I just finished reading Buy.ology: Truth and Lies about What we Buy by Martin Lindstrom. As a humane educator, one of the most important skills I hope to impart among my students is the ability to think critically and gain freedom from manipulation and brainwashing. Thus, books such as this are very useful to me and to the students in our M.Ed. and certificate programs in Humane Education and in our training workshops. Mr. Lindstrom discusses the new use of fMRI technology (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to understand our responses to advertising and branding — which is fascinating — and I found his chapter demonstrating the similarities in brain response to beloved brands and beloved religious icons especially so.

I had hoped for more on the ethics of branding and advertising, however, especially after reading the Foreward by Paco Underhill that describes Martin Lindstrom as exuding virtue. But there’s nothing virtuous about Lindstrom’s work or his book. He consults for multinational corporations, many of which engage in egregious human rights violations, environmental destruction, animal cruelty, and pervasive manipulation solely for profit. In one story in the book, Lindstrom describes an assignment he was hired for to “brand eggs.” I had hoped, finally, to hear Mr. Lindstrom speak truthfully about some negative aspects of an industry when he writes “I found myself standing inside one of the largest egg farms in the world.” Modern egg “farms” or more honestly, factories, cram hens into cages so small they are unable to even stretch their wings, let alone walk. The conditions in modern egg factories are so cruel and unnatural that it’s no surprise that he would be hired to improve sales of these unhealthy eggs by helping “this company create the perfect yellow” egg yolk. Lindstrom writes, “For ethical reasons, I couldn’t support the idea of adding artificial coloring to the grain, so instead, I identified a vitamin mixture that could be added to the hens’ feed that would produce yolks from light yellow to middling-yellow to the passionate yellow….” It amazed me that for ethical reasons, Mr. Lindstrom couldn’t support artificial coloring, but seemed to have no ethical concerns about the conditions for the chickens. Does Mr. Lindstrom know that the male hatchlings from the supply house were likely discarded (killed) by being dumped into the trash or ground alive, or that the hens would ultimately live for a year under brutal conditions before being killed without regard to even the most basic level of humane treatment?

Mr. Lindstrom says at the end of his book that he hopes he has helped the reader to escape “all the tricks and traps that companies use to seduce us to their products and get us to buy and take back our rational minds,” but this rings false. Martin Lindstrom has built his entire career on consulting with and serving these companies so that they will be ever more effective at persuading us to buy their products.

Nonetheless, I recommend this book because in it you’ll find valuable information for resisting branding and gaining a modicum of freedom from relentless advertising.

~ Zoe

Filed under: accurate information, books, consumerism, critical thinking, media literacy Tagged: | accurate information, advertising, books, branding, consumerism, corporations, critical thinking, ethical consumerism, marketing, Martin Lindstrom, media literacy, multinational corporations, reviews