Brandwashed: How Marketers and Advertisers Obscure the Truth, Manipulate Our Minds, and Persuade Us to Buy

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Title: Brandwashed: How Marketers and Advertisers Obscure the Truth, Manipulate Our Minds, and Persuade Us to Buy
Author: Martin Lindstrom
Publisher: Crown
Year: 2011
256 pages

I have a lot of criticisms of this, but I'll stick with my gravest. First, the way Lindstrom interprets psychological and other research doesn't always match how I'd interpret it. For example, if you were to hook me up to a plethysmograph (you can't, but that's not the point), you might find that I was physiologically aroused by a stimulus. That's a far different phenomenon than my acting on that arousal. Lindstrom consistently conflates the two. Second, his idea of consumers as essentially mindless bumpkins who are easily suckered and misled doesn't inspire my trust his motives. Third, based on this world view, Lindstrom assigns warrantless motivations to consumers. For example, he asserts that we don't choose the first item from a shelf but reach behind it for the second because we think it's cleaner. To test this hypothesis, I surveyed random family members and friends in situ at the grocery. I didn't interview those who took the first item. They are evidently outliers, even though it was true of most of them. I asked those who reached behind for the second item why they were doing so. Nobody said it was because it was cleaner. For perishables, they said it was because items with a longer time to pull date were further back. For shelved items, they said it was because the ones in the front were dented or dinged (which they were). The only person to cite cleanliness pointed out the filthy children being allowed to paw at the lower cans and boxes. I'd like a million dollars for my fab-o study, please.

There's not a lot here that's not obvious or that you didn't read in an expose 40 years ago. Producers want to sell things. Advertisers misrepresent their products. I'm as easy to influence as anybody, but my behaviors aren't those of Lindstrom's herds of moo-cow consumers who don't seem to read the labels or Consumer Reports, or consider whether products actually work.