We quickly learn packaging is king. Never mind the old saying about the customer always being right. OBD says, today it's not about serving consumers but about pumping up products and getting into the psyche of shoppers, forever "helping" them do the "right" buying. In the end, the idea is to heavily increase "the bottom line" for company stockholders ...as hastily as possible. Author Conley details how "executives apply innovations to marketing... rather than to products and services." And it all works. -So, we consumers think we shop "by choices," do we?

Here's one good book that tells us how shoppers, from supermarket to car lot, are enticed, swayed, directed, influenced, encouraged, manipulated, schmoozed, and otherwise "helped" into buying what "they" want us to buy. OBD opens our eyes to tricks of the trade by marketers and advertisers, who work feverishly to have us pick Their (!) favorite brands off the shelf. He uses examples of familiar goods and situations: Froot Loops to Ford, Best Buy to Blockbuster. Volvo and Xbox. Ever think your neighbor might actually be "paid" to casually fawn over a great product he's been using lately? It's in OBD. How about companies that spend millions on subtle strategies to tickle your sense of smell in the store? It's in OBD. "Sounds" that direct us to certain products? Using lasers to put ads on eggs? -Most interesting! [Didn't someone years ago want to use lasers to put an ad on the face of the moon? (!) Maybe "branding" is not so new a technique after all.]

-But it's not a very uplifting book if shoppers believe in "carefully choosing." Product numbers may be limitless, but we learn real "choice" is minimally in play. Companies have the edge, Conley says. Indeed, here's an mind-sharpening alert that scorns (underhanded?) strategies and tactics that companies use to encourage us buy Their goods. He says CEOs enhance the aura of products, the charm of their packages, the glitz of their ads...without ever much worrying about actually improving the products. -And we, apparently as consuming "sheeple," bite every time at the trumped-up, branded bait. OBD explains it...but, too bad, doesn't much tell us what we can do about it. -If we could do anything about it at all.

The author does get a little wrapped-up in the analytical as he deals with "personal branding," and olfactory and brain-wave inventiveness. Here, he takes on a less-critical and more theoretical slant; and sometimes, it's hard to tell what he's getting at. Sometimes, the eyes automatically turn to reading in skim-mode. Complete with high-rent words like "activated zygomatic major," Conley abandons easy-to-relate-to, everyday products and services...and delves into the more abstract ...his thoughts on university studies, on CEO mindset, sensory logic...and, of all people, Freud. If OBD didn't suddenly morph into a thinly-layered, psychology treatise, it could have been a starting guide for beating "Branding Disorder." Luckily, "Getting Inside Our Heads" and "Getting Personal" are only two such chapters that come to mind....

-But more importantly, Lucas never actually defines his brand of "branding," making for some confusing passages.

For instance, is "branding" about hyping a product's name (as in its "brand name")? Is it re-doing a product's on-shelf look? -Can't be this alone because the author describes (unshelved, of course!) "personal" branding, or is it about the re-styling of people themselves? -About sneakily re-doing shopper thinking to favor a certain product? -Some new theory of eye-catching package wrapping? Is it tattooing the forehead or the back-end of a steer? Maybe it's all of this.

-Don't know for sure. Clearly, though, this is, overall, basic, textbook-like "psychology" on marketing and advertising, surely outstanding info if you like that sort of thing. Curiously, he's hit us with a pop-title that's all branded-up for consumer consumption! OBD. -A victim of his own research! In any event, the book's good, but it's not nearly a practical guide (as expected to be) to whipping the disorder [Obsessive Branding Disorder] Lucas Conley accuses the country of having.

Read it before doing the weekend shopping! After you've finished, going to the local supermarket may never feel the same.

I love this book. Lucas Conley steps back as a journalist and documents with a palpable tone of fascination mixed with horror, the degree to which branding has become so powerful as a marketing tool, and so pervasive as a force in our daily lives. He takes us inside the world of researchers and branding specialists and reports on the subtle, sometimes insidious work. And he covers the topic with colorful, vibrant language. He's an excellent raconteur.

What I love is the fact that Conley stands back far enough to question the whole paradigm of branding. He pulls the curtains on some terrible branding failures (where smart execs threw millions of dollars to develop dumb brands) and questions whether marketers themselves have become too obsessive with branding as a solution to all marketing problems. Call Interband and see me in the morning? It doesn't always work.

More deeply, he wonders if our collective obsession with branding is also cheapening our life experience. What exactly are we doing when we look at the world through brand-colored spectacles.

This is by turns entertaining, informative and provocative. Roll up your sleeve. At 220 pages its a quick jab. And it'll be good for you!

Having seen the author plug the book on 'The Colbert Report' I immediately thought it would be a book I would like to read...living in Ireland I had to import the book at extra cost...and having just finished reading it 10 minutes ago I can say it was well worth it.
I would recommend this book to anyone at all interested in how the companies of the world are infesting our daily lives with constant advertising and the ways in which they try to get under our skin to persuade us to buy their products.
The book being a little on the short side,would be my only quibble.

