Martin Lindstrom

THE WORLD’S LEADING BUSINESS AND CULTURE TRANSFORMATION COMPANY.

Time 100 and Thinkers50 laureate.

POST COVID-19: RETHINK CONSUMERS = RETHINK BUSINESSES.

English

Martin Lindstrom the chairman of Lindstrom Company, is one of the world’s foremost branding and business transformation experts and author of 8 New York Times best-selling book translated into 47 languages and sold well over one million copies.

Lindstrom was selected as one of the world’s 100 most influential people by TIME and in 2019, Thinkers50 named him one of the top business thinkers in the world.

 

Acclaimed keynote speaker, and a frequent speaker at the World Business Forum, the World Economic Forum and almost every major industry conference worldwide for tech leaders such as CISCO, SAP, Gartner, Microsoft, Amazon, Google to conventional brands such as the 
Coca-Cola Company, LEGO, Kraft Heinz, Disney and IKEA.

Also, he is the author of seven books including several New York Times bestsellers that have been translated into 60 languages. The Wall-Street Journal praised his book Brand Sense as “one of the five best marketing books ever published,” and his book Small Data as “revolutionary,” and TIME called his book Buyology “a breakthrough in branding.”

In his most recent title “The Ministry of Common Sense”, Martin Lindstrom shows how too many organizations seemed designed to drive their customers and employees crazy. This book help leaders build teams and organizations where common sense is the rule rather than the exception.

Martin Lindstrom has appeared in media including The New York Times, NPR’s “All Things Considered” and Marketplace, and on NBC’s TODAY show more than twenty times.

Awarded by Fast Company as one of the world’s top speakers on Business Transformation and Branding – Martin Lindstrom’s keynotes are in a league on their own. Through provoking – yet practical while highly entertaining, packed with cases, captivating videos, sounds and to -the – points visuals.

POST COVID-19: RETHINK CONSUMERS = RETHINK BUSINESSES.

After thousands of hours investigating the rapidly changing consumer post-COVID-19 landscape, Martin Lindstrom and his team have identified surprising new consumer needs … and remarkable business opportunities, too.

Throughout marketing history, studies have identified seven Points of Market Entry — that is, points at which a customer segment becomes receptive to a whole new category of products and services: newborn arrives, first day in school, starting college, first job, moving to a new home, getting married, and retiring.

Devastatingly, COVID-19 has introduced an “8th entry point,” a change so profound that it will impact every sector via a global synchronization of human behavior. It will establish a completely new, universal language and change of consumer patterns. Lindstrom calls it the “8EP.”

In this remarkable keynote address, Lindstrom shares his thought-provoking insight into the subconscious mind of the consumer and the profound impact COVID-19 is having on the world. In his presentation, Lindstrom will:

- Challenge established thinking and help you discover your organization’s new purpose.
- Share his practical guide for transformation in the aftermath of COVID-19.
- Share fascinating insights on which companies have barely survived, which thrived, and which companies completely failed to adapt to the 8EP — and what the winners all had in common.
- Share how to avoid having your great conceptual transformational thinking and big ideas drown in fear, politics, bureaucracy, and compliance.
- Explore powerful tools to prepare your organization for the next wave of change and (sadly) the next crisis.

CULTURE: Leadership, Innovation, and the Surprising Truth of Human Motivation.

Strategy eats culture for breakfast. Companies have never been so overwhelmed with emails, reports, data, statistics, and endless PowerPoint presentations, while at the same time preaching the importance of culture. Notice any conflicts?

Lindstrom takes his audience on a deep, remarkable dive inside some of the world’s largest organizations and their daily challenges as they rediscover, build, and maintain powerful cultures.

What happened when Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, was paralyzed by a two-month global cyber attack? When Lowes Foods faced two choices: to completely change their business model or to close down the entire retail chain? Or when Standard Chartered, the world’s 10th largest bank, realized that “common sense” had completely vanished from the behavior of their 86,000 staff members, leading to overly complex service offerings and immense customer frustration?

