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    Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
    Unavailable
    Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
    Unavailable
    Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
    Audiobook7 hours

    Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

    Written by Martin Lindstrom

    Narrated by Don Leslie

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Based on the single largest neuromarketing study ever conducted, Buyology reveals surprising truths about what attracts our attention and captures our dollars. Among the long-held assumptions and myths Buyology confronts:

    • Sex doesn't sell - people in skimpy clothing and provocative poses don't persuade us to buy products.

    • Despite government bans, subliminal advertising is ubiquitous - from bars to supermarkets to highway billboards.

    • Color can be so iconic that the sight of the robin's egg blue of a certain famous jewelry brand significantly raises women's heart rates.

    • Companies shamelessly borrow from religion and ritual - like the ritual, made up by a bored American bartender, of drinking a Corona with a lime - to seduce our interest.

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

    The fact is, so much of what we thought we knew about why we buy is wrong. Drawing on a three-year, 7 million dollar, cutting-edge brain scan study of over 2000 people from around the world, marketing guru Martin Lindstrom's revelations will captivate anyone who's been seduced -or turned off- by marketers relentless efforts to win our loyalty, our money and our minds.

    Packed with entertaining stories about how we respond to such well-known products and companies as Marlboro, Calvin Klein, Ford, and American Idol, Buyology is a fascinating tour into the mind of today's consumer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 21, 2008
    ISBN9780739376027
    Unavailable
    Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
    Author

    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 Buyology

    3.5/5

    218 ratings28 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Interesting content but unjustifiably stretched out. The entire book could have fit a single chapter. The repetition and filler content got so bad that, for the first time, I found myself struggling to finish a book -- and the fact that this is actually a short one is quite telling.I highly recommend NOT reading this book -- a reasonably well-researched magazine article, conference talk or blog post would suffice to provide the information contained herein.
    • 5/5
      Loved it! Good book i totally recommend it! Insightful and interesting!
    • 4/5
      Excellent book! Want to know more case studies. Great read
    • 5/5
      Great book and great narrator! Applicable for marketers and consumers alike.
    • 3/5
      Way to long. Just listen/read the last three chapters. Than you will know enough.
    • 5/5
      An interesting book with a lot of examples of how neuromarketing works.
    • 1/5
      really boring book, if you are looking for a book with applicable knowledge about marketing and neuroscience, this is not the book, this book is good in terms of stories and general ideas from 2004
    • 5/5
      It is a very helpfulf book. It shows various technics which could be applied in an advertisement to make a product more desirable. Many technics were borrowed from the field of psychology. So, people with a background in psychology will enjoy it.
    • 5/5
      I really loved the book. It was very insightful and the information could not have been condensed any more. I discovered so many mind blowing facts. I’m glad I listened to this.
    • 4/5
      I'm not normally one to pick up non-fiction, but this one caught my eye. I had been thinking a lot about how the media influences my life, and this just happened to be on the "featured" shelf at my library, so I grabbed it.

      And I'm glad I did. It's witty and enjoyable while remaining informative and well thought-out. I would suggest it to anyone looking for a quick read about an interesting subject.
    • 3/5

      What did I think (that teasing little prompt to write a review)? Lindstrom's book reads more like a fiction novel!

      If you can wade through the overblown prose (read author's sense of self-importance, borrowed deux ex machina and cliff-hanger endings to various chapters, all of which fizzle out along the way), Lindstrom actually has some sound advice for consumers!

      If you value your purchasing sovereignty, read this book (and borrow it from the library, so as to avoid 'buying' into Lindstrom's hype). Marketeers are already implementing some of the ideas in this book, rightly or wrongly (and not considering the ethics and the funding of the research Lindstrom undertook).

      How does a brand smell? Taste? Feel? Look like? Sound? And specifically, given the demographic in which you, as the customer, most likely fit, which representation of these characterisics should a brand/product have in order to engage your 'impulse buy' mechanism?

