Marketing to Mindstates: The Practical Guide to Applying Behavior Design to Research and Marketing

I enjoy the book. It gives important insights into buyer's behavior through understanding different mindstates they are in.When it comes to marketing, I don't think there's one single technique that can succeed in every campaign. However, this is one important skill to practice since it can help you look at the way marketing works and how to target accurately to your audience's mindstate.

Marketing to Mindstates (M2M) starts off with an interesting premise - most marketing doesn’t work. What’s revealing, when you scan all these customer reviews, is that nobody seems to dispute that premise.Marketing is indeed in a bit of a crisis these days. Too many marketers seem to believe that louder is better. They assume their ads must “grab eyeballs” and “rise above the clutter” of every other ad. But when every marketer thinks that way, and when marketing is everywhere, the result is not persuasion but a mind-numbing assault on consumers’ limited attentional and cognitive resources. From the consumer’s point of view, the marketing bubble that encases them is all clutter, all noise, all distraction, and ultimately, something they would rather avoid than embrace.M2M provides a simple yet profound response to this state of affairs. It asks marketers: what if you stopped focusing your energy on trying to convince people to adopt your goals (buying your product, basically) and instead started focusing on how your product or brand might help people achieve their own goals?The core of the book is basically an answer to that question. In a nutshell, it says marketers need to know four things about their consumers:* First, what goals are your consumers trying to achieve when they use your product?* Second, what motivations are driving your consumers to pursue those goals?* Third, how do your consumers tend to approach their goals - are they more promotion or prevention-oriented?* And fourth, what cognitive shortcuts are your consumers likely to use when they decide whether or not to buy your product?What is interesting is that none of these questions is about the features or functions of your product. They are about what people think and feel. They are about how people decide. They are about what people do, not what they say they do.In M2M, the idea of a “mindstate” is very specific. It is “a temporary state of mind in which we’re under high emotional arousal.” It is a state in which “we rely on more nonconscious, emotional factors, making us more susceptible to influence.” So marketing to mindstates is still about influence, but it is not about rational persuasion, feature comparisons, or celebrity spokespersons. It is about knowing what your consumers want, why they want it, and how, when, and where they want to get it.M2M acknowledges a dirty little secret of marketing. Consumers are unreliable narrators of their own decisions. They don’t actually know why they act the way they do, but they are happy to guess if you ask them. Unfortunately, those guesses are usually rationalizations or reconstructions that have little predictive value. So how can marketers understand why consumers do what they do, if those consumers don’t know themselves?The answer that M2M proposes is this: consumer decisions are a function of mindstates in context. Context, in turn, is a conjunction of four types of factors: location, other people, feelings (physiological and psychological state), and choice architecture (how choices are presented - or framed - in the moment of choice). Successful marketing, according to M2M, is therefore a function of knowing your consumers’ mindstates, knowing and designing the contexts in which those mindstates and their associated goals can be activated, and enabling consumers to achieve their goals as easily and painlessly as possible.How to put all these puzzle pieces together to develop successful marketing strategies makes up the bulk of the book’s practical advice. And it’s good advice. Once you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, it’s not rocket science to get it done.Marketing is a profession in transition. The old ways are no longer working. The new ways, steeped in neuroscience, behavioral economics, and mysterious unconscious processes, are often confusing and counterintuitive. Marketing to Mindstates is an excellent navigational guide for crossing over from the old to the new. In my opinion, it should be on every marketer’s bookshelf.

