Buyologi

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE FOREWORD BY PACO UNDERHILL INTRODUCTION

1: A RUSH OF BLOOD TO THE HEAD The Largest Neuromarketing Study Ever Conducted 2: THIS MUST BE THE PLACE Product Placement, American Idol , and Ford’s Multimillion-Dollar Mistake 3: I’LL HAVE WHAT SHE’S HAVING Mirror Neurons atWork 4: I CAN’T SEE CLEARLY NOW Subliminal Messaging, Alive and Well 5: DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? Ritual, Superstition, and Why We Buy 6: I SAY A LITTLE PRAYER Faith, Religion, and Brands 7: WHY DID I CHOOSE YOU? The Power of Somatic Markers 8: A SENSE OF WONDER Selling to Our Senses 9: AND THE ANSWER IS… Neuromarketing and Predicting the Future 10: LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER Sex inAdvertising 11: CONCLUSION Brand New Day
APPENDIX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT

FOREWORD PACO UNDERHILL

It was a brisk September night. I was unprepared for the weather that day, wearing only a tan cashmere sweater underneath my sports jacket. I was still cold from the walk from my hotel to the pier as I boarded the crowded cruise ship on which I was going to meetMartin Lindstrom for the first time. He had spoken that day at a food service conference held by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, the venerable Swiss think tank, and David Bosshart, the conference organizer, was eager for us to meet. I had never heard of Martin before. We moved in different circles. However, I had seen BRANDchild, Martin’s latest book, in the JFK airport bookstore before I flew intoZurich. Anyone seeing Martin from twenty feet away might mistake him for someone’s fourteen-year-old son, being dragged reluctantly to meeting after meeting with his father’s overweight graying business associates. The second impression is that somehow this slight blond creature has just stepped into the spotlight—you wait for the light to fade, but it doesn’t. Like a Pre-Raphaelite paintingthere is a glow that emanates from Martin as if he was destined to be on stage. No, not as a matinee idol, but as some god waif. The man exudes virtue. Close up, he is even more startling. I’ve never met anyone with such wise eyes set in such a youthful face. The touch of gray and the slightly crooked teeth give him a unique visual
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file:///D:/000004/Buy__ology.htmlsignature. If he weren’t a business and branding guru, you might ask him for an autographed picture or offer him a sweater. I don’t think we exchanged more than ten words that night seven years ago. But it was the start of a personal and professional friendship that has stretched across five continents. From Sydney to Copenhagen, from Tokyo to New York, we conspire to make our paths cross.Laughter, discussion, mutual council—it has been a unique pleasure. Martin spends three hundred nights a year on the road. I don’t have it that bad, but after a certain point you stop counting the strange pillows and discarded flight coupons and just enter into the comradeship of road warriors. Martin watches, listens, and processes. The bio on his Web site says he started his advertising career at agetwelve. I find that less interesting than the fact that at about the same age his parents pulled him out of school, hopped on a sailboat and went around the world. I know that at age twelve I couldn’t have lived on a ten-meter boat for two years with my parents. Martin says he still gets seasick and chooses to live in Sydney, which is about as far away from his native Denmark as you can get. In theworld of learned discourse what is fun is finding yourself sharing opinions with people whose pathway to that point of view has been different from yours. It’s both a form of validation and a reality check. In my career as an anthropologist of shopping, I haven’t always seen eye to eye with advertisers and marketers. For one, I have a fundamental distrust of the twentieth-century fascination...