The Birth of Tragedy (Out of the Spirit of Music) was Nietzsche's first book, published in 1872 when he was 27 years old. In it he discusses Greek tragedy and the world more generally in terms of three tendencies: the Dionysian, the Apollonian and the Socratic.

Of the Dionysian he writes: "Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus, and for a long time the only stage hero was Dionysus himself... All the celebrated figures of the Greek stage - Prometheus, Oedipus, etc - are mere masks of the original hero, Dionysus..."

Of the Apollonian he writes: "The joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo the god of all plastic energies... the "shining one," the deity of light, is also the ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perception of these states in contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world, this deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dreams, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the arts generally, which make life possible and worth living."

Nietzsche believes that the body is an overwhelmingly unconscious, non-individuated and active force, "Dionysian", in a constant process of Becoming.

The Apollonian is the healthy force of the mind that re-acts to the body and to the world, rendering them consciously intelligible and individuated, through art, archetypes and narratives we tell ourselves while we are awake, and through the healing power of dreams while we sleep (cf. The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives by Rosalind D. Cartwright).

What the Apollonian re-presents is not necessarily "true" in the sense of "correspondence" with the "real" world, but rather "affirmative" in the sense that it is a healthy re-presentation in the service of Life.

Nietzsche contrasts the Dionysian (healthy, unconscious active forces) and the Apollonian (healthy, conscious reactive forces) with the Socratic:

"Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy... Now the virtuous hero must be a dialectician, now there must be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality."

For the Socratic (unhealthy, conscious reactive forces), all re-presentations should be in the service of Knowledge, placing rational argumentation and Science above Art (thus killing Greek tragedy).

But ultimately Science itself is not in "correspondence" with real world "facts" (or Plato's Forms), but is rather in "coherence" with a dominant scientific interpretation or "paradigm" (cf. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). For Nietzsche, "There are no facts, only interpretations".

What is worst about the Socratic, according to Nietzsche, is that it places the re-presentations of Science in judgment of and opposition to Life, which often requires beautiful illusions in order to flourish.

Commenting on The Birth of Tragedy in a preface he wrote 16 years later, Nietzsche refers to "the task which this audacious book dared to tackle for the first time: to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of Life."

Brian Solis is one of the world's foremost experts on "social media". His book, Engage, is intended to be a "complete guide for brands and businesses to build, cultivate, and measure success in the New Web". And indeed it is.

This book is worth its price and more just for the extensive statistics, best practices from leading brands (e.g. the Home Depot channel on YouTube; the Best Buy "Twelpforce"on Twitter; the Intel social media guidelines), and its up-to-date inventory of new media that are available. But beyond these Solis also makes numerous useful observations:

- "The previous hierarchy of messaging has collapsed. Now in order to appeal to customers, clients, or potential stakeholders, we must approach them from top-down, bottom-up, and side-to-side... We must sanction and amplify the experts and emissaries" (p. 10)

- "Specifically we are looking to uncover: material social networks; people linked through common interests that are germane to our business, industry and marketplace; keywords commonly used by community members; patterns for discovering and sharing information; influence of outside networks and also the effects of existing networks on external communities; influential voices, tiered, and how they form distinct and overlapping connections; the personalities of networks and the specific communities; the nature of threads, memes, and associated sentiment; the language of inhabitants; the prevailing culture and our potential place within it; the tools people use to communicate in and around each network." (p. 14)

- "Go where your customers are, and not where they aren't. Give them something to read. Give them something to share. Give them reasons to respond." (p. 44)

- "Wikipedia entries regarding your company and market are highly influential to visitors who visit those pages. The Google page-rank function is incredibly strong in Wikipedia, and in most cases the leading result for any search in Google will direct you to the corresponding page in Wikipedia." (p. 47)

- "World of Warcraft, a popular MMOG, is rife with branded content. In many cases, companies pay for prominent placement within the networks as they can psychologically connect with users at a peer level. There's a general sentiment that the sponsoring brand is part of the community because it supports the community." (p. 49)

- "Top 10 ways to monetize real-time conversations: 10. Lead generation; 9. Coupons; 8. Analytics/ analyzing the data; 7. Enterprise CRM; 6. Payments; 5. Commerce; 4. User-authentication/ verifying accounts; 3. Syndication of new ads; 2. Advertising/ context and display ads; 1. Acquiring followers." (p. 85)

