The Consumer Mind, by Pepe Martínez

Pepe Martínez trained in psychology at the Complutense University of Madrid and went on to spend decades in market research. His experience at Millward Brown Iberia informs his account of how people form impressions of brands.

The Korean edition appeared in 2015. The book’s emphasis on how people make decisions gives it a longer shelf life than a guide to particular marketing channels.

The basic questions of marketing

Marketing covers everything a business does to understand demand, find customers, and keep them coming back.

Advertising and sales are familiar parts of that work. Smartphones and social networks have given companies more places to reach people.

A bookstore shelf reflects how broad the field is. Martínez takes on the underlying question of how people come to notice and remember a brand.

The neuroscience behind neuromarketing

The book draws on psychology and neuroscience to ask how consumers respond to brands and the messages they send.

Martínez moves across several disciplines, and it takes a while to find the thread. A reader coming from business books may find the early chapters especially wide-ranging.

The chapters tend to explore connections between the brain and marketing instead of building toward a single rule you can apply at once.

The role of emotion and unconscious processes

The central argument is that deliberate reasoning accounts for only part of a purchasing decision. The author draws on research to discuss the influence of emotions and processes we are less aware of.

That idea will ring true to anyone who has made an impulse purchase. The book is at its most interesting when it tries to connect such familiar experiences to the research behind them.

A practical page at the end of each chapter

Each chapter closes with a page of takeaways for marketers. These pages give the book structure when the discussion ranges far from the immediate concerns of a brand team.

They also make it easy to return to the practical implications without rereading every example and explanation.

Understanding the people who buy

Ultimately the book asks marketers to understand how people actually make up their minds. Reason, feeling, and processes below conscious awareness can all have a role.

Those responses can also vary with age, gender, and cultural context. Brand research needs to take such differences seriously if it is to tell us something about the people a company hopes to reach.

Readers looking for a campaign playbook will find a more exploratory book here, with plenty to think about if they are curious about the relationship between neuroscience and brand perception.

Book details

The Consumer Mind

Author

Pepe Martínez

Korean edition published

January 27, 2015

ISBN13

9791186137055

View the book on YES24

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