An interesting and informative marketing book; it harnesses recent scientific research on how to get consumers to do what you (a marketer of a product) want them to do, mainly by exploiting their emotions/desires rather than appealing to their rational minds (you DON’T want them thinking critically; e.g., pp. 167). Put otherwise, the book teaches one how to harness the “power” of neuro- and behavioral psychology to convince the consumer—when in a state of emotional arousal—that they can “buy their feelings” (e.g., pp. 99, 157; good example of “behavior design” with NY taxis on pp 160-1). It’s like Frederick Nietzsche on marketing steroids.On the whole, probably 3 (maybe 3.5) stars for accomplishing its purpose. Minus 2 (or 1.5) star(s) for six reasons:(1) There should be more footnotes/endnotes (or, at worst, a general bibliography) backing up all the “neurological and behavioral insights” on which the author purportedly draws (which is not to say that I don’t think he does). There are some notes, but not enough for all the various claims made (at least, not enough for me); particularly, redundant support would be beneficial to make his case (i.e., not just citing one study to make a point).(2) The author’s use of “mindstates” throughout the book (and in the title!) seems contrary to one of his primary arguments: marketing to emotion/gut/intuition/desire (what he calls “System 1”) rather than “reason” (what he calls “System 2”; see chs. 2-4 especially). Shouldn’t the “state” to which one markets be articulated as something more related to the “gut” or “emotions” rather the “mind”? That point may seem pedantic, but given how much of the book focuses on the importance of using certain kinds of language to appeal to consumers in certain (emotional/motivational) situations, his choice of words is at least strange, if not simply inaccurate/misleading.(3) The author repeatedly engages in what feels like a sort of humble-not-humble self-aggrandizement (either directly or indirectly talking about how great/brilliant/successful/athletic he is, including some self-deprecation that feels like thinly veiled self-promotion), which grates on the reader quickly.(4) A lot of what the book presents is not only common sense (e.g., it’s easier to manipulate people emotionally than rationally), but it basically repackages lots of stuff that marketing has known for many years, despite the fact that the author claims his model will “change marketing as we know it” (217). One can go back to marketing literature in the first half of the 20th century and find similar strategies, i.e., targeting/manipulating people’s emotional states, getting them to “buy” their feelings or identity, etc. No doubt those strategies were not as sophisticated as what the author presents here, so I suppose what this book offers is updated research and techniques; nonetheless, it is difficult to see how the author offers much that is novel, conceptually speaking.(5) Related to #4, one can’t help but feel that the author is constantly trying to “sell” the reader on his genius model; that is, he doesn’t seem entirely convinced it will fly on its own. I lost count of how many times he used italics (for purely rhetorical effect, e.g., “this will (italics) work”- p. 192) and called his model “powerful” or used “power” in relation to it (see, e.g., pp. 18, 63, 79, 82, 100, 157, etc.; thus the Nietzsche reference above). He also emphasizes ad nauseum that his model is backed up by “science,” to the point where it sometimes sounds like a commercial from an era when scientific support for one’s product was a novelty. Really? Doesn’t he know how skeptical the current generation is of being sold via cheesy rhetoric? Such language made me more skeptical, not more open to his ideas. Of course, perhaps I’m wrong about this point. Maybe many people are attracted to that sort of assertive rhetoric (witness politics). The author is, in fact, the marketing expert. As Kierkegaard put it, “To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions” (Soren Kierkegaard, Provocations, 21).(6) There is no discussion of ethics whatsoever. In the age of increasing knowledge of and potential for corporate corruption and customer-manipulation, shouldn’t there at least be some tipping-of-the-hat to ethical questions? What are the ethical implications of these strategies, especially given the fact that the author believes (“knows”!—p. 192) they’re powerful enough to shape human behavior? If that really is the case, how do we think about accountability in the use of such strategies? Should any and every brand use these strategies, regardless of whether a particular product is actually beneficial to the consumer, to the community, to the environment? The author seems to think such questions are irrelevant, given the complete dearth of any consideration of such topics. For example, he had (and apparently still has) no qualms about targeting blue collar workers with products like high sugar sodas and potato chips (see ch. 1). As long as he can design a marketing strategy that puts them in a desirable emotional state (desirable to the marketer of the product) that primes them to purchase the product, who cares if it has a deleterious medical and financial cost to the consumer? (for a deleterious medical example, see the soda-chips example in ch. 1; for a deleterious financial example, see the example used to illustrate the “Decoy Effect” on p. 172). It is disconcerting to see a modern text on business practices so entirely unconcerned with the ethical implications of its strategies/recommendations.

This marketing to mindstates was bought as a graduation gift. I never heard back from the person I gave it to. Having said that I can't say how the book is.

As an experienced marketer, I truly enjoyed reading this book! It's packed full of insight, offers up a fresh take on marketing, and can help a reader better segment customers based on mindset. This book is well-written, a potential gamechanger for businesses both big and small, and has plenty of easy to grasp examples. It's one of the better books you will read this year and I look forward to recommending it to peers. Seriously, don't think twice - but it, read it, take notes, and profit! A wonderful example for other business books to follow.

A deeper dive into the behavioral science behind marketing, he steers away from data driven marketing and into how the human mind works when buying

Wow, there were some amazing nuggets I simply did not know that is going to make all the difference in getting may message into the heads and hearts of my audience. I simply loved this book, it's message and the value it provides.

Probably the best framework for contemporary marketing

One of the best books I’ve read so far