Martin Lindstrom – Brandwashed

The book starts with a description of CEW, Cosmetics Executive Women, a group whose mission is to
prove to the world that beauty products can actually improve lives. Examples have been given where
fragrances were used to improve recollection after a traumatic incident had impaired memory of
patients. After that the author talks about how children are influenced by products as early as when
they are in their mother’s womb. The author talks primarily about two primary senses that the child has
fully developed even in the utero, the sense of sound and the sense of taste.

He elaborates on how the sense of sound is used to influence a child’s preference and future buying
behavior by citing several examples of brands whose jingles are so omnipresent that a child has heard
them time and again in the mother’s womb and develops a strong affinity for those brands exhibited by
the baby calming down in the presence of the familiar brand jingles at infancy.

The author further talks about the choice in music being developed and influenced largely by what our
mothers listen to when they are pregnant and proves that that taste in music is retained even in adult
life. The next part of the chapter talks about the influence that the mother’s eating habits during
pregnancy have on the child and validates it by citing research examples like a strong affinity for smoking
at age 22 if their mother was a smoker during pregnancy. Moreover, this sense of taste also includes the
fragrances inhaled and associated with particular food items. It is told that a child actually experiences
all these tastes and fragrances through the amniotic fluid and that anything the mother eats or drinks
during pregnancy is, in more or less quantity, mixed in the amniotic fluid that the baby receives from the
mother, leading to the baby developing preferences and affinities for particular food items in the womb
only.

The next part of the chapter talks about further marketing tactics employed when the babies are born
and how they are targeted at a younger age. Firstly the common media we are exposed to
subconsciously conditions us for life to act in a certain way and moulds our preferences. Moreover, he
gives an interesting quote that asserts that children might learn to say Mom and Dad first, but the first
word they learn to recognize is Ronald Mcdonald. Moreover, children learn to recognize an astounding
number of brand logos and iconic characters at a very young age, which is translated into brand
preference and buying behavior for the brands owning these logos. Even so much so that the children
preferred McDonalds branded products as compared to those without logos even though both were
completely identical in nature.