Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy2011

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 how advertisers and corporations: • Intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age • Stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares. • Are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives • Purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive • 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.