Book of the Week: Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom

Since a Finnish edition is finally out in stores, I thought it would be worth commenting on Martin Lindstrom's Buy-ology book.


The English edition has been out since Oct 2008, and had considerable hype--before, during and after its launch. Now, I really like the book mostly as it generates some really mind-blowing and occasionally scary ideas about the future of advertising.

First on the negative, as some critics have pointed out, Lindstrom does rehash some material from his earlier masterwork--BRANDsense (I'd recommend reading this one as well) and he is at times guilty of shameless self-promotion.

On the positive, this opens up some major issues for discussion -- ethically, socially, politically, culturally and so forth. The general concept of the book was to scientifically quantify how advertising really affects our brain. To accomplish this, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and steady state topography (SST) to monitor volunteer's brains while they viewed targeted ads.

One point I often mention in my Marketing English Plus classes is about cigarette warning labels. Coming from Canada where they have some of the most visually abhorrent warning labels showing blackened lungs, mouth cancer, etc., I had assumed like most others that these labels did the trick. But, apparently not. Lindstrom's team showed that when smokers saw cigarette warning labels, the same part of the brain lit up as when they saw someone else smoking. Nicotine craving! Even though, the volunteers usually stated that the labels had made them feel less likely to smoke, the brain scans showed otherwise.

While Lindstrom oftens says in the book that he is doing this out of pure curiosity, I'm a bit skeptical given the fact that he has set up a new company backed by a lot of US business heavyweights to help Fortune 500 companies research the efficacy of their own advertising. Where this leads is anyone's guess, but I personally think we will be seeing some very highly effective marketing and political campaigns on the near horizon. Is this right or wrong? I'll leave that to you to debate.

Stay inspired!

Cheers,
Maurice
www.voiceone.fi