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 meet Martin 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 into Zurich.
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 painting there 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 file:///D:/000004/Buy\_\_ology.html 2 of 83 08/08/2009 10:45
signature. 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 age twelve. 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 the world 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 with branding; I don't own shirts with alligators or polo players on them and I rip the labels off the outside of my jeans. In fact, I think companies should pay me for the privilege of putting their logo on my chest, not the other way around. So it's a bit strange for me to find myself in the same pulpit with someone who is passionate about branding and believes that advertising is actually a virtuous endeavor, not just a necessary evil. What we share is the belief that the tools for understanding why we do what we do, whether it's in shops, hotels, airports, or online, need to be reinvented.
Through the end of the twentieth century merchants and marketers had two ways of examining the efficacy of their efforts. First was tracking sales. What are people buying and what can we ascertain from their purchase patterns? I call it the view from the cash register. The problem is that it validates your victories and losses without really explaining why they're happening. So they bought Jif peanut butter, even though Skippy was on sale.
The second tool was the traditional market research process of asking questions. We can stop people as they stroll down the concourse of the mall, we can call them up on the phone, we can invite them to a focus group or ask them to join an Internet panel. I know from long experience that what people say they do and what they actually do are different. It does not mean that those two tools are not functional, just that they are limited. Just as advertising and branding still work-but they don't work the same way they used to.
The problem was that we are better at collecting data than doing anything with it. In the nineties the offices of many market researchers were stacked with printouts, whether on television ratings and viewing, scanner data from sales research, or the results of thousands of phone interviews. We learned that soccer moms between the ages of 28 and 32, driving late model minivans and living in small towns, prefer Jif two to one over Skippy. What do we do with the information? As one cynical friend suggested, we are looking to get beyond the so what, big deal, and what-can-I-do-with-this information test.
Science and marketing have historically had a love-hate relationship. In the 1950s academicians ventured out of their ivory towers and began collaborating with advertising agencies. Vance Packard's seminal book The Hidden Persuaders describes that golden era that lasted less than a decade. Making moms feel good about feeding their children Jell-O, or deconstructing why a sexy sports car in the front of the Ford dealership sold Plain Jane sedans off the back lot. Much of it was simple and logical. Applying it was easy with three major television channels and roughly a dozen popular magazines. The relationship started unraveling when stuff just went wrong. In the fifties, in spite of the best brains and a very healthy marketing budget, the Edsel flopped. Thirty years later New Coke tanked.
For the past three decades the science in market research was more about higher math than psychology. Statistical relevance, sample size, standard deviation, Z-tests and T-tests and so on. The absolutes of math are somehow safer. I like to think that the modern market researcher is in the business of making his clients better gamblers by seeking to cut the odds. Call it a cross between scientist and crystal ball reader: someone fast enough to get it right and with enough gift of gab to tell a believable story.
In this volume, Martin, who has spent the past ten years developing new research tools, steps off into file:///D:/000004/Buy\_\_ology.html 3 of 83 08/08/2009 10:45
neuromarketing. This book is about the new confluence of medical knowledge and technology and marketing, where we add the ability to scan the brain as a way of understanding brain stimulations. What part of the brain reacts to the Coca-Cola logo? How do we understand what part of sex sells? I guarantee you, it's an enjoyable and informative ride. From fishing villages in Japan to locked corporate boardrooms in Paris to a medical laboratory in Oxford, England, Martin has a treasure chest of fascinating insights to impart and stories to tell. And whatever your feelings about brands and branding-or whether you have any feelings on the subject at all-he'll keep you wanting more.
Will we be able to watch sexual stimulus migrate to different parts of the brain as procreation and pleasure get further unhooked? Stand back, Michael Crichton-this isn't the science fiction of time machines or nano-technology run amok. It is Martin Lindstrom and he's got another great book.
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