Energizer bunny being unique (how about the practically identical, down to the colour, Duracell bunny) and many others.

14 people found this helpful

Laura

Brilliant book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 29, 2016

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This is utterly fantastic. I am fascinated with the psychology behind buying, shopping and design of stores, and this book absolutely quenches my thirst for more knowledge on the subject. I've even managed to get my family to read this book, and they love it too!

It's great, easy to read and not too daunting like other text books can be on this matter. It is not theory based, rather written with the intent of educating everyone (rather than a tool for students).

Diggy

How everything we believe about why we buy is wrong? Well perhaps some things.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 14, 2014

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The subhead is a perfect example of the bold claims made in this book which are backed up by illogical conclusions and assumptions or are contradicted by the evidence presented. That said if you can put them to one side then there are some nuggets of gold to be found. Or as the book might say "Nuggets of gold are scattered across every page of this seminal, groundbreaking book."

One person found this helpful

Reece

Very readable, very entertaining

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 28, 2013

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This was a good, interesting and readable book, though somewhat superseded by his later book Brandwashed. If you're going to want a fuller picture then read this one of the two first. It's an interesting and easy read. I am not really able to comment on the quality of the science or whether it was fully peer-reviewed and/or replicated.

STEVEN THOMPSON

A good book, but more of an overview of his ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 14, 2014

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A good book, but more of an overview of his studies rather than any in-depth insight or actual technical information. It#'s quite feelgood, quite useful, quite interesting but not enough of any of these to be rated any higher. It's a shame, because it could have delivered so much more.

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