In each of these cases, culture became the savior.

As the spearhead of these and many more remarkable culture transformation projects worldwide, Martin Lindstrom takes the audience behind the scenes and shares what it takes to bring culture front and center in organizations that had been paralyzed by bureaucracy, compliance, and inefficacy.
Viewing bureaucracy as a disease, the Lindstrom team rebuilt the purpose of the organizations, reinvigorated and empowered the staff, and, most importantly, systematically removed the red tape that was killing entrepreneurship and productivity. In one organization, Lindstrom and his team banned PowerPoint presentations. In another, they entirely removed the CC function from Outlook. Meetings were limited to maximum four participants, and smart phones were banned. In one case, he even introduced a special division called The Ministry of Common Sense. And in every case, it worked!

In just two years, Maersk recovered and added an additional 43% to their global brand value. Lowes became the most innovative retailer in the U.S., and Standard Chartered nearly doubled their share price.

YOU WILL LEARN:

- What it takes to create a powerful culture, reverse poor staff morale, and attract top talent.
- Common sense initiatives (low-hanging fruit) that can, within weeks, infuse hope in an organization, boost morale, and improve productivity.
- The step-by-step roadmap to transform a bureaucratic organization into a powerful culture.
- The classic pitfalls and misunderstandings that jeopardize 9 out of 10 culture projects — and how to systematically avoid them.

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION: The Disruptor’s Agenda: Unleashing the Innovators.

Fourteen years ago, everyone’s favorite toy company was near bankruptcy — but then something remarkable happened, elevating LEGO to become the world’s most powerful brand* … seemingly overnight.

With Amazon and Walmart’s relentless attack on the conventional retail industry, Lowes knew they had a two-year deadline to survive. Fast-forward four years, and customers were lining up to enter Lowes stores.

Around the globe, conventional postal service organizations are considered to be dinosaurs. There’s only one exception: Switzerland. Why was Swiss Post, in contrast to the rest of the world, the first to adopt drones and self-driving cars, placing their services way ahead of Amazon and Uber?

Over two decades, Lindstrom and his team have challenged companies from almost every industry — toys, retail, postal services, shipping, banking, food, beverage, pharma, automobile, fashion — to rediscover their core and transform themselves. Lindstrom always starts with the customer, but what follows consistently breaks the rules of conventional thinking. His unusual method proves itself resilient within even the most stubborn organizations.
In this presentation, packed with behind-the-scenes, first-hand observations from some of the most remarkable business transformations in the world, Lindstrom introduces a ready-to-use framework, suggests simple and memorable metaphors, and merges it all into a captivating narrative. He will have the audience on the edge of their seats, leaving them eager to transform their own businesses. As Lindstrom says: Sixty-five per cent of the jobs today’s 12-year-old will do when he’s grown don’t exist today. So, why would yours, unless you change … right now?

YOU WILL LEARN:

- Why most MBA textbooks are misguided about transformation, and what a true (and much more dynamic) alternative looks like.
- How to reinfuse hope into an organization that began, decades ago, to lose its nerve, nimbleness, and entrepreneurial spirit.
- How to ensure that great conceptual thinking and big ideas don’t drown in politics, bureaucracy, compliance — with a lot of talk but no action.
- How to balance the short term (going from red to black) and the long term (the big idea, versus a compromise of a compromise) without losing the interest of the board, senior management, and investors.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY: Creating a Next-Gen Customer Journey Experience.

Two years ago, we all shook our heads as a doctor was dragged out of a United Airlines plane, leading to the company’s biggest PR disaster in its 92-year history.

But is that any different from what’s going on in your organization? What would happen if you became an undercover employee in your own organization, experiencing what your customers experience every day?

In this eye-opening presentation, Lindstrom goes underground with his audience. He shares first-hand recordings of disastrous customer interactions — and, yes, surprised managers and CEO’s who thought everything was perfect. This highly thought-provoking presentation is packed with videos and case studies, placing a revealing mirror in front of the audience. It will make them think, reflect, and, most important, act.

