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Brandwashed
304 pages
A brisk, eye-opening tour through the invisible psychological tripwires that dictate our everyday choices.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like putting on a pair of X-ray glasses that suddenly reveal the hidden machinery of the modern world. It is a brisk, highly readable plunge into the slightly paranoid reality of consumerism, where every scent, sound, and digital footprint is weaponized against your wallet. The mood is a compelling mix of fascination and alarm; you will find yourself nodding along to the cleverness of marketers while simultaneously feeling a creeping sense of dread about your own susceptibility. The prose is conversational and punchy, relying on insider anecdotes and accessible neuroscience rather than dense academic jargon. It is an absolute delight for pop-psychology fans and anyone who loves the thrill of having their everyday assumptions completely dismantled, leaving them with a sharper, more cynical eye for the world around them.
- Mood
- alarming
- paranoid
- intriguing
- eye-opening
- Tone
- revelatory
- urgent
- conversational
- authoritative
- cynical
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- illusion of free will · corporate manipulation · psychology of desire · surveillance capitalism · hidden persuasion
- The writing
- Accessible and punchy, blending engaging insider anecdotes with digestible summaries of neurological studies.
- The arc
- Moves from naive curiosity to a state of shocked paranoia, ultimately settling into a cynical but empowered awareness.
- Who it's for
- Pop-psychology enthusiasts and conscious consumers who want to peek behind the curtain of modern advertising.
Content notes
- technology addiction
- psychological manipulation
- discussion of panic and anxiety
About the book
From the bestselling author of Buyology comes a shocking insider's look at how today's global giants conspire to obscure the truth and manipulate our minds, all in service of persuading us to buy. Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars. Picking up from where Vance Packard's bestselling classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off more than half-a-century ago, Lindstrom reveals: New findings that reveal how advertisers and marketers intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age starting when they are still in the womb; Shocking results of an fMRI study which uncovered what heterosexual men really think about when they see sexually provocative advertising (hint: it isn't their girlfriends); How marketers and retailers stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares; The first ever neuroscientific evidence proving how addicted we all are to our iPhones and our Blackberry's (and the shocking reality of cell phone addiction - it can be harder to shake than addictions to drugs and alcohol); How companies of all stripes are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives, then using that information to target us with ads and offers perfectly tailored' to our psychological profiles; How certain companies, like the maker of one popular lip balm, purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive; What a 3-month long guerilla marketing experiment, conducted specifically for this book, tells us about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all; And much, much more. This searing expose introduces a new class of tricks, techniques, and seductions -- the Hidden Persuaders of the 21st century -- and shows why they are more insidious and pervasive than ever. - Publisher.
Description from Open Library.
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