      Ultimately, if you can determine what it is that drives you to purchase something, you're better protected against mindless consumerism. It might have not been the point Lindstrom wanted to make, but that's certainly the message I took from the book. Buyer beware.
    • 3/5
      Lindstrom is a proponent of using neuroscience and neuroimaging in particular as part of marketing, because we’re so bad at articulating why we make the choices we make. He can play fast and loose with the evidence—for example, he uses brainscans of smokers whose “reward centers,” associated with pleasurable experiences and thus with desire for cigarettes, lit up at the sight of graphic cigarette warnings to argue that such warnings backfired. But his evidence doesn’t prove that. It might prove that even graphic images don’t deter addicted smokers, but it doesn’t show that such smokers smoke more because of the warnings, or that nonsmokers are more likely to convert into smokers because of the warnings. Indeed, other research he discusses found that Marlboro red and other non-logoed reminders did the best job of stimulating cigarette cravings, arguably because without the explicit brand name people let their guards down, not realizing they were being advertised to. That suggests we need more regulation of cigarette brands, including their use of colors and trade dress, not less.Still, there’s plenty of note here, including the result that pure product placement in entertainment doesn’t work at all unless it’s well-integrated into the story, at which point it does increase brand awareness, which is a critical waypoint to brand liking. Sex, however, distracts people from the brand actually providing the sexual ad, but he nonetheless expects the use of sex in ads to increase—he doesn’t say so outright, but I think the idea is that executives like the look of such ads and will therefore approve them, because they’re no more rational than any other human.He’s uninterested in non-advertising sources of meaning, arguing, for example, that we buy products “Made in Japan” because of their association with high-tech and newness. While he acknowledges that this meaning is the opposite of what it was five decades ago, he’s indifferent to the changes in production—spurred, not incidentally, by substantial government intervention—that gave Japanese products these associations. This is, I think, connected with his ultimate idea that advertisers will increasingly use neuromarketing to encourage more consumption and will be increasingly successful at doing so. He says at the end—without any evidence at all, and certainly against the weight of what I’ve seen in behavioral economics—that if we, the audience, know this is going on we will be able to make rational choices about consumption. But then he says what he really means: “what choice do we have?” Neuromarketing is going to happen to us, and so our only options will be to choose how to max out our credit cards. That we might make a societal—and governmental—decision not to allow this route is inconceivable. And as a practical matter I’m not sure he’s wrong.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating and very approachable book. A lot of the data I've read of before from other sources, but not in this context and not as engagingly written. He makes a very scientific concept very easy to follow and enjoyable and he really makes you think about your motivations for buying things.I find it fascinating how little we know about how we think and respond to things and how easy we are to manipulate. Even when we go in with our eyes wide open and the best of intentions to think and buy smart, they have ways around that.I mean, who knew a company would spend a fortune on figuring out a way to make egg yolks a more appealing yellow and that it would even matter?
    • 5/5
      Great engaging book that delivers on its title with something new to say. He goes over his studies in neuromarketing which examine the many factors used by marketing to persuade us. These studies explore a deeper level than we can verbalize. For example, while it appears sex sells he uncovers that it is really controversy that sells and sex may even be counter productive.
    • 3/5
      The writer's ego is definitely at the wheel, but this book has so many interesting things to say about how the brain responds to the advertising around us. It was very interesting to learn that warning labels on cigarette boxes actually stimulate the purchases of cigarettes
    • 2/5
      An interesting idea, but massively oversold - which is comically ironic. It's a rather breathlessly messianic account of how neuroscience shows that our purchasing decisions are not necessarily based on logic. Well, duh.It is interesting to see the ways our brains are affected by advertising. For instance, even the ugliest antismoking ad - complete with cancer sores - still makes smokers want a ciggie. And our brains tune out repetitions, and product placement isn't always effective and sex doesn't always sell.But what is to be done with this information? How deep does it go? Is the immediate urge tempered by better afterthoughts? Do all people react alike to like stimuli? You won't find out in this book. It's very superficial, and I suspect was written mostly to sell the author's services to big companies.
    • 4/5
      Although this writer's ego is definitely at the wheel, this book had so many interesting things to say about how the brain responds to the advertising around us that I forgave him (but could not forget him - he really was in your face).
    • 3/5
