Martin Lindstrom (1) (1970–)
Author of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
For other authors named Martin Lindstrom, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Martin Lindstrom was born in Denmark in 1970. He is the author of Brand Building on the Internet, Clicks, Bricks and Brands, Brandchild: Insights into the Minds of Today's Global Kids: Understanding Their Relationship with Brands, Brandsense: Building Powerful Brands Through Touch, Taste, Smell, show more Sight & Sound, Buyology: The Truth About Why We Buy, Brandwash: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, and Small Data: The Tiny Clues that Uncover Huge Trends. He is a columnist for Fast Company, Time Magazine, and Harvard Business Review. His work can also be seen on NBC's Today show. He has appeared in a movie documentary and has made other movie and television appearances. In 2009, Time Magazine included him in their list of the top 100 Most Influential People in The World. He is the founding partner and Chairman of the Board of Buyology Inc. and Director of Brand Sense Agency. show less
Image credit: Martin Lindstrom. Photo by Luc Van Braekel.
Works by Martin Lindstrom
Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy (2010) 365 copies, 23 reviews
BRANDchild: Insights into the Minds of Today's Global Kids: Understanding Their Relationship with Brands (2003) 60 copies
The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS (2021) 34 copies
This is Your Buyology 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1970
- Gender
- male
- Short biography
- MARTIN LINDSTROM, is the CEO and Chairman of the LINDSTROM company and the Chairman of BUYOLOGY INC. As one of the world’s most respected marketing gurus, he advises top executives at companies including the McDonald’s Corporation, Nestlé, American Express, Microsoft, The Walt Disney Company and GlaxoSmithKline. Martin Lindstrom speaks to a global audience of close to a million people every year. He has been featured in numerous publications, including USA TODAY, Fortune, and The Washington Post, and his previous book, BRAND sense, was acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best marketing books ever published. His five books on branding have been translated into twenty-five languages.
- Nationality
- Denmark
- Associated Place (for map)
- Denmark
Members
Reviews
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 show more 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 to 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 interested 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 the 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. show less
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 to 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 interested 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 the 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. show less
Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy by Martin Lindstrom
I have a lot of criticisms of this, but I'll stick with my gravest. First, the way Lindstrom interprets psychological and other research doesn't always match how I'd interpret it. For example, if you were to hook me up to a plethysmograph (you can't, but that's not the point), you might find that I was physiologically aroused by a stimulus. That's a far different phenomenon than my acting on that arousal. Lindstrom consistently conflates the two. Second, his idea of consumers as essentially show more mindless bumpkins who are easily suckered and misled doesn't inspire my trust his motives. Third, based on this world view, Lindstrom assigns warrantless motivations to consumers. For example, he asserts that we don't choose the first item from a shelf but reach behind it for the second because we think it's cleaner. To test this hypothesis, I surveyed random family members and friends in situ at the grocery. I didn't interview those who took the first item. They are evidently outliers, even though it was true of most of them. I asked those who reached behind for the second item why they were doing so. Nobody said it was because it was cleaner. For perishables, they said it was because items with a longer time to pull date were further back. For shelved items, they said it was because the ones in the front were dented or dinged (which they were). The only person to cite cleanliness pointed out the filthy children being allowed to paw at the lower cans and boxes. I'd like a million dollars for my fab-o study, please.