- Social Media Optimization (SMO) through titles, descriptions, tags, content distribution, links and "liking" (pp. 107-112)

- "Adding to the list of attributes that are fundamental drivers for creating effective online presences and corresponding communities, we should also include those seeking: 1. Recognition; 2. Affinity/ association; 3. Purpose; 4. Insight; 5. Entertainment; 6. Rewards; 7. Empowerment; 8. Resolution; 9. Access; 10. Exclusive content." (p. 126)

- "Top 10 Guidelines for Social Media participation: 1. Be transparent and state where you work; 2. Never represent yourself in a false way; 3. Post meaningful, respectful comments; 4. Use common sense and common courtesy; 5. Stick to your area of expertise; 6. When disagreeing, keep it polite; 7. Be diplomatic when writing about the competition; 8. Never comment on legal matters; 9. Never participate in social media in crisis situations - refer to PR or legal affairs; 10. Protect confidential information." (pp. 196-198)

- A detailed process for "Establishing a Conversation Index": Step 1. Listening; Step 2. Documentation; Step 3. Presentation; Step 4. Observation (pp. 220-227)

- A summary of Forrester's "Social Technographics Ladder" to segment social media participants (pp. 255-258)

- An outline for a Social Media Plan (pp. 277-280)

- And "The New Media Scorecard" to measure ROI (pp. 321-345)

Despite its wealth of useful information, there are a few annoying rhetorical excesses and even spelling errors in this book, for example "It is the dawn of a democratized information economy"; "the interactive Web served as a great equalizer"; "genuine participation is a new blueprint for unmarketing"; "affect" where it should be "effect"; and the hyped "Foreword by Ashton Kutcher" which consists of a grand total of one page full of clichés. Any 10-year-old girls or 60-year-old cougars who bought the book for Ashton are in for a disappointment.

It is not surprising that a book about "social media" would hype social media, but a few comments on terminology might be appropriate.

First, Facebook did not invent human sociability. ALL media are "social media", whether a caveman's pictographs, newspapers, e-mails or Facebook: they are each media through which messages - intended and unintended - are communicated from senders to - intended or unintended - receivers, who in turn may or may not "engage".

Second, calling Facebook "the New Web" is like calling a garden "The New Nature". It is trivially true, in the sense that chronologically Facebook was invented after the Web; but it is not a "New Web", but rather a limited, domesticated corner of it.

And finally, a recent study by Nielsen and Facebook has suggested that an "earned" impression on a social media site may increase intrusion, comprehension and purchase intent (Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression, April 2010). Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that, according to Keller Fay, Word-of-Mouth online represents only about 10% of WOM - 90% is offline.

So despite its relevance, "social media" marketing is but one important component of a more comprehensive WOM marketing strategy. That having been said, for social media marketing, Solis' book is a great place to start.

For many years Jack Trout, the world's top expert on positioning, insisted on the importance for a brand to claim a singular idea in the minds of consumers.

Of course in reality things are not so simple, and Trout allowed for different expressions of this positioning across different cultures and different communications platforms. Still, this conceptual "land claim" of exclusive territory in the consumer's mind was the objective.

Positioning becomes more challenging as brands expand across different cultures, as Millward Brown's Nigel Hollis observes in his book The Global Brand (2008). Though difficult to execute, positioning nonetheless remains a key marketing objective.

Arguably the greatest challenge to top-down corporate positioning of brands is the exponential rise of consumer-generated content. Dr. Andreas Weigend, the former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com has observed that there was more consumer-generated content created in the past year than in all the rest of human history combined.

What this means for brands is the rise of the "Attention Economy", and strategies to effectively cut through the clutter and capture mindshare are more critical than ever.

The days when a corporation could simply impose a brand's positioning on the supposed tabula rasa of a consumer's mind are over, because consumers are now coming to the table with preconceived ideas about your brand that they are sharing with other consumers at the click of a mouse. Furthermore if there is a discrepancy between C2C content and B2C content, C2C content will often win.

Thus for B2C communications to succeed in the future, they will have to be more aware of, sensitive to, and opportunistic in surfing C2C communications. Go with the C2C conversational flow, because Word-of-Mouth rules.

