Lindstrom is a highly successful marketing expert -- a fact he makes a point of discussing at great length -- who was involved with some studies using fMRI brain scans to investigate people's responses to various forms of advertising. This seems like a really interesting topic to me, but unfortunately his explanations of the experiments and their results are often vague, confusing, and/or scientifically iffy. I have absolutely no idea, for instance, how he gets from the stated results of the experiments on product placement to the conclusions he eventually asserts. Which is a pity, because I'm kind of interested to know whether product placement works, but I feel like I might actually know less about it now than I did going in, because I've got no idea which of several possible things I should believe.

I also found aspects of the way the book is written extremely irritating. Lindstrom uses a lot of examples when talking about how advertisers appeal to our irrational, subconscious minds, repeatedly inviting us to "imagine you're doing X" or "remember when you did Y." In principle this is great; it's important be able to relate this stuff to our own experiences if we're going to understand it properly. And yet every single time he launched into the second person, I found myself protesting. Almost none of it bore any resemblance to my own experiences at all, often to a degree that was downright offensive. If I'm invited to imagine myself in a clothing store with the ambiance of a trendy night club full of beautiful young things in hip clothes, my irrational inner brain is not flooding itself with happy reward chemicals as it imagines how purchasing their clothes will make me cool like them. My irrational inner brain is flooding me with nasty fight-or-flight chemicals and screaming things like, "Aaaaah! It's the popular kids who made my life hell in junior high! Must get out before the social humiliation starts! The tedious shallowness, it burns!" Now, I know perfectly well that I'm not remotely immune to the kind of influences and irrational thought processes that Lindstrom's talking about here. I know that because I've read better books than this that dealt with the subject by offering up examples and explanations that I could actually relate to. But if this book were my only encounter with these ideas, I'm almost certain that I'd walk away from it thinking that either it was all complete crap or else I was clearly a special snowflake to whom such normal human foibles did not apply. This strikes me as a pretty serious failure, but I think it has provided me with a potential insight into why the vast majority of advertising does absolutely nothing for me, or else has a deeply negative effect. It really just isn't aimed at me. I am, not, on reflection, entirely sure that hotshot ad execs are even aware that people like me exist. My guess is that they just don't tend to have many nerds in their social circles.

It's funny. Lindstrom takes great pains to assure the reader that there's nothing "creepy" about the whole brain-scanning thing, reassuring us that, hey, he's a consumer, too, and isn't remotely interesting in brainwashing people into buying things they don't want. He's all about helping companies make products people genuinely want, he says, and his main goal is to show us how this advertising stuff works so we can become more aware and less easily manipulated. Well, I think that's an excellent and worthy goal, and I don't really doubt that he means it. And yet, in some hard-to-pin down but deeply disturbing way, he just comes across to me as... smarmy. This is no doubt largely an irrational emotional response on my part, and I might be inclined to feel a little bad about it, except that there's something richly, stupidly ironic about having that reaction to the work of someone who's supposedly an expert on making people feel good about the stuff he's selling.

Anyway, there are books which offer much better treatments of kind of psychology Lindstrom is talking about here, minus his focus on "branding." Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational comes to mind, and I would definitely recommend that over this. ( )

I read this book in one day . I learned a lot of interesting information about marketing, what works and what doesn't. I enjoyed learning about the research into neuromarketing and how that technology will make it possible for advertisers to tailor campaigns to sell us even more of what we may or may not need. I think consumer awareness is important.

Because I read the book so fast, I didn't notice the self-promotion that many other reviewers did. Neurology and marketing are two topics of great interest to me, and if you share those interests, this is a light and informative read. ( )

The book could have been a lot shorter, and Lindstrom is quit self promoting. I usually like this kind of book so I ended up disappointed. ( )

I've read and enjoyed many books about behavioral economics, but this one was disappointing. One thing I disliked was the author's arrogance. In the introduction, he asks himself he bothered "to write a book about neuromarketing? After all, I run several businesses, I constantly fly all over the globe advising top executives -- heck, I'm home only sixty days out of the year. So why did I take time out of my already time-starved schedule to launch the most extensive study of its kind ever conducted" (p. 2)? While less blatant, his self promotion occurs throughout the book.

Neuromarketing involves directly measuring consumers' responses to pitches through brain imaging and other technology. Lindstrom believes that its effect on marketing will be revolutionary and that the 2008 presidential campaigns will be the last ones not making the use of neuromarketing. While Lindstrom pays lip service to helping consumers better understand their behavior, the book does not (and really could not) live up to that claim. Lindstrom's sympathies are 100% behind the advertisers: "[T]he more companies know about our subconscious needs and desires, the more useful, meaningful products they will bring to the market....Seen in this light, brain-scanning, used ethically, will end up benefiting us all" (p. 5). The claim is unjustified by his later conclusions. For example, when discussing the impact of scent, he envisions a future in which "the sidewalk is awash with smells and sounds. A Whiff of lemon from a store selling a new, must-have sneaker. A burst of fresh orange from a sporting goods emporium. A clingy perfume wafting from the doors of a just-opening hotel" (p. 164).

The book does have some interesting information and factoids, especially in the discussion on product placement, such as Tom Cruise's accessories in Top Gun: "[W]hen the actor alit from his fighter jet clad in Air Force leathers and Aviator Ray-Bans, the sunglasses maker saw an additional boost of 40 percent to its bottom line....Sales of leather aviator jackets surged as well, as did Air Force and Navy recruitment, the latter increasing by 500 percent" (p. 45).

While this is the only book I've seen that specifically focuses on neuromarketing, there are other books I would recommend instead of this one for people with broader interests about how we make decisions, such as "Why We Buy" by Paco Underhill, "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, "Sway" by Ori Brafman, and "Nudge" by Richard Thaler. The latter is noteworthy in being explicitly focused on how to steer people to behave in their own interests, making it the opposite of Lindstrom's book. ( )

Interesting insight into what triggers a "relationship" between product and buyer. What I learned: try and activate an association between your product and all 5 senses to establish a bond. Smell and sound are possibly more powerful than sight alone. ( )