There's not a lot here that's not obvious or that you didn't read in an expose 40 years ago. Producers want to sell things. Advertisers misrepresent their products. I'm as easy to influence as anybody, but my behaviors aren't those of Lindstrom's herds of moo-cow consumers who don't seem to read the labels or Consumer Reports, or consider whether products actually work. show less
There's not a lot here that's not obvious or that you didn't read in an expose 40 years ago. Producers want to sell things. Advertisers misrepresent their products. I'm as easy to influence as anybody, but my behaviors aren't those of Lindstrom's herds of moo-cow consumers who don't seem to read the labels or Consumer Reports, or consider whether products actually work. show less
In an age of information overload, how do we navigate the highway and make good use of even a part of what we're exposed to? Or, how do we notice the things that we don't see? Martin Lindstrom thinks we need to pay attention to the small things and I thought he might be on to something. But I must disclose upfront that I do not buy into the specific small things he describes here. Much as when I read a book on some kind of psychology and find specificity incongruous, the small triggers that show more Lindstrom identifies in his anecdotes are certainly enlightening, but I cannot make the connection nor believe that there is an actual connection to the increased sales he claims. That I do not recall ever in my adult life being swayed by an ad might have something to do with that. I'm not a normal consumer, even if I possess normal consumer products...I own and use an iPhone and iPad not because they are intuitively easy to use (hardly) or stylishly designed (seriously?)...rather because my wife picked them once and it is inconvenient to switch now. So, in my mind, the rationale for marketing makes no sense.
And I would, of course, be wrong as I usually am. After all, billions are spent each year on marketing, so it must work, right? There is value here for any US company wishing to work into non-American markets. And for non-US companies wishing to market to Americans...
I totally agree that the small things that Lindstrom identifies and has shared here might well have some significance, but i think he's reaching...a lot. Did you know that "[g]enerally speaking, when toothbrushes stand in a holder, or a cup, or jar, their owners tend to be less sexually active than not."? I didn't. He observed that
When Euro Disney opened, it didn't fare well. The managers brought in Lindstrom to "help reverse the park's downward spiral." He tied a decrease in church attendance to religion's inability to give believers transformation and thought that Euro Disney needed to re-infuse superstition onto their experience. So they handed out packets of pixie dust and had visitors close their eyes, make a wish, and scatter the dust on Sleeping Beauty's pond. And miraculously, patronage was up. True story. Now, Lindstrom says the best person to observe a culture is one not from that culture, and I agree. I'm not a marketer, so the me who looks at that scenario comes to a much different conclusion... The park was more fun. The employees had fun, so people had fun, and it became the fun place it was expected to be. Or...it could be filling a superstitious need. I think William of Ockham might agree with me rather than Lindstrom. Whatever...it worked.
Now, as to the outsider observer...he's a Dane and in one section, nails Americans:
I need to qualify my disdain, for I do think a lot of what he says and observes does make sense, if not for the reasons he thinks. For example: From watching ESPN, I’d learned about the power of information bombardment. ESPN strafes its viewers with an almost hysterical amount of data and details. Scrolling boxes. Panels. Bars. Graphics. Multi-angle camera perspectives. When exposed to a surfeit of data, men tend to feel more masculine and in command. Do most men bother to decipher these boxes, panels, bars and graphics? No—but that’s not really the point.To sell something, particularly to Americans, especially to Americans, flash it up. More features, more gadgets, faster transitions.
What's missing in this are Lindstrom's failures. And he obviously has had to have some. Where are the Small Data guesses and associated misses? Lindstrom does talk about how he was missing somethings in the lead up to his brilliant breakthroughs, but always in support of one more piece of Small Data. But no one, really...no one... has a 100% track record. I'd like to hear more of where his wild theories didn't hold.
Even if I don't agree with his reasoning, whatever he does seems to work; at least for the stories he told here. My takeaways are of a real life Sherlock Holmes approach to observation: see and observe as much as possible. There may be connections to something you are working on. show less
And I would, of course, be wrong as I usually am. After all, billions are spent each year on marketing, so it must work, right? There is value here for any US company wishing to work into non-American markets. And for non-US companies wishing to market to Americans...
I totally agree that the small things that Lindstrom identifies and has shared here might well have some significance, but i think he's reaching...a lot. Did you know that "[g]enerally speaking, when toothbrushes stand in a holder, or a cup, or jar, their owners tend to be less sexually active than not."? I didn't. He observed that
The clocks in practically every home, as well as most of the watches on women’s wrists, were five minutes ahead of time. In Arabic culture, there is no “good luck” number, but there are five pillars of Islam, suggesting to me that Saudi natives were compensating for some as-yet-undefined terror by creating a halo effect in their homes—a way of warding off bad luck or misfortune.WTH? (There're a lot of similar reaches in his other anecdotes.) What about this? "Someone once said that blue is the color of longing for the distances that we as humans can never reach." Oh, please. And he claims that addressing a national need for superstition and ritual helped boost beer sales in Brazil. Sure.