This is why the ARF's Listening Playbook by Steve Rappaport is so timely and important. Corporations that continue to attempt to impose brand positionings and messages from on-high with little regard for existing consumer perceptions and conversations are going to face an exponentially harder challenge as time passes and C2C communication (and impressions) overwhelm B2C communications.

For many years the Advertising Research Foundation has been consistently a thought leader, ahead of the curve of mainstream advertising theory and practice, for example in its important work on consumer engagement led by Joe Plummer, Dr. Robert Heath and Dr. Gerald Zaltman. Once again the ARF remains in the avant-garde with publication of this book.

The ARF Listening Playbook is a very systematic and detailed presentation of state-of-the-art practices in listening to consumer conversations in their "natural" on-line environments. It presents a definition of listening; the reasons brands listen; the structure of listening initiatives; the objectives that listening initiatives can fulfill; best practices; and a comprehensive and up-to-date inventory of listening vendors. In short, valuable information on almost every page, and everything required to make your marketing significantly more in-touch, intelligent and efficient.

Instead of trying to position your brand through communication brute force, the ARF Listening Playbook shows you how to achieve a detailed read on what consumers are already saying about your brand and its category. This makes it significantly easier to navigate your brand from its spontaneous positioning to your desired positioning by "going with the winds" and carefully monitoring and managing existing consumer conversations, sentiment and engagement. A must-read for intelligent marketers!

Dr. Philip Kotler is one of the world's leading authorities on marketing.

In Marketing 3.0, he describes the evolution of marketing from 1.0 (product-based) to 2.0 (consumer-based) to 3.0, a holistic approach recognizing that people are more than mere consumers: they are multi-dimensional human beings with values, aspirations and hopes for the world, or at least for their own corner of the world.

Marketing 3.0 looks at how values-driven marketing is deployed, and how it impacts not only customers, but also employees, channel partners and company shareholders.

Whereas in the past a company's positioning, the singular idea it projects in the minds of consumers was sufficient to capture market share, with the avalanche of information available instantaneously on the Internet, and P2P communication among consumers, the bar has been raised considerably for marketing.

Consumers who are uninterested in you can easily avoid you and give their business to countless other companies; consumers who may be interested in you want more than just a simple idea: they want to know and be able to participate in the creation of a company's vision, mission, values and even the products themselves.

Kotler describes the three stages in the relationship between marketing and values: 1) Marketing vs. Values - values are seen as extra costs and constraints; 2) Balance of Marketing and Values - business as usual, but some corporate philanthropy takes place; and finally 3) Integration of Marketing and Values - the company lives its values in a transparent way throughout the organization and in its interactions with customers, channel partners and the world as a whole.

While the broad strokes of Marketing 3.0 are hard to disagree with, many of Kotler's specific observations are debatable, to say the least. For example: "Because social media is low-cost and bias-free, it will be the future for marketing communications." In fact there's no free ride, not even in social media, and as Altimeter Group has observed, the companies most successful in social media are devoting significant financial resources to it. And bias-free? Many observers would say that there is far more bias in social media than there ever was in traditional advertising.

Kotler concludes the book with "The 10 credos of Marketing 3.0":

1. Love Your Customers, Respect Your Competitors
2. Be Sensitive to Change, Be Ready to Transform
3. Guard Your Name, Be Clear About Who You Are
4. Customers Are Diverse, Go First To Those Who Can Benefit Most From You
5. Always Offer a Good Package at a Fair Price
6. Always Make Yourself Available, Spread the Good News
7. Get Your Customers, Keep and Grow Them
8. Whatever Your Business, It is a Service Business
9. Always Refine Your Business Process in Terms of Quality, Cost and Delivery
10. Gather Relevant Information, But Use Wisdom in Making Your Final Decision

That pretty much sums it up. In others words, nothing too controversial, but nothing groundbreaking either. All of Kotler's key points in Marketing 3.0 could easily fit into a journal or magazine article.

Marketers who are looking for cutting-edge thinking may want to take a pass on Marketing 3.0, and spend their money on more groundbreaking books that have been released recently, such as the ARF Listening Playbook by Steve Rappaport (2010) or Engage by Brian Solis (2010).

Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image, a successful digital marketing and communications agency with offices in Toronto and Montreal.