Having spent a good many years in advertising and marketing, and having read a great many articles and books about the subject, I'll have to admit I did approach this book with a more than casual interest in learning about the current state of the "art".

One of my all time favorites "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard, was the standard of the earlier attempts to dig into the underbelly of the mind grabbing beast called advertising. Well, we've come a long way, Baby.

Lucas Conley's book delivers marketing today, with specificity, freshness, and courage. A "no-holds-barred" look at the disorderly state of the marketing of "brands" instead of the "goods and services" they were originally intended to represent. I found it fascinating.

I originally purchased this book because of the bright red cover, the lettering style and the title. After reading it, I decided to buy additional copies for some of my friends in the business world. Of the books currently out there on the topic, I give this one "Best of Breed".

Perhaps the breeziest business book in years, Obsessive Branding Disorder hooked me in with its gloriously funny potshots at branding executives and the branding industry.

Examples: The state of Kentucky shelled out some $20 million for the words "Unbridled Spirit" and an ad campaign to accompany it, while Connecticut's tourism board assigned colors to each region of the state, because: "The psychology of color was used to further define the brand by zeroing on geographic characteristics or more ethereal elements," said a state tourism director.

If only Lucas Conley could have continued his assault on the world of branding. Sadly, beginning with the story of the Charmin Bath Tissue truck (Page 67), his writing flattens into a catalog of advertising methods and gimmicks the industry continues to trot out...entire stores devoted to a brand, packaged scents, and neuroscience.

(The list is not astoundingly different from other sound-the-alarm tomes of the recent past. Product placement on game shows, celebrities in TV ads, and even radio jingles were considered demons of the day, and while I'd personally argue (and agree with the author) that all of this marketing is taking a toll on our psyches, he provides no evidence that the latest gimmicks are going to be any worse than their predecessors.)

Only in the end does Lucas get back to branding, and this time, he takes successful shots at personal branding before finishing with some fairly well-written philosophical perspectives on the practice.

A must read for any marketing specialist and for more than one C level executive. Hopefully, it will prevent some of the readers from loosing sight of the real thing. It shows why Branding is a powerful weapon and why, as such, is dangerous in the hands of extremists. This book might make you re-think your marketing plan. Or even your career.

Some of the tendencies the author addresses in the advertising industry are indeed disturbing. However, presented with this wealth of information, he reaches the wrong conclusion.

He blames the corporations for creating these brands and boosting sales through cheap gimmicks completely unrelated to product quality. However, the corporations would not observe such practices if they were not the most effective known strategies. Clearly, in the West, people buy image as much as they do a product.
So the correct conclusion is not that corporations are superficial, but rather that most consumers make purchases according to superficial criteria.
People need to ask change of themselves, not of the corporations who will use whatever means are most successful to sell their product. Marketing and advertising is but a mirror into which the collective consumer may look. The author of this book does not like what is to be seen there and concludes that the problem is to be remedied by breaking the mirror.

Finally, I would question whether ubiquitous branding is a disorder. For instance, if I had to choose between having an X Inc. stadium and no stadium at all, I'd rather paste on the logo. What if a poor working mother is able to send her child to college by intelligently investing the money she gets from naming him/her after a company? The kid can change their name when they're 18.

A quick read - and yet it has been said before. As disturbing as the subject matter maybe for marketeers, the author appears to have an ax to grind?

Okay, so first off, I haven't read the book. But the idea that branding has taken over and is now a more powerful factor than quality or R & D is something I might be willing to grant the author.

But the question is, what should/can be done about it? A few intellectual people griping won't add up to anything more than a few intellectual people griping.

Branding has a functional role in ensuring that quality is reasonably consistent and that someone's name is behind a product. If Nike doesn't work on their R&D, another product by Puma will take their market share. And what would the author prefer? Anonymously made cars? Don't get me wrong, I don't love living in an advertising-overladen world, but brands have a function, and if they've been stretched beyond that, people's skepticism will push them back to a reasonable level. If Porsche starts making a deodorant, people simply won't buy it.

I had to chuckle at the title of this book "Obsessive Branding Disorder." This sounds like the latest mental disease to make the rounds of television talk shows, but the author is pointing up a marketing "disease" in business. In the absence of an original idea of worth, in a world awash with me-too products, marketing tries desperately to grab a few milliseconds of our attention to influence our buying decisions. Does it work?

In the case of youths, certainly it does. For someone my age (who had to sew her own wardrobe for school), the idea that the "wrong" shoes, jacket, jeans would lead to social ostracism in high school (as opposed to honestly getting there by being a nerd) is something nightmarish to me. But marketeers springboard off that desperate herding instinct of kids not to be different (so as not to be singled out) and to belong by engineering marketing efforts using blogging, Youtube and word of mouth. Since word of mouth is one of the cheapest and most powerful means of generating sales, marketing efforts have been concentrating on harnessing the power of multitudes of advocates. Even though word of mouth is difficult to control marketeers have been trying to seed the population and generate buzz by free samples, small payments and other inducements. That's just one type of branding strategy.

