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Considering the amount of money spent on advertising and the staggering sizes of corporate marketing budgets, it's astonishing to what extent it's unclear what exactly those huge amounts of money buy. Lord Lever famously said that half of the money spent on advertising is wasted - but he had no way of knowing which half.

The efficiency of selling is, of course, in direct relationship to whatwe know about how and why people buy things.

Theories from various branches of social science, mostly psychology, have been applied with varying success to buying behaviour, and there exists a body of knowledge, composed of a mixture of common sense, practitioners' experience and, increasingly, some respectable research results from both the field and the laboratory.

Martin Lindstrom is asbig a brand guru as they get, sitting on the boards of several companies, CEO of a couple of successful brand agencies as well as a publisher of a branding blog with an audience of millions. His consultancy work and his observation of various products and brands 'flopping' led him to believe that the traditional tools of market research - analysis of sales data and various forms of researchconsisting essentially of asking people questions - were not enough.

Buyology is a result of a foray into neuro-marketing, or a research project that combines cutting edge tools of neurophysiology and medicine (essentially precise brain scanning) with the objectives of the salesmen.

Evil enterprise, possibly, but providing insights that are interesting beyond the obvious, although nowhere near asground breaking as the blurb promises and as Lindstrom himself frequently claims in the text. He is clearly very excited about the big neuro-marketing project - and he should be (I would have been myself!), as the scale and reach of the study was indeed unprecedented for what was essentially an equivalent of 'basic research' in the field of marketing. This excitement, occasionally infectious, moreoften contributes to the sense of hubris permeating the whole of Buyology.

Is there any substance beyond the hype, then?

The main thesis of Lindstrom's is expressed in his subtitle: everything we believe about why we buy is wrong.

Traditional market research, which, according to Lindstrom, consists of people being asked directly why they made a particular purchase decision, is limited ifnot downright useless as in most cases people simply don't know, or are not aware, of what drives their purchases. In order to make neuro-marketing appear more revolutionary, Lindstrom chooses to ignore a vast number of techniques that can be used to indirectly study the buying process, from anthropological observation to all kinds of projective techniques to other in-depth methods adapted fromclinical psychology to sophisticated techniques of statistical analysis.

Neuro-marketing is Lindstrom's answer and his study certainly goes a long way towards testing some of his intuitions and ideas, some common-sensical, some controversial.

The discussion of the role of ritual and habitual routines in usage and purchase of products is insightful and the real-life examples very interesting(from lime + Corona to slow pouring of Guinness). But then, unnecessary generalisation somehow spoils it: nothing will persuade me that the results of learning and the resulting preference for a particular model or interface (e.g. of Nokia versus Motorola) can be in any meaningful way described as 'ritualistic', as in habitual and repeated activities that have little or no logical basis that stemfrom the need for control in a complex and unpredictable world.

The section on subliminal advertising (similar to the one dealing with ritualistic behaviours), takes a term and re-defines it to support a supposedly shocking claim. The term always referred to messages below the sensory threshold, i.e. ones that that people cannot consciously decode even if they tried. Lindstrom applies it to...