The basic premise of Six Pixels of Separation is that "we no longer live in a world of six degrees of separation... everyone is connected."

Joel is a very engaging writer, having honed his skills on his own blog for years before the publication of this book in September 2009.

While acknowledging other online marketing activities, Joel spends most of his time discussing more "conversational" channels, namely blogs, micro-blogs (e.g. Twitter), podcasts, online social networks (e.g. Facebook), sharing sites (e.g. YouTube), user-generated content, wikis (e.g. Wikipedia), and widgets (applications).

He makes many excellent points. To name a few:

- "Your brand is not what you say it is... it's what Google says it is" (echoing Chris Anderson of Wired magazine)

- "Most businesses are not present enough in the search engines and they're leaving big money at the table (or for the competition)"

- "Digital marketing is not a one-night stand... it is about building real relationships, both with your customers and with your potential customers"

- In an excellent section entitled "Trust + Community = ROI", he summarizes with crystal clarity six ways to build trust in the `trust economy'

- "Everyone is so busy getting excited about the channels (and tactics) that they completely put aside the strategy and the brand"

- "Your website sucks - mostly because it was an afterthought and now it's the main calling card for your business"

- "Think ripples, not splashes... ripples are the powerful conversations that are generated when you share your content online"

- The bottom line is about facilitating and amplifying C2C positive communication about your brand. And if there is the occasional C2C negative communication, Joel suggests, "suck it up". Consumers will take it as a sign of your honesty

- "You can't have a strong business without a strong community" (or at least a strong community helps you have a stronger business)

- "Know Control". In a chapter filled with helpful observations, Joel demonstrates how the notion of Control has evolved in the social media universe

- "Digital Darwinism favors the community, not the creator or the enabler of the content" (this is a profound insight that is arguably the main point of Bob Garfield's book The Chaos Scenario)

- "Traffic does not equal Community"

- "Attention does not equal Trust"

- "Not all `Friends' are created equal...for your business to grow using online social networking, you are going to need a way to understand more about the individuals you are connecting to than how many connections they have"

- "Openness will make us very private... Many individuals are going to recoil in an effort to protect their privacy more and more... People are going to wake up en masse and be much more careful about what they put online and where"

Even with Joel's many helpful suggestions, of course there's no free lunch, even in "free" media, because getting social media strategy right often means a significant time commitment, and in our creative economy - or indeed in any economy - time IS money. A 2009 poll of (mostly small) businesses by Michael A. Stelzner found that 64% of are using social media for 5 or more hours each week, and marketers who have been in social media for years are devoting 20 or more hours each week.

And brands that are recognized leaders in social media like Starbucks, Dell, Nike and Amazon devote substantial financial resources to their online activities, being engaged deeply, on an ongoing basis, across numerous social media channels.

One of the main strengths of Joel's book is that ultimately it is not about the first digital screen (TV) the second digital screen (Computer), the third digital screen (Mobile device) or the fourth digital screen (In-store signage). As Rishad Tobaccowala has observed, "the media may be digital, but human beings are analog". Ultimately many of Joel's insights are not about media, but rather about human nature.

My one very minor criticism of this book is with Joel's assertion that "six degrees of separation is no longer relevant. In the digital world there are no degrees of separation between you and your customers".

In fact, everyone is NOT connected to everyone. Much as I would like to be connected to Lionel Messi, Barack Obama and José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the fact is that there ARE degrees of separation between me and them that I will likely never breach, regardless of the social media campaign I mount. With even the average consumer being bombarded by 3000 marketing messages a day, the burning question now is how do you BREAK THROUGH, especially to those you would most like to reach, and whose communications are filtered, double-filtered and triple-filtered. Barack Obama reads TEN letters from average Americans a day, out of the tens of thousands he receives daily.

Despite this minor reservation, this is an outstanding book. Unless you work for Forrester Research or for Altimeter Group, you will likely learn a lot. And even if you work for them, you can learn from the exemplary clarity of Mitch Joel's writing style: Highly recommended!

God is not Great is one of a number of "new atheist" books that were published over the past few years: Breaking the Spell by Dr. Daniel Dennett; The God Delusion by Dr. Richard Dawkins; In Defence of Atheism by Michel Onfray; and Hitchens' book, to name the best known. However there are significant differences among these books, so if you're thinking of picking one up, you should be aware of their different styles and subject matter.