      This book wasn't bad, wasn't great either. I slipstreamed it into my other books as I found it on the shelf and figured I better squeeze it in while it's available. Basically the writer goes through a series of descriptions of neuromarketing experiments that he or other colleagues have performed, and what was found. It is an interesting survey and primer for this new and exciting field, but by his own admission it is in it's infancy and there are lots of gaps. I look forward to reading more about the subject.
    • 4/5
      After reading Paco Underhill's Why We Buy, I thought this book might add to my knowledge of the topic. The author writes about his own studies -- sponsored by eight multi-national companies -- into the brain science behind buying.I thought the author did a great job of explaining neuroscience to a lay audience and of blending the science with anecdotes from his own experience to create a light read. I finished reading it in a few hours over two days. It was so good, I'm going to suggest it as a future book for my non-fiction readers' group. It was very interesting to learn that warning labels on cigarette boxes actually stimulate the purchases of cigarettes. One of those unintended consequences that can rear up and bite us in the butt.01/21/2010
    • 3/5
      Read How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It's a much better book with much more detailed information about how the brain really works and much less smugness. In every chapter Martin almost breaks his arm patting himself on the back.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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 others 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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      Lindstrom is the most narcissistic author I’ve ever read, and, not surprisingly, is shallow and materialistic to a degree I haven’t encountered in my reading in a long time. He's also often times illogical and his pro-marketing views trump his ability to think scientifically--though he endless promotes himself as logical. If the topic wasn’t so interesting I would have dumped the book. His ignorance is just screaming for a totalitarian state/corporation to misuse the neuromarketing he’s promoting.
    • 4/5
      I'm thoroughly enjoying this as an audio book - the introduction was interesting, the brain science and the analysis of current marketing patterns is fascinating. I'm planning to recommend it to Media, Marketing, and Anatomy teachers.
    • 3/5
      Lindstrom shows some astonishing facts in his book. However, I also find that he sometimes writes a little narsistic about himself. Besides, amost none of the outcomes in this book are emperically explained. Details about the conducted studies are being left out of the book, making some facts somewhat questionable. Still, the book can be a nice eye opener and gives nice illustrations on the effect of advertising on people.
    • 3/5
      Honestly, it took forever for me to finish this book. In fact, I came to the point where I read about 2 pages into the book, and I wanted to just give it up. But I hate leaving a book unread. And decided that I'll just skim a bit and push through ahead. I'll have to say that it got a little more interesting in the middle of the book before killing my interest near the end again. Despite this, I cannot say that I came out of reading this with absolutely nothing. I was actually fascinated with some of the facts that were presented to me.Like, who knew that all those anti-smoking ads actually do the exact opposite of its purpose? It really does pose a serious concern for those who are trying to quit smoking. But as shocking as it is, I think that it's also understandable... all a part of human nature and the part of us that's selfish and wants.Another thing I thought was pretty cool was the idea of brands and products that are "smashable" (Linstrom, 122) I love the idea of being able to smash Apple products and you will still be able to recognize it. You realize just how big Apple as a brand really is.The thing with this book is, despite how some of the findings are truly interesting and an eye-opener, I realize that as a consumer, it doesn't change much. I've actually realized this a few years ago when I did a little personal reading into the "dark" side of Disney. There actually is a lot about Disney that makes you wonder how corrupted you were as a child. But that hasn't stopped me from still buying into all that cute-ness and their products. Despite knowing the way companies advertise and manipulate our minds, we still buy into it because what other choice do we have? We need goods and services. They provide them. Despite knowing that all these sublimal messages are being fired at me for Apple products, I know for a fact that when my current iPod nano dies or breaks, I will spend about 10% of my time looking at other possible brands, and the other 90% on the Apple website. As for the book itself, I found it a bit of an oxymoron (right use of term?) The book is about the way we buy and how our minds are being targetted by companies and advertisers. Yet... the author works in advertising and helps companies capture buyers. The author points out all these companies who manipulate buyers, yet at the same time, by all those name dropping of companies and brands, the author is once again just advertising those products.Honestly, for a literary read... well it's not a litererary read. The beginning and conclusions bored me and I honestly just skimmed through most of that. However, I would say that I would recommend it to people. Mostly some of my friends who are interested in the media and advertising fields. I think some of the facts and stats in the book will fascinate them.