Mind Hacks tipsar om Jonah Lehrers recension i Washington Post av boken ”Buyology – trues and lies about why we buy”. Den danske författaren Martin Lindström, tar upp neuroekonomisk forskning och teorier och försöker förklara psykologiskt varför vi köper det vi gör. Mind Hacks är föga imponerad och skriver följande om boken:

If one of the greatest ironies of public relations is that it has an image problem, one of the greatest achievements of neuromarketing has been the self-promotion without having demonstrating any material benefit to the approach.

That’s not to say there’s some respectable science being undertaken to understand the neural basis of commercial reasoning and buyer decision-making, but so far, no-one has demonstrated that any of these approaches actually provide a more effective way of marketing.

Det är bara att instämma. Mind Hacks konstaterar:

One irony is that commercial neuromarketing has been a marketing success story, but not on the basis of the neuroscience which is largely just used as another form of traditional branding.

In fact, it’s just a form of marketing first developed by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Freud, back in the 1920s. The secret, Bernays said, was not to appeal to what people need, but to what they desire – in this case, to seem cutting edge.

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Se även bloggen Neurosciencemarketing som skriver utförligt om boken.