What makes Lindstrom’s presentation unique is that it’s hands-on, based on his personal experience designing, implementing, and monitoring some of the world’s most successful customer journeys, including the Walt Disney theme parks, Swiss International Airlines, Burger King, Maersk, and Dorchester Collection, the operator of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Bel-Air Hotel, and many other luxury properties around the world.

What these and numerous other cases all have in common isn’t huge budgets. Instead, they share clever, innovative thinking, often requiring only a couple thousand dollars of investment to create happy customers and million-dollar returns.

This remarkable, highly entertaining presentation is guaranteed to change your view of customer journeys, demonstrating that a small effort can yield a big difference.

YOU WILL LEARN:

- The optimal, highly cost-effective way to design a unique customer journey.
- The pitfalls few think about but which, if avoided, can save your organization millions.
- The small, yet highly strategic, steps you should take first in order to immediately generate results, build momentum, and save money.
- Best practices from completely unrelated industries, and what you should learn from their innovate ways of handling customer experiences.

FUTURE RETAIL: Until Amazon creates a drone that can cut your hair, there’s a physical, real reason to visit the barbershop.

We’re witnessing the biggest retail war in living history, with more than 4,000 store closures in the United States alone during 2018. Is eCommerce the only answer? Surprisingly, Lindstrom’s answer is No — and he backs up his claim with solid evidence and provocative cases, time after time proving that while the whole world sees only one direction, there are multiple alternative paths leading to amazing opportunities and results.

Based on exhaustive global consumer research conducted in more than 70 countries, for more than a decade Lindstrom and his team have investigated the wants of today’s and tomorrow’s consumers. They’ve investigated how retail is likely to evolve and, most important, what it takes to turn a red bottom line to black as a conventional and eCommerce player.

Lindstrom knows his game. He was the mastermind behind Lowes’ remarkable transformation, turning a struggling business into the most innovative retailer in the United States. He helped the world’s second-largest supermarket chain, Carrefour, beat Amazon and introduce a flurry of successful eCommerce concepts worldwide. In his speech, Lindstrom will share how to identify undiscovered consumer needs and translate them into unconventional retail solutions few would ever have thought possible.

What makes this presentation unique is the price tag of Lindstrom’s solutions — they are hands-on, concrete, inspiring, and highly cost effective. Consider his introduction of a groundbreaking multi-state “mini-makeover” competition inspired by American Idol. This format resulted in a double-digit improvement of the bottom line for one major retailer, yet only cost a few thousand dollars per store.

The presentation explores every dimension of retail, offline and online. It explores opportunities spinning out of consumer observations made in homes, and it takes a deep dive inside Amazon’s servers. The biggest in the world, they contain shocking consumer data and are already able to predict your next car, pet, or house purchase — without your knowledge. You’ll learn how Alexa’s secret “Voice Sniffing Technology” is able to listen in on any conversation and interrupt your conversation with relevant commercial messages. You’ll hear how AmazonGo, the conglomerate’s retail store, may soon adjust the prices live on the shelves according to who you are and how many people follow you.

Expect an express journey into tomorrow’s retail universe. This inspirational, provocative, hands-on presentation will help any company elevate its presence into the next league of retail.

YOU WILL LEARN:

- To identify “low hanging fruit” that can have an immediate bottom-line impact and create the momentum needed to revise a negative spiral trend.
- The latest retail trends from around the world, which will inspire you, provoke you, and strengthen your strategy.
- What it will take to turn around your stores — and the roadmap that will get you there.
- How to identify and steer around the pitfalls and unexpected obstacles that cause nine out of ten retail transformations to fail.

BIG DATA: And Why the Next BIG Thing Will Be All About Small Data.

LIKE IT OR NOT, businesses are drifting away from the consumer. In the last year, only 1 in 3,000 executives has spent time with their consumers. Instead of keeping in touch with consumers, leaders rely on BIG Data — reports, databases, and statistics — in order to understand the emotions of our most important asset. The only problem with this approach: They’re all looking at the past in order to predict the future.

