Brandwashed

Brandwashed turns the author's own industry into its subject. Lindstrom had spent more than twenty years inside branding when he wrote it, and the book sets out what he says he watched companies do behind closed doors to win people's money. The publisher positions it as a successor to Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, arguing that the persuasion techniques of the mid twentieth century have been replaced by a newer and more pervasive set. Four lines of argument are named. Companies target children at a very young age, deliberately building brand relationships before buyers can evaluate them. They work on public anxiety, using fears about contagion, extreme weather and food contamination as a selling context. They mine digital traces to assemble intimate pictures of private life and sell against them. And they adjust product formulations so that what is sold becomes chemically habit forming. The through line is that shoppers should stop thinking of themselves as rational actors making free choices, because the environment in which choices are made has been engineered in advance. The book is written for consumers rather than marketers, and reads as a disclosure rather than a manual.

Written from the publisher's page for the book at Penguin Random House, Crown Currency imprint.

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People

• Martin Lindstrom