Hitchens' one-liners in God is not Great will delight atheists who cannot imagine why anyone would take this nonsense seriously, let alone use it as a foundation for their values. Perhaps the freshest contribution Hitchens makes is introducing the general public to the fine points of Mormonism, surely one of the most infantile and ridiculous collection of claims to ever grace the face of the earth. Mormons' clean living habits, which are highly commendable, serve to mask a total detachment from both current and historical reality when it comes to their deranged belief system.

But for the most part, there are no new arguments or information in this book, and Hitchens is preaching to an already convinced irreligious choir. In the same way that he challenges believers to give an example of a moral act that could not have been performed by a non-believer, I would challenge Hitchens to present even one person whose belief in the existence of God has been shaken by this book: sadly I don't think this person exists.

Regardless of how idiotic religious beliefs may seem to non-believers, the fact is that they have persisted among the majority of people, in a majority of cultures, for thousands of years, so they obviously have something going for them. What that something is may not be truth, but religions undeniably appeal to very fundamental psychological needs of human beings for a sense of meaning, direction and purpose in life, that only a minority of people have the time, desire and educational background to fully think through and analyze for themselves. Religion is a often a short-cut to meaning.

For anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the psychological and sociological "hot buttons" that religions use (whether or not they are aware they are doing this), Dr. Daniel Dennett's book Breaking the Spell would be a much better place to start than Hitchens' book.

For those who are looking for a deeper understanding of the "debate" between creationists and evolutionists, Dr. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (or indeed any of Dawkins' books) would be a better place to start.

But if what you are looking for is not understanding, but rather an entertaining polemic, Hitchens' is certainly a great read. That having been said, Friedrich Nietzsche made almost all of Hitchens' points, just as entertainingly and much more deeply, more than 100 years ago. Hitchens is Pepsi to Nietzsche's Coca-Cola.

There are books of fiction that reveal greater truths than non-fiction, because the revelations it makes are still largely in our collective unconscious, waiting to surface. Generation A by Douglas Coupland is such a book.

In a sense it is a sequel to Coupland's now classic Generation X, but a special sort of sequel, about New Beginnings rather than about a final conclusion. After all, "Generation X" ended up being used to label the post-boomer generation, leaving only two generations, Y and Z before... (religious fundamentalists can tell you the end of the story).

So Coupland has decided on a theme of Hope rather than despair, and with this choice he is aligned with an intense yearning of the Zeitgeist, reflected in the recent election of Obama, and the epic yet uncertain fight against global warming.

Generation A is set in the very near future, when bees have gone extinct. Or so everyone had thought, until five people are stung in different areas of the world. As a universally-recognized fertility symbol symptomatic of the health of the planet, these bee stings are the messenger of precarious hope.

However, "precarious" is the operative word:

"When I was growing up, Mother Nature was this reasonably hot woman who looked a lot like the actress Glenn Close wearing a pale blue nightie. When you weren't looking, she was dancing around the fields and the barns and the yard, patting the squirrels and French kissing butterflies. After the bees left and the plants started failing, it was like she'd returned from a Mossad boot camp with a shaved head, steel-trap abs and commando boots and man, was she pissed."

Coupland's five protagonists are engaging and diverse, inadvertent stars in a celebrity-obsessed world. What they have in common is their youth, and the opportunity their common experience has given them to think about life.

There is Zack from rural Iowa, a corn farmer who makes extra cash doing Web porn from his tractor. There is Samantha from New Zealand, who meets virtual friends to make "earth sandwiches". There is Julien, a student at the Sorbonne, who is enraged when his avatar from the World of Warcraft disappears suddenly, after 114 consecutive days of marathon sessions.

There is Diana from North Bay, Ontario, a fundamentalist Christian with Tourette's syndrome ("F-cks-it-p-ss-c-unt"). And there is Harj, who works in customer service for Abercrombie & Fitch's Midwest United State division - from a call center in Sri Lanka.

Despite its very current references, Generation A is, like Coupland's Generation X, a timeless work, in the sense that its themes are existential.

The five young adults are characterized by anomie, and above all, by an unconscious or even conscious desire to escape Life: into imaginary realities of webcams, Facebook "friends" on the opposite ends of the earth, videogames, imaginary kingdoms of God, or in the case of Harj, imaginary kingdoms of Abercrombie & Fitch-wearing New Englanders.

