I just finished reading Brandwashed, an amazing book by Martin Lindstrom, a worldwide renowned marketeer.

Martin takes you in very deep places on how brands we use are brainwashing us, the consumers, everyday.

On a personal experience, Martin tried hard to get away from his brands, the brands he is using everyday, but could not resist and came back using them. He is also showing how consumers get attached to brands because of fond memories and nostalgia, how brands are creating everyday different techniques to make us want them, to inspire us going into stores and getting them from shelves even sometimes without thinking.

Book foreword by Morgan Spurlock

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.

    About Martin

    True story. When he was a kid growing up in Denmark, young Martin had but one thought in his life: Lego. He hand-built and slept on a Lego bed. The family garden became his very own Legoland creation, attracting visitors from near and afar (including the lawyers from Lego).

    Then, still a child, Lego installed Lindstrom onto their advisory board. And then, of all the children in the world – they gave him the very first green brick in the collection.

    You’re guessing this is what got Martin started in the crazy world of branding, marketing and all things advertising. And you’d be right.

    Blame it all on Lego.

    Fast forward some three decades later…

    Consumer Advocate Lindstrom emerges from marketing and branding jungle; he has a fresh perspective. Times have changed and a new, more enlightened, more respectful way of marketing to consumers needs to be addressed. The challenge is clear. Consumers now dictate to brands how they want to be spoken to. The king is dead. Long live the king.

    In particular is the thorny issue of consumer manipulation. Most know it’s going on, this is nothing new. What is new, though, is the voice that is prepared to speak out and challenge this marketing status quo. Brandwashed, his latest bestseller, is a full-frontal exposé of the wanton trickery employed by many conglomerates, iconic brands included, to squeeze dollars out of their loyal customers. Lindstrom, using , t’s not as easy as he thinks. (When is it not.)

    TBWA Shanghai, in partnership with the Gamelab (one of the world’s digital labs network of DAN) TBWA Helsinki, the city that invented Angry Birds, has proposed a partnership with McDonald’s in particularly ambitious 1500 restaurants in China. A special version of the game was created, with levels of game you cannot unlock unless you visit a McDonald’s restaurant.

    During recession times, retailers always keep searching for new ways to keep the clients to come back to their stores. Some of the new trends in pulling traffic to the stores and enabling them to expand into new categories with attractive margins are:

    1. Site and Store Integration
    Retailers will continue to feature high-rotation products in-store, but they will also increasingly offer additional SKUs online, without taking on the additional cost and risk of stocking products in-store.

    2. Automated Retail
    As the online categories continues to grow, retailers will deploy more self-service technology that enables shoppers to select, buy, and check-out.

    3. Prepared and Ready-to-Heat Food
    The goal is to drive trips and increase average basket sizes, prepared food in particular, whether it be ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat. Consumers like the idea of shifting the meal preparation from the shopper to the retailer.

    4. Instructional/Educational Space
    Retailers are trying to help their shoppers learn and get the most value from the products they buy.
    By offering in-store classes, retailers can attract a shopper base to spend more time in-store while building brand loyalty.

    5. Interactive Space
    The Apple stores style and approach. Laying products out in a more attractive environment and let shoppers trial them.

    6. Retailtainment
    Another way to get shoppers in the store is offering entertaining shopping experience. This is something that retailers like Disney know very well. Creating a destination that’s entertaining to visit will remain a key strategy.

    7. Services
    Brick-and-mortar stores need to master one of two things in order to win–being low price or being differentiated. One way to differentiate is to offer a unique set of services in-store. The right services will drive incremental trips, increase loyalty, and higher annual spend.

    8. Showroom
    E-commerce and price comparison apps are turning some retailers into showrooms. Some retailers will embrace this and convert their space or open new formats to take advantage of it.
    These showrooms will have little or no inventory and will offer options for ordering and delivering to home and the store.

    9. Social Space
    Providing social space in the store will become more popular. By having places for people to just hang out–bars, restaurants, coffee shops–retailers can get shoppers to spend more time in their stores.

    10. Store-Within-a-Store
    Renting space to trip-driving brands within big box stores is likely to become extremely popular over the next few years. Look for retailers to take a highly rotational/seasonal approach with these mini-stores and focus on showcasing innovation.

    Source: http://retailnetgroup.com/

    I don’t smoke and I never did in my whole life. And I hate when people smoke in private or in public (something very common in Lebanon, especially the moment they enter Beirut Airport building after landing).

    During a passage at Prague airport, I saw the below billboard for Marlboro, which on top had a new logo, so I was wondering if Philip Morris is changing its famous brand name with a more modern font.

    While digging into this, I have found another amazing thing about the Marlboro logo, the graphics on the below Formula 1 car are either deceptively genius or quite a coincidence. Apparently when the car is racing around the track at 200 mph the barcode creates a blur which suggests the Marlboro logo, even though advertising tobacco is banned in the sport.

