Ratings15
Average rating3.2
How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today's message-cluttered world? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds that we're barely aware of them? Marketing guru Lindstrom presents the startling findings from his three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy.--From publisher description.
Reviews with the most likes.
An interesting book - the reason why we consume things beyond our rational consumer behaviors - the inner works of a circuit board, which is our brain.
Sometimes - a boarding read.
While some of this book was excellent and entertaining... much of it read as Martin selling himself for the corporate machine as in “buy my services and this is why.” It's almost as if there should be a consumer version of the book and a free version that he would circulate to corporate marketing departments as an ad for himself and his services.
Still, the general themes found within Buyology are certainly eye-opening and a little frightening when you really think about it, and I feel better at least knowing the marketing that is being arrayed against me.
There are some crazy techniques being used in marketing and they will only get crazier, more intrusive and more subtly manipulative thanks to guys like Martin Lindstrom. He seems a little conflicted about what he does - on one hand he tries to come off as a consumer advocate, exposing marketing tricks so we can be aware of them, on the other he actively employs the same techniques in the companies he works with. He had me going back and forth about whether he is the ‘good guy' or the ‘bad guy.'
Either way, the book is somewhat of an eye opener to the work being done to perfect advertising techniques that are effective despite what consumers think works, and instead basing them on what brain scans show actually works–often two completely different things.
I'm only rating it 3 stars because the first 30 or 40 pages were full of repetitive hyperbole building up Lindstrom's research techniques and unprecedented large study group size and generally amazing work only to to be followed by much less than revolutionary results throughout the rest of the book. It's an interesting read, but definitely not as groundbreaking as it's made to sound in the first few chapters.