The author gives example after example of how brand placement, a new strategy in marketing, is used by companies in place of innovation and the risky business of introducing a new product. He also discusses the extremes of brand loyalty (theft and mugging over popular brands of clothing) to branding campaigns for entire cities, to promote tourism. He discusses product placement "creep", where product logos appear on stadiums, in films and other unexpected places, in order to seep into the unconscious and sway your opinion.

There is no doubt that marketing "noise" (the din of similar products competing for attention in this media-saturated world) is a huge problem for marketing. Any surface upon which your eye dwells for more than a second is a place to put an ad (example, the tray table in airplane seats and the handle of a gas pump.) The author exhorts us to avoid being herded into brand loyalties that offer no real benefit or differential by being aware of marketing ploys, by avoiding "loyalty beyond reason" and by fighting what is in many cases, an illusion. This is a short but excellent book to make you aware of tricks being played on you to extract your money from your pocket unwittingly for diminishing value, for paying a premium for absolutely nothing, not a promise of superior quality or performance or any benefit beyond what a similar product could provide to you. Excellent, fascinating reading. I really recommend you read this.

This was a great book. It was short (only 200 pages), but the type was small and the margins were reasonable. It's an investigative piece. The author is not a marketing expert or a writer trying to promote a marketing firm or whatever. This is a simple book that explores the status of marketing today. It questions whether the US culture has become obsessed with brands rather than quality products and new improved products.

The author says at some point that he was thoroughly amused by the extreme examples of branding he saw. And he believes the world is cheapened when EVERYONE sees it with a marketer's eye. I agree. But this book is good because it points out that branding is used AND ABUSED as a tool to sell goods and services today. A lot more use and a lot less abuse would be good!

This book informs us that successful marketers today create loyal customers who are lazy minded and don't think much before they buy. They just stick to the brand that they have learned to trust and believe in. Once a company creates a successful brand, then they milk it for all it's worth.

This book has an introduction and 9 chapters. Examine the Search Inside material provided by Amazon to see the chapter titles. I thought the book was written well and well outlined. 5 stars!

And Lucas Conley is none too happy about it as he warns us in OBD. Less R and D is being spent on improving a product. Why spend the do-re-mi when you can just change the shape,say, of the bottle it comes in, making it cooler but not better.Exploit emotion. The brain thinks 3,000 times faster with an emotional charge than a logical one. Go to an Apple store and you'll see his point. Or quoting Daniel Gilbert, "Experiences don't hang around long enough to disappoint you. What you have left(after a visit) are wonderful memories."(Or look at the testing done showing that people love Pepsi, in a blind taste test but when it is mano a mano(can to can), the visual of the Coke can actually lights up a part of our brains.) But the book really excels when he talks about what sounds like a vast conspiracy. Smells emanating from the shelves of grocery stores? Yes, put there to get you worked up. And smells for kids on put on the shelf consistent with a child's height. And P and G has organizations that give free samples to regular, next door folks in exchange for them hitting you up on the value of pampers or the sparkle to be found only in a certain toothpaste.Like a sci-fi movie. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must drive home in the Ultimate Driving Machine, fire up the Viking Range, get out the Gordon Ramsey cookbook, and get ready for the Fourth.

As someone who travels often, I require reading material that distracts m from the boredom of the airport drone. This book is poignant, funny and revealing. It held my attention throughout. The author, Lucas Conley has done an excellent job of pointing out how we have deviated from a society of quality seeking individuals to a mass of the product obsessed. It is all around us, on the subways of New York City where everyone is plugged into the latest i-gadget, to the streets of Bangkok where booths are jammed with fake goods. All this is clearly a reflection of our obsession with the appearance and perceived coolness of the brand rather than the caliber of the product itself.
Conley does an excellent job of calling our attention to the error of our ways, and does so in a humourous and captivating manner. I would highly recommend his book to anyone.

Conley has done well in providing overdue business and cultural criticism for our quick fix, near-sighted economy. He cleverly points out that, over the last decade, business has become obsessed with branding their products with imagery, lifestyles, and experiences in an effort to fool consumers into loyalty and irrational buying habits. This obsession has sacrificed a company's attention to innovation and for a product's quality improvement.

To sell your product, it isn't about making something useful or effective anymore. Companies are convinced that the storylines, ideology, and the lifestyle they invent for their product will do the selling. If these methods become ineffective, the company ignores the need to improve the product or create something more advanced as it's far easier to just "rebrand" the lifestyle and the experiences that the product is supposed to bring you. All this is done in an attempt to overwhelm emotion and discourage reason.

Conley has framed a vibrant discourse for the zero-sum game playing out between branding and innovation, emotion versus reason, and the quick fix versus long-term solutions. He thoroughly outlines the branding disorder by providing plenty of convincing examples from the business world of Proctor Gamble to the cityscapes of New Orleans and Cincinnati. A persuasive criticism develops as we find out that it's not just business that loses but the consumer and the public at large as well.

The book encourages further thought and discussion as it branches into complicated issues including the nature of buying and selling, globalization, and our "just saying it makes it true" culture. A must read for the business tycoon or just the economic well-wisher, reading the book produces an immediate 'brand' new awareness of the ads and economy around us.