buy-ology

While the concept of Neuromarketing is intriguing I couldn't help but thinking that Mr Lindstrom was self promoting, even bragging. Sentences similar to the following littered the sixty seven pages we had to read, "If you look around chances are pretty good you'll find my branding fingerprints are all over your house or apartment...(Lindstrom 16)", "Here, I cant help but be reminded of one of my numerous hotel visits(Lindstrom 1)." And since he is a global branding expert could this book not be more for the purposes of him telling us what we should be drawn too instead of what his research tells us our brains are pulling us towards subconsciously? Its true i might be over thinking it, which i wouldn't be offended if anyone decided to agree with, but those are just my initial beliefs. Hopefully by the end of the book my thoughts on Martins reasons for writing this book will have changed.

He used the most sophisticated brain scanning instruments such as the SST which shows what parts of your brain are being stimulated in real time and fMRI scans which track the amount of oxygen and glucose that are being rushed to certain parts of your brain. Basically him and his team of experts and ethics panel are trying to find out what makes you buy or not buy certain things. His wide array of study subjects included not only Americans, but Germans, people from China, Japan and England. His results show that although you may think you know why you buy, or don't buy things your subconscious has much more to do with your decision making than you think. For example many times we purchase things because they bring back good memories, or happy thoughts even if we like the competing object just as much or even more! We might purchase items because we think we need to, to show others we care about a certain cause or social standard. Previous thoughts on how marketing should be conducted was once based entirely on focus groups, or customer surveys. Now however these old ways of gathering consumer information are being judged as invalid and even just wrong, stating that our conscious thoughts are not as impacting on our actions as our subconscious ideas. Could this be true?

Although i do see truth behind this new way of researching why people like what they like and buy what they buy, I myself have been in paid focus groups and i believe that the information that companies gather from such meetings is valuable as well.

Click here to learn about how someone other than Martin Lindstrom explains Neuromarketing. (video and article)