Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy
Written by Martin Lindstrom
Narrated by Dan Woren
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
From the bestselling author of Buyology comes a shocking insider's look at how today's global giants conspire to obscure the truth and manipulate our minds, all in service of persuading us to buy.
Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars.
Picking up from where Vance Packard's bestselling classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off more than half-a-century ago, Lindstrom reveals how advertisers and corporations:
- Intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age
- Stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares.
- Are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives
- Purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive
- And much, much more.
This searing expose introduces a new class of tricks, techniques, and seductions--the Hidden Persuaders of the 21st century--and shows why they are more insidious and pervasive than ever.
Martin Lindstrom
Best-selling business author MARTIN LINDSTROM is a well-known international management consultant who routinely sees various kinds of “corporate constipation” all over the world. Over the years, he has learned how to quickly pinpoint and then eradicate these bothersome hurdles in companies of all sizes.
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Reviews for Brandwashed
84 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you buy things, read this book.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Nothing too new or surprising here. Lindstrom is a little too fond of the expression "more than you can imagine." I can imagine plenty, when it comes to marketing, and my deeply cynical imaginings are rarely wrong. So, yeah- you are being marketed to every second of your life, unless you live in a cabin in the unspoiled woods. Speaking of the unspoiled woods, I thought a lot about Ma Ingalls while I was reading this- I wonder who marketed what to the pioneers, and what brands were popular, and why. I know there are brand names scattered through some of the other period fiction I've read, but offhand, I don't remember any from the Little House series.
The writing here is pedestrian and the concepts interesting but familiar. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was an interesting read, all about how we're persuaded into buying things. How a company makes easy links for us to choose products and then encourages us to unthinkingly go along with their choices. It asks us to look at our habits and decide if we're happy being led or whether we should question it. One of the most interesting chapters was at the end where he talked about the experiment he and some others did with a family, the Morgensterns, where they were brand ambassadors for products and where, when they were advocating green products other people listened, saying that it is important what brands you advocate to your friends and family and to be mindful of it.Yes we have free will, but we have to be willing to use it.It calls for us to be a little more mindful, and maybe to play games with the marketing types. That we're being watched for every step we take and that privacy is often an illusion. Me, myself? I'm going to continue using my reward cards in shops, they get something back, also I have to eat gluten-free so this is telling them that I buy certain brands, which they will hopefully continue stocking. That while you're a commodity, that you have to make sure that you influence them with the good choices, as well as your unthinking choices. To buy what you want and try to ignore the influence of others trying to make you do what you don't want to do.It also tells me that I should be more adventurous in my choices and to venture out of my comfort zone occaionally - provided there's no gluten involved, of course.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thoroughly enlightening and horrifying! This book had a ton of information about how companies are vying for our patronage.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lindstrom, a marketer with decades of experience at shaping the images of McDonald's, Microsoft and even an unnamed royal family (but you can guess who), explains how retailers get you to buy and how brands get you to buy their products. It even more invasive than you'd think. Lindstrom details the use of fear, peer pressure and nostalgia to sell things like iTunes downloads and soda, how the success of expensive fruits like acai and goji have been a result of marketing over science, how some grocery stores have your shopping cart wired to tell them everything you choose and how long you spend shopping, and that digital coupons and loyalty cards are sending your personal info to the stores permanent data banks.This was published in 2011, so I don't know if all the procedures are still being used, but I would guess that the majority are. It's a very interesting subject and Lindstrom explains the marketing tactics very well.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoyed this, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in marketing strategies. If nothing else, read chapter 9 on data mining. It's fascinating and very disturbing.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A real eye opener to the way Marketeers-online, and off use neuroscience to target behavioural advertising at us to make us buy.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Good book for the basics of Marketing. Would reccomment
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Marketing bullshit explained through more bullshit. Other than for its irony value I don't see any reason to recommend this. Denouncements of lack of scientific backing for product claims don't stop him from making his own pseudoscience claims. You will learn nothing new, this is the most obvious stuff you will have heard of without reading anything on the subject.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Some scary stuff in here about how the marketing mind thinks! Read and learn!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It was an OK book. It mostly let’s you know how sleazy big companies are in manipulation of consumer.