Martin Lindstrom - Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy

Copyright 2011 by Martin Lindstrom Company, Limited

All rights reserved.
Published by Crown Business,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lindstrom, Martin, 1970

Brandwashed : tricks companies use to manipulate our minds and persuade us to buy / Martin Lindstrom.1st ed.
p. cm.
Include index.
1. Consumer behavior.2. ConsumersPsychology.3. Brand choicePsychological aspects.4. MarketingPsychological aspects.5. Neuromarketing.I. Title.
HF5415.32.L557 2011
658.8343dc23 2011023484

eISBN: 978-0-385-53174-0

JACKET DESIGN BY EVAN GAFFNEY

v3.1

Dorit, Tore, and Allan
without you I would be nothing

O ver the years, Ive put myself in some of the most horrible situations and scenarios possible. I once traveled to a half dozen or so Middle Eastern war zones, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, in the hope of finding the exact coordinates of Osama bin Laden. I worked as a coal miner in West Virginia, and I spent nearly a month wearing a jumpsuit in a prison cell. I also wrote, directed, and starred in the movie Super Size Me, in which I gorged myself with McDonalds hamburgers, French fries, and sodas until my body was bloated, my liver was pt, and my cholesterol was just this side of death.

But can I just go on record as saying that nothingnot jail, not black coal dust, not the Afghanistan mountains, not the awful mirror image of my own McTorsoprepared me for the world of advertising and marketing?

My latest film, Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, is a documentary about the insidious ways corporations manage to get their brands in our faces all the timeand incidentally, includes my own efforts to finance my film by precisely the same means. (In the end, I approached roughly six hundred brands in all. Most of them told me politely to get lost. In the end, twenty-two of them agreed to sponsor my movie.) As is the case with all the movies I make, all I was looking for was a little honesty and transparency. This is the Information Age, right? Arent honesty and transparency supposed to be the thing right now?

My goal in making Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was to make you, me, and everybody else in the world aware of the extent to which we are marketed to, and clubbed over the head with brands, just about every second of our lives. After all, you cant even go into the mens room at the mall without being obliged to pee on a urinal cake thats advertising Spiderman 6. Nor can you escape the brand paradise that is your local shopping mall without climbing behind the wheel of your Toyota Scion LC, turning up the volume on the Keb Mo playing on your Apple iPod that connects to your car radio via a Griffin iTrip FM transmitter, and sliding your Dockers-enclosed leg and Nike Air Force 1 sneaker onto the gas, at which point youre assailed by one highway billboard after another for Kenny Rogers Roasters, Taco Bell, KFC, Papa Ginos, Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, Marriott Courtyard Residence, Shell Oil, andare you getting some sense of why I wanted to make my movie? In one scene, I asked consumer advocate Ralph Nader where I should go to avoid all marketing and advertising entreaties. To sleep, he told me. It was a depressing moment.

Which brings me to Martin Lindstrom and the groundbreaking book youre gripping in your hands.

I first met Martin when he agreed to appear in my film. Id read his last book, Buyology, which explores the hot spots in our brains that compel humans to buy everything from Harley-Davidson motorbikes to Corona beers, and I thought hed be an interesting, innovative person to talk to. As a global marketing guru who works with everyone from Coca-Cola to Disney to Microsoft, as well as a consumer who detests being manipulated by advertisers and corporations, Martin maintains a very fine line between what he knows and (how else to put it?) what he really knows. If you catch my drift.

In Brandwashed, Martin yanks back the curtains and serves up a page-turning expos of how advertisers and companies make us feel well be bereft, stupid, and social outcasts unless we buy that new model of iPad or that new brand of deodorant or that make of baby stroller whose price is equal to the monthly rent of your average urban studio apartment. Just as I do in my documentary, he aims to expose all that goes on in the subterranean world of marketing and advertising. Only he has one distinct advantage. Hes a true insider. Martin takes us into conference rooms across the world. He talks to advertising and marketing executives and industry insiders. He teases out some fantastic war stories, including some of his own.

Along the way he shows us the most underhanded ploys and tricks that marketers use to get us to part with our money. Such as scaring the crap out of us; reminding us of wonderfully fuzzy days gone by (which actually never existed); using peer pressure so well feel like wallflowers if we dont do, or buy, what the rest of the world is doing, or buying; using sex to sell us everything from perfume to mens underwear; paying celebrities a bajillion dollars to endorse bottled water, or just cross their skinny legs (clad in $300 jeans) in the front row of a fashion show; injecting what we eat and drink with this or that magical elixir that promises to give us a one-way ticket to Shangri-la and eternal life; and thats not even the half of what youll learn inside Brandwashed.

In the course of these pages, Martin also rolls out a TV reality show called The Morgensons, where he implants a real-life family inside a Southern California neighborhood to test whether word-of-mouth recommendations work. (Its fascinating, and also pretty horrifying, to consider that that sweet young couple down the block could actually be paid marketing commandos.) With my film and his book, he and I share a goal: to let consumersyou and mein on the game, so that we know when were being conned or manipulated, and can fight back, or at least duck for cover, that is, assuming theres anyplace left to hide.