Buyology

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.

Good intentions and ideas. One bad thing is it did not age very well. Reading it in 2020 feels a bit ‘off', examples and analogies given for various theories are with technology and practices that are already obsolete or not relatable anymore. Smart readers might be able to replace examples in book with their own equivalents, to better fit the present. A bit disappointed in how predictable some ideas were. Especially because in some chapters, at their end the author works to build up some tension and excitement about the next chapter coming, promising “shocking results”. When you get there, you find out those results were usually not that shocking. Maybe nowadays the corpus of knowledge about how marketing works is already rich enough to take some of Lindstrom's ideas for granted, considering them ‘common sense'. At times, the book felt like this - stating an obvious truth, but presenting it like an amazing discovery.
It's a good body of knowledge to have, but I feel like it brings too few new ideas to the table if you are a somewhat educated adult in 2020.

While the book was interesting, I grew to dislike the writing style over time. The author's lead ins to the next chapters were pointless, and he often seemed to be floating around the topic instead of just stating what needed to be stated. It seemed like an attempt to make the book longer.

I also found myself disagreeing with some of the theories presented in the book. In one part the author discusses how we do certain things during the day as part of a ritual to make ourselves feel secure; however, the majority of these were things people must do every day because they -have- to, and can't really be counted as rituals. Perhaps it was merely the way the book was stating this information, but it came off as not only pointless, but incorrect and misleading. And when something in a non fiction books makes me stop and think “What the heck is this BS?” it kind of throws off my mood for continuing on.

I came away feeling that instead of running all these exceedingly expensive brain scans, the advertising agencies could, at least in some cases, merely asked consumers how they felt about things. Anyone could have told them that no one pays attention to commercials, or that colors attract more attention then black and white advertisements.

All in all, it's still an interesting read and if you're interested I'd recommend getting it from the library as you likely won't ever be reading it again.. I mostly picked it up because I was interested in the author's other book “Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy”. However, I'm not sure I'll bother with the next book if it's full of annoying lead in's and “Well, duh!” information...

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.

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.