The Brain Sell: How the new mind sciences and the persuasion industry are reading our thoughts, influencing our emotions, and stimulating us to shop

The Japanese distinguish between atarimae hinshitsu and miryokuteki hinshitsu. The former describes what the customer expects a product or service to do.

Andrew Lewis succinctly put it: “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

Digital Natives include anyone born from the late 1980s onward.

Impulse purchases, reportedly worth around £24 billion annually to retailers in the US and UK, result from System I not System R thinking.

spend ten seconds imagining a pink elephant diving into a bowl of blue custard. Such vivid, fantastical images are what psychologists call “thought stoppers.”

Miryokuteki hinshitsu describes the quality that fascinates by exceeding customers’ expectations:

they “live much of their lives online, without distinguishing between the online and the offline.

Viewers who spend four or more hours watching television each day hold significantly different opinions from those who spend far less time obtaining their information from the television. They believe, for example, that there is a far higher prevalence of crime, violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, and prostitution in society than is actually the case

Likes can be used to create remarkably insightful personal profiles. These include accurate predictions of a user’s age, IQ, race, personality, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and political leanings, and whether or not they smoke cigarettes, take drugs, or drink alcohol.