The natural world, the physical world, just isn't good enough. In the words of Julien, "All I wanted was to be back in World of Warcraft, not on this wretched planet with its trees and old crones and cause and effect."

As in his previous novels, Coupland is an astute observer, presenting our world as it is: without meaning other than that which we give it. Whereas our ancestors created myths to compensate for a life that was too short, we create distractions to take our minds off a life that is too long. One day without checking our e-mail is a boring eternity. And one of the things that most unnerves the five protagonists is that the rooms they are put in for observation contain furniture with no logos!

Is Nature good enough? Or is self-anesthesia through World of Warcraft or pharmaceuticals better? You'll have to read Generation A to find out!

Martin Lindstrom, a regular contributor to Ad Age and countless other media, is now recognized as a superstar in branding circles.

His previous book, Brand Sense (2005), was judged by the Wall Street Journal to be one of the ten best marketing books ever published. And rightly so: it was singlehandedly responsible for sensory branding becoming a much more mainstream and rigorous practice within the space of a few short years. Largely as a result of this book, today 35% of Fortune 100 companies integrate the concept of sensory branding, and there are numerous firms that specialize in sound branding, olfactory branding, and tactile branding, including Lindstrom's own Brand Sense Agency.

Buyology is a similarly ambitious work, and this time it is neuromarketing that he is trying to introduce to the mainstream. It is largely based on a $7 million dollar research project involving 102 fMRI scans and 1979 SST studies. The book is full of interesting observations.

In the introduction, before delving into his own findings, Lindstrom summarizes some of what we have already learned from the relatively few neuromarketing studies conducted to date, including a 2003 study by Dr. Read Montague that showed why the blind Pepsi taste challenge was invalid - because as soon as you know the brand, Coke becomes preferred, because Coke's idea - Coke's BRAND - is stronger, regardless of the taste:
"All the positive associations the subjects had with Coca-Cola - its history, logo, color, design and fragrance; their own childhood memories of Coke, Coke's TV and print ads over the years... beat back their rational preference for the taste of Pepsi. Why? Because emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally - think Apple, Harley Davidson and L'Oréal, just for starters - will win every single time."

In Chapter 2, on product placement, Lindstrom shows how Coca-Cola remains at the cutting edge of branding practices. He demonstrates that product placement can work in two main ways - in the Narrative, by being integrated into the action as part of the story - or present subliminally via brand identity elements such as colours and shapes. On American Idol, Coke has done both:

"When asked by a fellow judge if he liked a contestant's song... Simon commented, `How much I love Coca-Cola!' and then took a sip... The three judges all keep cups of America's most iconic soft drink in front of them, and both the judges and the contestants sit on chairs or couches with rounded contours specifically designed to look like a bottle of Coca-Cola. Before and after their auditions, contestants enter a room whose walls are painted a chirpy, unmistakable Coca-Cola red. Whether through semi-subtle imagery or traditional advertising spots, Coca-Cola is present approximately 60 percent of the time on American Idol."

Lindstrom shows how this dominance of Coca-Cola on both conscious narrative and unconscious imagery levels not only enhances perceptions of Coca-Cola, but in fact even suppresses recall of other brands that have a weaker presence.

In Chapter 3, Lindstrom explains how the discovery of Mirror Neurons in the 1990s has revolutionized psychology, quoting a professor at the University of California: "What DNA is for biology, the Mirror Neuron is for psychology."

Mirror neurons are neurons that empathetically "mirror" the feelings that other people around us are having - when we see someone eating a slice of pizza in person or even on TV, the same areas of our brains light up as if WE were eating the pizza. Similarly, our mirror neurons are responsible for us unconsciously mimicking the actions of people around us - yawning, running our hands through our hair, you name it.

"When other people whisper, we tend to lower our own voices. When we're around an older person, we're prone to walking more slowly." The discovery of mirror neurons has proved that "Monkey see, monkey do" is true in an extremely strong sense.

Chapter 4 is entitled "I can't see clearly now: Subliminal Messaging, Alive and Well." Lindstrom shows that in many ways subliminal advertising is even more powerful than conventional advertising, because it bypasses our conscious defences: it we don't notice something consciously, we have no way of critically evaluating it.

