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How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today's message-cluttered world? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds, we're barely aware of them?

In BUYOLOGY, Lindstrom, who was voted one of Time Magazine's most influential people of 2009, presents the astonishing findings from his groundbreaking, three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy. Among the questions he explores:

Does sex actually sell? To what extent do people in skimpy clothing and suggestive poses persuade us to buy products?

Despite government bans, does subliminal advertising still surround us – from bars to highway billboards to supermarket shelves?

Can "Cool" brands, like iPods, trigger our mating instincts?

Can other senses – smell, touch, and sound - be so powerful as to physically arouse us when we see a product?

Do companies copy from the world of religion and create rituals – like drinking a Corona with a lime – to capture our hard-earned dollars?

Filled with entertaining inside stories about how we respond to such well-known brands as Marlboro, Nokia, Calvin Klein, Ford, and American Idol, BUYOLOGY is a fascinating and shocking journey into the mind of today's consumer that will captivate anyone who's been seduced – or turned off – by marketers' relentless attempts to win our loyalty, our money, and our minds.

“Move over Tipping Point and Made to Stick because there’s a new book in town: Buyology. This book lights the way for smart marketers and entrepreneurs.”-Guy Kawasaki, Author of The Art of the Start

"Martin Lindstrom is one of branding's most original thinkers"-Robert A. Eckert, CEO & Chairman, Mattel, Inc.

“Lindstrom takes us on a fascinating journey inside the consumer brain. Why do we make the decisions we do? Surprising and eye opening, Buyology is a must for anyone conducting a marketing campaign.”-Ori Brafman, author of the bestselling book, Sway

MARTIN LINDSTROM was voted by Time Magazine as one of the world's most influential people of 2009 for this work on neuromarketing. As one of the world's most respected marketing gurus with a global audience of over a million people, Lindstrom spends 300 days on the road every year, advising top executives of companies including McDonald's Corporation, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Microsoft, The Walt Disney Company and GlaxoSmithKline. He has been featured in The Washington Post, USA TODAY, Fast Company, and more. His previous book, BRANDsense, was acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best marketing books ever published.

Not surprisingly, the smokers were on edge, fidgety, not sure what to expect.

Barely noticing the rain and overcast skies, they clumped together outside the medical building in London, England, that houses the Centre for NeuroImaging Sciences. Some were self- described social smokers–a cigarette in the morn­ing, a second snuck in during lunch hour, maybe half-a- dozen more if they went out carousing with their friends at night. Others confessed to being longtime two-pack-a-day addicts. All of them pledged their allegiance to a single brand, whether it was Marlboros or Camels. Under the rules of the study, they knew they wouldn’t be allowed to smoke for the next four hours, so they were busy stockpiling as much tar and nicotine inside their systems as they could. In between drags, they swapped lighters, matches, smoke rings, apprehensions:Will this hurt? George Orwell would love this. Do you think the machine will be able to read my mind?

Inside the building, the setting was, as befits a medical lab­oratory, antiseptic, no- nonsense, and soothingly soulless–all cool white corridors and flannel gray doors. As the study got under way I took a perch behind a wide glass window inside a cockpit-like control booth among a cluster of desks, digital equipment, three enormous computers, and a bunch of white-smocked researchers. I was looking over a room domi­nated by an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, an enormous, $4 million machine that looks like a gi­ant sculpted doughnut, albeit one with a very long, very hard tongue. As the most advanced brain- scanning technique avail­able today, fMRI measures the magnetic properties of hemo­globin, the components in red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body. In other words, fMRI measures the amount of oxygenated blood throughout the brain and can pinpoint an area as small as one millimeter (that’s 0.03937 of an inch). You see, when a brain is operating on a specific task, it de­mands more fuel–mainly oxygen and glucose. So the harder a region of the brain is working, the greater its fuel consump­tion, and the greater the flow of oxygenated blood will be to that site. So during fMRI, when a portion of the brain is in use, that region will light up like a red-hot flare. By tracking this activation, neuroscientists can determine what specific ar­eas in the brain are working at any given time.
Neuroscientists traditionally use this 32-ton, SUV-sized in­strument to diagnose tumors, strokes, joint injuries, and other medical conditions that frustrate the abilities of X-rays and CT scans. Neuropsychiatrists have found fMRI useful in shed­ding light on certain hard-to-treat psychiatric conditions, in­cluding psychosis, sociopathy, and bipolar illness. But those smokers puffing and chatting and pacing in the waiting room weren’t ill or in any kind of distress. Along with a similar sam­ple of smokers in the United States, they were carefully cho­sen participants in a groundbreaking neuromarketing study who were helping me get to the bottom–or the brain–of a mystery that had been confounding health professionals, cig­arette companies, and smokers and nonsmokers alike for decades.

For a long time, I’d noticed how the prominently placed health warnings on cigarette boxes seemed to have bizarrely little, if any, effect on smokers.Smoking causes fatal lung cancer. Smoking causes emphysema. Smoking while pregnant causes birth defects.Fairly straightforward stuff. Hard to argue with. And those are just the soft- pedaled American warnings. European cigarette makers place their warnings in coal-black, Magic Marker—thick frames, making them even harder to miss. In Portugal, dwarf­ing the dromedary on Camel packs, are words even a kid could understand:Fumar Mata.

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Excerpted from Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.