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Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy Review

This book has a very interesting premise - using MRI to examine, not cognition, memory, or emotion, but advertising. And some of the results are rather interesting. For example:
- Negative messages (anti-smoking ads, say) can activate desires just as easily as positive ones.
- Strong brands can activate the same brain centers as do religious topics.
- Indirect advertising (the coke glasses sitting in front of the American Idol judges) can be more effective than direct advertising.
Probably the biggest takeaway is that what people say and how they really feel are not the same. Actually, having written all this out, I'm not sure that these results really are all that unexpected and interesting after all. ;^)
My biggest beef with the book is how thin it is beyond the basic reporting of results. Yes, it actually is over 200 pages (just barely), but there is an awful lot of padding in there. Part of that is going over some very basic ideas (subliminal advertising, e.g.) ad infinitum, but also being extremely anecdotal. I like anecdotes, and feel they make for a great read, but the author really goes overboard - especially when it comes to anecdotes about himself.
In fact, the author's ego really gets in the way here. Here are some samples:
"But this study wasn't going to come cheap, and I knew that without corporate backing, it was dead in the water. But when I get an idea in my head that keeps me up at night, I'm persistent. Politely pushy, you might call it. Those twenty-seven messages on your answering machine. They're all from me (sorry)."
and
"By way of profession, I'm a global branding expert. That is, it's been a lifelong mission (and passion) to figure out how consumers think ... If you look around, chances are you'll find my branding fingerprints all over your house or apartment ... As a branding expert and brand futurist (meaning that the sum of my globe-hopping experience gives me a helicopter view of probable future consumer and advertising trends) ..."
and
"I've been told more times than I can count that my appearance is as unconventional as what I do for a living ... My features [he has a baby face], my raked-back blond hair, and my habit of wearing all black give a lot of people the impression that I'm some kind of quirky child evangelist, or maybe some precocious, slightly wired high-school student who got lost on the way to the science lab and ended up in a corporate boardroom by mistake. I've gotten used to it over the years. I suppose you could say it has evolved into my brand."
Overall, the tone of the book is more one of simply trying to drive business (including a URL to his site in the book's last sentence) than actually reporting anything seriously. A little sad, given the premise and all the hype and expectation the author tries to generate.
This also brings up the issue of ethics, which the author barely touches on. Apart from the issue of the book being basically a long infomercial, I also wondered about the intrusiveness and manipulation that would be inherent in applying some of the findings. It really only gets an oops-almost-forgot two sentences at the end of the book:
"Because that is a world in which we, the consumers, can 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. And I hope that by writing Buyology, this is the world I have helped bring about."
A much better read would be Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters - same large topic, but much more interesting, informative - and modest.

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