"Subliminal messages are defined as visual, auditory or any other sensory messages that register just below our level of conscious perception and can be detected only by the subconscious mind... Some stores play tapes... that conceal recorded messages - imperceptible to our conscious minds - designed to prod shoppers into spending more or to discourage shoplifting. Among the messages: "Don't worry about the money," and "Imagine owning it," and "Don't take it, you'll get caught." According to one vendor, in stores that broadcast these tapes overall sales are up 15 percent, while store thefts have fallen 58 percent."

"Subliminal messaging has even been shown to influence how much we are willing to pay for a product. Recently, two researchers demonstrated that brief exposure to images of smiling or frowning faces for 16 milliseconds - not long enough for volunteers to consciously register the image or identify the emotion - affected the amount of money subjects were willing to pay for a beverage... In other words, smiling faces can subconsciously get us to buy more stuff."

In Chapter 5 Lindstrom discusses the strong impact of consumption rituals, for example the ritual of putting a lime in a Corona:

"The Corona lime ritual reportedly dates back to 1981, when on a random bet with his buddy, a bartender at an unnamed restaurant popped a lime wedge into the neck of a Corona to see if he could get other patrons to do the same... (the invention of this ritual) is generally credited with helping Corona overtake Heineken in the US market."

The word "reportedly" in this context got my guard up, but in any case it's an entertaining story!

It's worth reading Buyology, and it will certainly have done a service if it succeeds in raising the profile of neuroscience in marketing circles. I probably would have enjoyed it even more, if I hadn't already read Brand Sense, which in my opinion is clearly a superior book. Indeed Chapter 8 of Buyology "Selling to Our Senses", is basically a rehashing of some of the findings in Brand Sense.

Even if you believe that all of our motivations and actions are somehow reflected in the brain - which I do - it is still a stretch to say that the BEST WAY to understand motivations and actions is through studying the brain.

Lindstrom is absolutely right that marketers have come to realize that there is often a gap between what people SAY they do, and what they ACTUALLY do. For example, a majority of consumers may SAY they read nutritional labels on food packages, but in fact they don't. Consumers may under-estimate the time they spend watching television. So people don't always know what they do.

He is also right that people don't always know WHY they do what they do. They may think they bought a car because it was "higher quality", but in fact they bought it because the sound of the car door closing sounded "solid", and they were influenced by the "new car smell" (straight out of a spray can).

But the research community has developed other methodologies to address these issues. The fact that people don't always know what they do, or why they do it, does not preclude research, it just precludes direct questioning.

Today savvy marketers use ethnographers (or digital ethnographers) to observe what people ACTUALLY do, regardless of what they think they do. And semioticians study RESIDUAL, DOMINANT and EMERGENT cultural codes to understand how our collective understanding and motivations in a category are evolving, even if we ourselves are unable to articulate this evolution. And qualitative research has come a long way in its use of advanced projective techniques, such as Dr. Gerald Zaltman's ZMET, to understand individuals' unconscious motivations.

Buyology is worth reading, and neuroimaging has a role to play in marketing, perhaps even a growing role. However, for the time being there are a lot of less costly, more practical research alternatives to answer the vast majority of marketing questions.

This is certainly a very important book. Whether or not it will have an impact on decision-makers is an open question.

In any case Jeff Rubin's thesis is very well-aligned with those of a growing consensus of serious thinkers: that the real economy is about to become a lot more Local.

Some analysts such as Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Upside of Down) and Jeff Rubin himself - see this as inevitable because of the hard stop limited oil supplies will impose. Others see this as desirable - John Ralston Saul (The Collapse of Globalism), Naomi Klein and Carl Honore (In Praise of Slow) because globalization, despite some positive aspects, has been seriously over-hyped, and for the Western world has now revealed itself as essentially a race to the bottom in terms of living standards (aka the race to live like a Chinese factory worker).

So all signs are pointing in the same direction: "Buy Local" is a growing trend for economic reasons (rising transportation costs, desire to protect local jobs); for environmental and public health reasons (minimize pollution and global warming associated with transportation, assurance of food safety standards); and for social reasons (stronger feeling of being integrated with your local community). Local is Beautiful.

