Martin Lindstrom

Renown brand author, speaker, and advisor Martin Lindstrom joins me today to talk about the ways marketers manipulate customers and what we should do about it.

Most businesses wouldn’t question that it’s a good idea to resolve problems quickly to prevent erosion of their reputation, but many don’t do a particularly good job of it. Even when it’s too late to fix the actual problem, an apology can mollify that customer and even result in reversal of the public criticism (see Apologies Really DO Work).

Lots of us say we love our favorite products. We love our Droid. We love our iPad. We love our comfy sweater. We love our bank. (Well, banks and airlines might feel the love a little less these days.) Last week, Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed and Buyology, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that described his use of fMRI brain scans of subjects exposed to iPhone sounds and video.

The poll I ran earlier this week in Is Your Brand Evil produced results that, in retrospect, were predictable. Fully half the respondents thought that branding could be used in either good or bad ways. Of the other half, my neuromarketing-oriented readers came down four-to-one on the “good” side of branding.

Book Review: Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy by Martin Lindstrom

Like a surgeon exposing the nasty underbelly of medical malpractice, Martin Lindstrom, branding expert and author of the neuromarketing book Buyology, takes a decidedly consumerist point of view in showing how brands influence and sometimes even control our lives.

The marketing media was buzzing last week with news that CBS will promote its fall program lineup via a teeny-weeny video player inserted in an issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine. I know the ad industry is in dire need of some good news, but doesn't anybody else think this is utterly stupid?

by: Roger Dooley

by: Roger Dooley

Continuing our survey of neuromarketing books, we recently finished Brand Sense - Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste, Smell, Sight, and Sound, by Martin Lindstrom. This data-packed volume was published in 2005, and is based in part on a global research project by Millward Brown which studied the relationship between branding and sensory awareness.