Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy

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.