When Euro Disney opened, it didn't fare well. The managers brought in Lindstrom to "help reverse the park's downward spiral." He tied a decrease in church attendance to religion's inability to give believers transformation and thought that Euro Disney needed to re-infuse superstition onto their experience. So they handed out packets of pixie dust and had visitors close their eyes, make a wish, and scatter the dust on Sleeping Beauty's pond. And miraculously, patronage was up. True story. Now, Lindstrom says the best person to observe a culture is one not from that culture, and I agree. I'm not a marketer, so the me who looks at that scenario comes to a much different conclusion... The park was more fun. The employees had fun, so people had fun, and it became the fun place it was expected to be. Or...it could be filling a superstitious need. I think William of Ockham might agree with me rather than Lindstrom. Whatever...it worked.
Now, as to the outsider observer...he's a Dane and in one section, nails Americans:
At social events and parties, the topics of sex, politics and religion are all off-limits. (In fact, a lot of what goes on in America is off-limits—or at least too risky to raise in polite company.) Few Americans are willing to discuss things everyone knows but won’t admit—from how tedious it is to stay home all day with a baby, to their true feelings about hip-hop, to how they feel about sex. [...] What’s most striking about mainstream American humor is that it focuses on much of the material they won’t talk about over dinner. Visit any comedy club, or watch Bridesmaids, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy or Louis CK’s routines on YouTube, and you’ll realize that Americans pay comedians millions of dollars to talk about things most of them have felt, or thought, but never said in public. [...]From what I could tell, most Americans were so accustomed to their regulated, rule-bound status they barely noticed the restrictions to their freedom.
I need to qualify my disdain, for I do think a lot of what he says and observes does make sense, if not for the reasons he thinks. For example: From watching ESPN, I’d learned about the power of information bombardment. ESPN strafes its viewers with an almost hysterical amount of data and details. Scrolling boxes. Panels. Bars. Graphics. Multi-angle camera perspectives. When exposed to a surfeit of data, men tend to feel more masculine and in command. Do most men bother to decipher these boxes, panels, bars and graphics? No—but that’s not really the point.To sell something, particularly to Americans, especially to Americans, flash it up. More features, more gadgets, faster transitions.
What's missing in this are Lindstrom's failures. And he obviously has had to have some. Where are the Small Data guesses and associated misses? Lindstrom does talk about how he was missing somethings in the lead up to his brilliant breakthroughs, but always in support of one more piece of Small Data. But no one, really...no one... has a 100% track record. I'd like to hear more of where his wild theories didn't hold.
Even if I don't agree with his reasoning, whatever he does seems to work; at least for the stories he told here. My takeaways are of a real life Sherlock Holmes approach to observation: see and observe as much as possible. There may be connections to something you are working on. show less
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 show more 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 the questions he explores:
**Does sex actually sell?** To what extent do people in skimpy clothing and suggestive poses persuade us to buy products?
Despite government bans, does **subliminal advertising still surround us** – from bars to highway billboards to supermarket shelves?
Can “Cool” brands, like iPods, **trigger our mating instincts?**
**Can other senses** – smell, touch, and sound - be so powerful as to physically arouse us when we see a product?
Do companies **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. show less
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 show more 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 the questions he explores:
**Does sex actually sell?** To what extent do people in skimpy clothing and suggestive poses persuade us to buy products?
Despite government bans, does **subliminal advertising still surround us** – from bars to highway billboards to supermarket shelves?
Can “Cool” brands, like iPods, **trigger our mating instincts?**
**Can other senses** – smell, touch, and sound - be so powerful as to physically arouse us when we see a product?
Do companies **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. show less
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