Martin Lindstrom is creeped out by the way marketing companies can peer into our psyches by scanning our credit card history. He is appalled by the way they prey on our biologically based fears and passions. He thinks they’re often sneaky, underhanded, cunning. And he accuses them of lying on a regular basis.
Mr. Lindstrom should know: For more than two decades, he’s trotted around the globe on the dime of marketing companies as a highly paid branding expert, leveraging some of those very techniques to help push the buttons to get us to buy more stuff.
But over the past few years, he’s had a change of heart: Call him the reformed smoker of the advertising world. Because now, though he continues to count multinationals like McDonald’s and Lego as clients, he also fashions himself as a latter-day Ralph Nader, sounding the warning bells about the damages wrought by the marketing industry. His 2008 book, Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy, explored the burgeoning practice of neuromarketing: scanning people’s brains to scientifically understand what stimuli they best respond to (and therefore how best to persuade consumers). It sold 1.5 million copies around the world, and counted many in the industry as its greatest admirers.
With Brandwashed, his new book out this week, Mr. Lindstrom is sharpening his bite of the hand that feeds him. Its no-nonsense, attention-grabbing (which is to say, cannily marketed) subtitle? Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy.
“If I was to write a book called Ethics in Advertising or something, no one would read it except my mom and dad,” he said this week, on the phone from his room at the Mandarin Oriental in New York. (While his company Buyology Inc. is based in Manhattan, the Danish-born Mr. Lindstrom lives in Sydney, Australia. Though, since he’s on the road by his estimation about 300 days a year, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where he lives.) In Buyology, his concern over questionable ethics focused most famously on neuromarketing: he argued for industry standards that banned both efforts to find the brain’s “buy buttons” and the potential practice of implanting persuasive suggestions while a subject is under a researcher’s control.
With Brandwashed, Mr. Lindstrom isn’t calling for a ban on any specific marketing practice; rather, he believes that educating people on the darker arts of marketing will make them savvier, more skeptical consumers – who will, if need be, put the screws to companies.
To that end, he offers up a comprehensive catalogue of shady tactics, from the classic and unsurprising (sex sells) to the cutting-edge (forget viral videos; how about marketing to fetuses?). He puts forward evidence that the particular buzz made by a ringing iPhone is calibrated to tap something deep in our brains that makes us feel love. He runs through dozens of examples of marketers inappropriately targeting children with products that sexualize them.
He unfolds endless entertaining tales about double-talking companies, the pull of nostalgia and the seductions of so-called game-based marketing (FourSquare, Groupon). And he includes a marvellous dissection of the beguiling Whole Foods retail experience, from the faux old-timey chalkboards to the fresh flowers at the front of the store, to the Odwalla juice bottles gently sweating away atop a bed of shaved ice.
He hopes, he says, that revealing these tactics will force companies to become more transparent in their operations.
