Buy-ology

I’ve just read Martin Lindstrom’s book on branding “Buy-ology”. I had picked is up in the local Oxfam shop and thought it looked like it might be interesting (along the lines of Freakonomics) and the title triggered a vague memory that I had read a good review of it somewhere. Anyway, I have to say that I found it to be poorly structured and not particularly interesting. Lindstrom claims to have applied science to marketing/branding and cites various studies which have used various brain scanning and imaging techniques to show which parts of the brain light up when we are exposed to different kinds of marketing images, sounds and smells. It claims to reveal fresh secrets about how we are persuaded to part with our money but pretty much everything that he said seemed like common sense to me, even the revelations about how things like Nokia’s ring-tone actually damage the Nokia brand. So, all in all, this was a bit of an irritating book – you can get an idea of this irritation from Martin Lindstrom‘s website – fire it up and then wait for the annoying little videos of Lindstrom dispensing branding advice to pop-up…