Buy.ology How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong;
By Martin Lindstrom; Publisher: Random House; Pages: 240; Price: Rs 1,397
Martin Lindstrom is a branding expert and brand futurist. The next time you want to know why your lipstick brand no longer has the gloss in the mind of the consumer, you might want to call him. The author comes from a rich marketing background, including stints at Lego (apparently his childhood obsession) and BBDO.
Lindstrom does to marketing research with Buy.ology, what Daniel Coleman did to our lives with Emotional Intelligence. He uses findings from various experiments by him and others to push for the relevance of using neuroimaging, fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), SST (Steady State Topography) and other such techniques to literally look into the mind of the consumer.
Martin Lindstrom is one of the world’s most respected marketing gurus. With a global audience of over a million, Lindstrom spends 300 days on the road every year, advising top executives of companies such as McDonald’s, P&G, Nestlé, Microsoft and GlaxoSmithKline. His previous book, BRANDsense, was acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best marketing books ever published.
Will you have the same confidence in the findings from your market research agency once you know they have gathered their data and analysed findings based on the standard methodology of questionnaires and focus groups? Or would your client have more confidence in your findings if you threw around an expression such as “But there was increased activity around the nucleus accumbens in the case of 250 of the 300 women in the survey when we showed the model against the mauve silk background…”
Lindstrom presents Buy.ology by introducing the field of neuromarketing using the analogue of a Venn diagram — an overlapping of quantitative, qualitative marketing research and neuromarketing is what the author believes will be the future of marketing. His contention is that traditional marketing research techniques are no longer sufficient. “The future of advertising is not in smoke and mirrors, but in mirror neurons,” he quotes someone in the book.
The book rests on some pioneering research by Lindstrom in 2003 across five countries — Germany, the UK, US, China and Japan. While the first two countries were chosen for technical reasons (due to the partners in the study), the rest were chosen due to the nature and relevance of their markets.
This review was published in Businessworld issue dated 30 March 2009
Book Reviews 
Buy.ology How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong; 
Martin Lindstrom is one of the world’s most respected marketing gurus. With a global audience of over a million, Lindstrom spends 300 days on the road every year, advising top executives of companies such as McDonald’s, P&G, Nestlé, Microsoft and GlaxoSmithKline. His previous book, BRANDsense, was acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best marketing books ever published.
