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

If you’ve ever given in to your child’s plea for a particular branded toy or breakfast cereal, bought a book just because it was on the best-seller list, swooned over the latest teen idol sensation, slept with your iPhone tucked cozily between you and your sleeping partner, "liked" something on Facebook, signed up for a loyalty card, or stashed a little bottle of anti-bacterial hand gel in your purse, then you’ve been brandwashed.

Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom knows this because he has been on the front line of the branding wars for over 20 years, and in Brandwashed he turns the spotlight on his own industry and exposes the full range of psychological tricks and traps today’s marketers and advertisers use to obscure the truth, manipulate our minds and persuade us to buy, including:

The shocking ways in which advertisers and marketers target children at an alarmingly young age -starting when they are still in the womb. How the makers of certain cosmetics products, like one popular lip balm, deliberately adjust their formulas to include chemically addictive properties.How businesses secretly mine our digital footprints to uncover the most intimate details of our private lives, and use that information to target us with ads and offers tailored to our psychological profiles. What a revolutionary, multi-million pound, three month-long, unscripted social experiment revealed about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all: our friends and neighbours.

Eye-opening and engaging, Brandwashed is a searing expose of the hidden persuaders of the twenty-first century, showing why they are so insidious and pervasive, and how global giants are conspiring to take our money.

In his fascinating new best-seller, Brandwashed, marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom exposes the full range of psychological tricks and traps companies use to manipulate our minds & persuade us to buy. Drawing on all he’s seen behind closed doors in the boardrooms and back rooms of some of the biggest and most profitable corporation around the globe and on the wealth of ground-breaking new research he conducted for this book, Lindstrom reveals some of the best -kept secrets of the marketing.