8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Valuable Synthesis of Brain Science, Advertisng and Branding, 1 May 2005
By A Customer
This review is from: The Advertised Mind: Groundbreaking Insights into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising (Hardcover)
This book is a synthesis of various perspectives on how the brain works and what this means for how advertisng and branding work. It combines real world advertisng research and latest thinking on neuoroscience to put forward a genuinely new paradigm for thinking about how consumers, and indeed marketing managers, think about brands and how this influences their behaviour.
The insights you get from reading The Advertised Mind are very much overdue, especially the integration of rational thinking and emotional response into one system. You do sometimes have to work at the ideas to realise their full implications, but it is worth it.
There are numerous anecdotes from real-world situations and experiences encountered by Erik Du Plessis in his work with Millward Brown, the research company. These are are interlaced with a review and explanation of the brain physiology (a marvelous slow motion walk through how the brain respondes emotionally first. The author explains the complexity of brain science in a straightforward way that layman can understand. He also in many ways details the hidden history of ideas about advertising works and debunks right-brain left brain explanations. and the Low Attention arguments of Robert Heath, simply by explaining how emotion is the stimulator of attention.
This should be required reading for all marketing and brand managers, and anyone who is concerned with truly understanding how to improve communications between people and the resonance of their brand.
The ideas in this book have wider application beyond advertising, to all brand encounters.
It is the kind of book that you will return to again and again, and realise a different insight each time. Great Stuff.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book on the effectiveness of advertising I have ever read, 16 April 2011
I can wholeheartedly recommend the Advertised Mind to anyone who wants to understand how advertising is being processed by consumers, and how it creates an effect on brand perception or purchase intention. The first half of the book is about the workings of the human mind. That seems like a long prelude to the actual theme of advertising, but it provides a fertile ground for fully understanding the second half of the book. Moreover, this first half of the book is a lot of fun reading, and I learned a lot about the human mind that is even applicable beyond the realm of advertising. Also the second half of the book, which truly focuses on advertising itself, is thorough, very well organized and together provides a comprehensive perspective on advertising. The overall messages are very clear, and they make the very strong point that there is still a lot of advertising out there that is wasted. The old adagium in advertising "I know that half of my advertising is wasted but I do not know which half" has become a little less true when one takes these messages seriously. Thank you, Erik du Plessis. I will definitely apply these learnings to my work, and hence, help to create more effective advertising for my company.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Cognitive science meets Madison Avenue, 24 May 2007
This review is from: The Advertised Mind: Groundbreaking Insights into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising (Hardcover)
This treatise is designed for patient, methodical readers with a quest for insight. Erik Du Plessis is committed to explaining how advertisements work on consumers' consciousness, so he reviews existing research on advertising, and includes cognitive science's understanding of how the brain works on a chemical and cellular level. His research is accessible, since he often recaps and provides analogies that bring it to life, but some of the material remains dense and even obfuscates key points. Du Plessis' results are accurate but may seem self-defining such as the idea that ads you like are ads you remember and they can be difficult to apply. This is an impressive attempt to bring social science and neurological theory to bear on advertising. Given the intangible nature of creativity, a strong intuitive understanding of what makes advertisements likeable might help ad designers get more from this dissection. Of course, the industry also wants to know how it can reach a tech-oriented audience that records its favorite programs on TIVO and fast-forwards through the ads anyway. We find that this innovative book may be most useful for professionals in areas that involve a quantifiable, systematic approach, such as methods for determining how many ads to buy and how to allocate them across television outlets and other media.
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