    2011 was the year of “SoLoMo” (social, local and mobile), basically this trend will keep on during 2012 for brands and services, but personally I believe that social media will start going downhill mid-2012, I have to wait and see if my feeling is correct about it.

    Without pretending to be a social media expert, (this was also a VERY trendy title since 2010 and kept on in 2011, as most of the people I know suddenly became social media experts, whatever… *sarcastically*), below are my speculations:

    Social Fatigue
    The number of social networks is still growing, users are overwhelmed, and if you follow the same person on different networks, you end up seeing the same post/photo/quote/joke everywhere, so you keep wondering what the hell!

    Social Enterprise
    My favorite niche network where productivity gets to its peak, Yammer is the one I use.

    Localization
    This is the continuation of SoLoMo, where brands and services will come closer to the consumer to experiment the link between their product and the consumer behavior.

    Apps
    With the non-stop growing number of smartphones and tablet sales, Apps will be very trendy and the Apps market will keep on growing for both, paid and free.

    Collecting Data
    The networks want to know more about you in order to serve you better, who has the information control the game.

    Social TV
    It is already here on low levels, in 2012 it will emerge to the surface heavily.

    I would like to share with my blog visitors, a paragraph from a book I started reading today called Engage, The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web written by Brian Solis.

    This below quoted paragraph is addressed to the smart-asses out there who pretend analyzing, studying, planning and embracing social media the right way BUT stupidly going and creating a Google+ page for a brand while Google is shouting all over the web that profiles should be human at this stage, therefore businesses and brands should wait for their format.

    Another book I suggest to those pretenders to read is UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging written by Scott Stratten.

    P.S. If you are not into “real” marketing, don’t say or pretend you are in marketing.

    Social media is about speaking with, not “at” people.

    This means engaging in a way that works in a conversational medium, that is, serving the best interest of both parties, while not demeaning any actions or insulting the intelligence of anyone involved. So what of those skeptics or apprehensive executives who claim that participating on social networks will only invoke negative responses and ignite potential crises?

    As we’re coming to realize, the social landscape is an apparent sea filled with unforgiving predators—most of whom would love nothing more than to have marketers for every meal of the day. Nevertheless, succeeding here is the future of integrated communications, marketing, and service.

    The truth is that there will be negative commentary. However, that should not deter you from experimenting or piloting programs. Even without your participation, negative commentary already exists. In most cases, you just aren’t encountering it. This is why I like to ask business leaders the following question: “If a conversation takes place online, and you weren’t there to hear it, did it actually happen?”

    Yes. Yes, it did.

    Assuredly, every negative discussion is an opportunity to learn and also to participate in a way that may shift the discussion in a positive direction. If there’s nothing else that we accomplish by participating, we at least acquire the ability to contribute toward a positive public perception.

    The conversations that don’t kill you only make you stronger.

    No matter how many people you will ask around you to define the exact meaning or definition of the word “marketing”, you will always get more and more different views about it. Almost no 2 people can agree on the same marketing angle.

    In 1964, a phrase was famously used by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for pornography,
    I know it when I see it“.

    With no hesitation or doubt, I can add to this: “I know this is marketing with I see it and feel it”.

    If few agree on the definition of marketing, lots of brands and/or marketing manager try to apply what they have learned in books or go strictly by the textbook definition and end up failing. Unfortunately some ignorant and pretending people stayed behind and missed catching the fast train of how marketing evolved during the past few years.

    Social Media
    Till the moment I am writing this blog post, some marketeers in this world, still don’t believe that social media is a useful tool to help marketing or promoting a brand and unfortunately, in case they get convinced somehow, they think that setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter account will do the job for them and they stupidly think a YouTube video can go viral just like that, without preparing the field.
    They have no clue that if the brand does not talk or engage with its consumers, no matter the tool you are using, it is useless.

    Don’t Talk Bullshit
    Picking your words is important, the message itself also. Try to be honest when marketing your brand, be fair to your consumers, treat them honestly. Good word-of-mouth did never bad to a brand, your fans can spread the positive image in no time and for free. It will only cost you some transparency. Have a company or brand blog and let people read about what you think and let them share their thoughts.

    Metrics & Analytics
    No matter how much money you spend on your marketing campaigns, and you are not smart enough to measure your efforts and learn from your mistakes, then you barely can maximize your ROI. Some marketeers have no idea that such measuring tools exist and if they know, they don’t appreciate their real value and how helpful they are and how far they can take them on the ever evolving super marketing highway. With total accuracy: “You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure”.

    Crowdsourcing
    This is maybe better known as focus groups to some. Most of marketeers neglect and underestimate the power of “social answers”, because they are afraid of negative vibes that consumers can bring to their brand. While big corporations start crowdsourcing internally until they take it to the outside world, some others don’t do it even inside their companies and if they do it, they do it the wrong way and don’t even use any collaboration tools to bring teams together and be productive.

    Even this looks very odd and unusual at the end of this post, an old client of mine once said: “all marketing managers, male and female, should be screwed”.