3 x books you should read
Three books I just finished reading and some text I’ve written about them. Read the text or skip my text and read the books right away instead.
1. Buyology
by Martin Lindstrom (2008)
This book is about neuromarketing – what happens inside your head when you are exposed to marketing and when you buy stuff. The book explains what Lindstrom (he’s Danish!) and his team discovered during a three year research project involving fMRI (brain scan) and EEG technologies. The results are in many ways controversial. A few examples of what they found was the cigarette health warnings actually stimulate smoking, that product placement almost never work, that strong brands from a brain activity perspective and that Nokia’s well-known ring tone destroys the brand. Overall, this book is a must-read for anyone into progressive marketing.
I give it four myselves out of five.
2. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini (2008)
This book is a summary of recent social-psychological research on persuasion. The book highlights 50 pretty simple (but effective) strategies to convince people. The book looks at persuasion mainly from a marketing perspective, but many of the ideas could be applied to everyday life situations as well. The scenarios in the book are very concrete – one for instance describes how to alter the messages on cards left in hotel rooms that asks you to recycle your towel, to maximize the number of people who behaved in environmentally friendly ways (the key here by the way, is to tell the guests that most past guests in the hotel, or even the guests of the very room you are staying in already are recycling). All scenarios are scientifically proven and are presented with statistics. This book is also very well worth reading. A plus for one of the guys who wrote it’s name is Steve Martin.
Four myselves out of five.
3. Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
by Sarah Lacy (2008)
This book, written by business reporter Sarah Lacy (BusinessWeek), takes you behind the scenes of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. In the book Lacy profiles Max Levchin (Slide’s founder), Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson (digg.com) and Mark Zuckerberg (The founder of Facebook). This book tells (sometimes) really interesting stories about the people and their journeys, far from the boring management literature you usually find on the topic.
Three and a half myselves out of five.
