Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy
Martin Lindstrom
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0385531737
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Foreword by Morgan Spurlock
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:
• New findings that reveal how advertisers and marketers intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age – starting when they are still in the womb!
• Shocking results of an fMRI study which uncovered what heterosexual men really think about when they see sexually provocative advertising (hint: it isn’t their girlfriends).
• How marketers and retailers stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares.
• The first ever neuroscientific evidence proving how addicted we all are to our iPhones and our Blackberry’s (and the shocking reality of cell phone addiction - it can be harder to shake than addictions to drugs and alcohol).
• How companies of all stripes are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives, then using that information to target us with ads and offers ‘perfectly tailored’ to our psychological profiles.
• How certain companies, like the maker of one popular lip balm, purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive.
• What a 3-month long guerilla marketing experiment, conducted specifically for this book, tells us about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all.
• 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.
data. If you want to cash a paycheck at a Walmart, for example, you must surrender both your Social Security number and your driver’s license information, and quite often your e‑mail address. Guess where that information ends up? You guessed it, in Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. And if Walmart were working with a “data enhancement company” (which, as of writing, it’s not), merely divulging your e‑mail address could reveal not just your name and address but also additional
contamination scares. For example, in 2010, when over half a billion eggs were recalled due to reports of salmonella, the marketers of brands like Egg Beaters and Davidson’s sprang into action, adding sections to their Web sites boasting that their products were uncontaminated. Davidson’s even bought the Google adwords for the searches “pasteurized eggs” and “safe eggs,” so that panicked egg lovers looking online for information on the recall would most likely find themselves on the Davidson’s
establishments free advertising in the process). Foursquare is hailed as the next big thing in social media (at the time of writing, there were some 2.5 million users), and I’ve spoken to aficionados who describe it as being “like a drug” and admit to feeling uneasy and on edge if they go somewhere and fail to “check in.” A recent New York Times article reveals the extent of players’ obsession with the game, describing one Philadelphia man who was competing with his girlfriend over mayorship of
The day they announced the selections, those books immediately shot up to the top of the Amazon rankings, and the following week occupied prominent positions on the New York Times best-seller list. The only thing that could have catapulted their sales higher was if they’d been recommended by Oprah. If you’ve ever visited one of those ginormous Barnes & Noble or Borders superstores or, for that matter, any oversized superstore, be it Target, Best Buy, or Walmart, it’s easy to understand why
and mulateiro, rosewood, or copaiba (it would seem that the harder it is to pronounce, the more it costs). Some online sellers of acai berry go even further over the line in their sneaky efforts to sell us the stuff. Some use a tactic called network marketing, a clever technique that also incorporates a healthy dose of peer pressure. What this means is that one day your friendly neighbor Maureen will knock on the door, claiming that the acai juice she is holding (and by holding, I mean selling)