Rubin doesn't shy away from the fact that in the short term this poses serious structural challenges. The Dominant economic paradigm subscribes to the notion of "economies of scale", which often implies that "Distant is Beautiful" - 100 coal and nuclear power plants and hundreds of thousands of kilometres of power lines are preferred to millions of energy self-sufficient homes equipped with solar panels.

But the Emergent paradigm points toward what Jeremy Rifkin calls "micro-generation": LEED homes and businesses with micro-solar and micro-wind; electric vehicles such as Nissan's Leaf and Chevy's Volt; a larger role for public transit systems, including urban bicycle networks like Montreal's BIXI; and even urban agriculture in the form of individual and community gardens so cities are more food self-sufficient.

The facts suggest that Rubin is correct, but it is not going to be an easy transition.

This is a very worthwhile book, and it would take a book-length response to fully do it justice. Douglas B. Holt contributes a lot of good observations and insights on the specificity of iconic brands. However, he also makes several dubitable points, with which most marketing experts would disagree.

The weakest point of this otherwise excellent book is when Holt tries to suggest that his "cultural branding model" is somehow in opposition with 1. the "mind-share branding model", 2. the "emotional branding model" and 3. the "viral branding model (sic)". He is compelling when he suggests that iconic brands are different from other brands and should be treated differently, but they require ADDITIONAL considerations, that are not in any way in conflict with the other three that remain necessary for any strong brand.

To briefly address each: Holt wants to impugn the mind-share model of branding, to which today's marketing community almost unanimously subscribes, yet presents no convincing evidence as to why it should be questioned. If anything, the latest neuroscience shows that the mind-share model's weak point is that traditional marketing tools have focused too exclusively on CONSCIOUS mind-share, when in fact UNCONSCIOUS mind-share is as or even more important, as confirmed by leading research firm Thinkscan's findings on the Mere Exposure Effect, and Dr. Robert Heath's research on Low Attention Processing, among others.

When Ipsos, Millward Brown and other leading research firms insist on the importance of brands' mind-share - (conscious) Awareness, perceived Popularity, and people's Familiarity with what the brand is all about, they are absolutely correct. Most people like what they think is Popular, and most people don't like what they don't know. Like it or not, we are part of a Herd.

And can anyone suggest seriously for even a moment that iconic brands do not use, and even depend on, emotional branding practices? Coca-Cola, Apple, Harley Davidson, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser - are at their best (often literally) dripping with emotion. As leading neuroscientists such as Dr. Antonio Damasio have shown, emotion is absolutely necessary for motivation, even when evaluating supposedly rational functional attributes and benefits.

Finally, most marketers would consider it bizarre to talk about a "viral branding model". Viral communication can be an extremely effective strategy or tactic (see for example Dove's groundbreaking Evolution campaign), but it is not a "branding model".

Despite these reservations, Holt's overarching point is a vital one, the importance of which is usually under-estimated : that iconic brands are NOT exactly like other brands, and should not be treated as such by marketers.

Iconic brands are iconic because of their unique relationship with semiotically-rich "populist worlds" that they are able to tap, unlike other run-of-the-mill brands, and the way that they articulate and mythically resolve tensions among different social milieus, and within society at large.

His point is made convincingly through the presentation of a series of case studies of iconic brands (which he calls "genealogies"), some more convincing (his discussion of Harley Davidson), some less (his analysis of Corona). But what is clear in any case is that iconic brands "perform as activists, leading culture".

Consumers do not only accept the role of iconic brands in pointing out new directions for society, they expect it. Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola are deeply embedded in our cultural unconscious, and thus possess the license to make statements about culture or about sub-cultures that other brands simply do not have.

Apple's famous "1984" ad is an example, as is Coca-Cola's "I'd like to teach the world to sing", that blazed the trail of Emergent social codes. Iconic brands should always be one step ahead, and this is why they cannot be evaluated on the same basis as ordinary brands: the criteria to be a successful leader are different from the criteria to be a successful follower. As Holt asserts, "Managers of iconic brands like ESPN, Nike and Patagonia never aim their strategies at (mainstream customers). Rather, they work to create the most desirable myth for their nucleus of followers and insiders".

There is nothing more sad than iconic brands that through poor marketing practices fail to leverage or even undermine their own iconic status (Levi's is the saddest example I can think of).

Overall Holt's book is a very welcome addition to the marketing discussion.