Emerging in its place is a new approach, Small Data, which Lindstrom defines as seemingly insignificant consumer observations that completely transform the way businesses are built and run.

In 2004, the LEGO Company was near bankruptcy. Big Data had informed the executives that, due to the lengthy construction time, kids no longer had interest in playing with LEGO. In response, LEGO introduced larger modules, which cut the building time in half. However, the result didn’t mirror their expectations. Sales plummeted, and as a result the company decided to cease all conventional Big Data-based sources — and instead introduce Small Data.

It was a visit to an 11-year-old German boy’s home that profoundly changed the LEGO Group’s view of the world. A LEGO executive asked the kid what he was most proud of. It wasn’t a Nintendo or PlayStation, but a pair of old, worn-out sneakers. The reason why? Because, as the kid explained, the sneakers’ very particular worn-down angle on the side of the sole proved he was the #1 skateboarder in town. You see, when pro skateboarders slide down the board, their shoes get worn down exactly like this 11-year-old boy’s shoes.

This insight taught LEGO that if a kid is willing to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours fine-tuning an angle on a shoe, why wouldn’t a kid spend thousands of hours playing with LEGO? They reintroduced the small bricks, created the LEGO movie, and formed alliances with Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Batman.

LEGO had lost contact with its core consumers, yet by adopting Small Data, the link between the consumer and the iconic toy company was recovered — making LEGO the most admired brand in the world, according to Brand Finance 2019.

Lindstrom will share the remarkable insight behind LEGO’s success, and he will discuss how Small Data has been instrumental in the turnaround success of numerous other companies around the world, in shipping, banking, retail, fashion, and food and beverage.

YOU WILL LEARN:

- Why most Big Data strategies have been shown to be fundamentally flawed, resulting in billions of wasted time and cost.
- Why some of the world’s largest companies now swear by Small Data when identifying their next billion-dollar bet (and how their success rate is an astounding 81% above average).
- How combining Big Data with Small Data has been shown to establish a remarkable competitive edge, while saving millions of dollars.
- How it is possible to adopt a Small Data approach right away, in a highly cost-effective manner, generating tangible results within a matter of months.

The Ministry of Common Sense.

How come every Zoom call lasts exactly 1 hour no matter how mundane the call is? And why did all the toilet-breaks disappear as Zoom became everyday work life in our bedrooms?

Why has a simple action like buying office equipment turned into a 6-people-committee decision followed by a 5-level approval process?

When a 264 page PPT deck kicks off with “Welcome to the Christmas Party Planning Meeting”… it’s time to call the Ministry of Common Sense – to put an end to it once and for all! It’s time to get rid of the wasted time red tape, to remove the silly rules and recover common sense to serve our customers better.

Laser-beam insightful, side-splittingly funny and packed with solutions, The Ministry Of Common Sense will show you how to transform your company.

The Ministry of Common Sense.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

Martin Lindstrom, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, harnesses the power of “small data” in his quest to discover the next big thing

Hired by the world's leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends 300 nights a year in strangers’ homes, carefully observing every detail in order to uncover their hidden desires, and, ultimately, the clues to a multi-million dollar product.

Lindstrom connects the dots in this globetrotting narrative that will enthrall enterprising marketers, as well as anyone with a curiosity about the endless variations of human behavior. You’ll learn…

• How a noise reduction headset at 35,000 feet led to the creation of Pepsi’s new trademarked signature sound.
• How a worn down sneaker discovered in the home of an 11-year-old German boy led to LEGO’s incredible turnaround.
• How a magnet found on a fridge in Siberia resulted in a U.S. supermarket revolution.
• How a toy stuffed bear in a girl’s bedroom helped revolutionize a fashion retailer’s 1,000 stores in 20 different countries.
• How an ordinary bracelet helped Jenny Craig increase customer loyalty by 159% in less than a year.
• How the ergonomic layout of a car dashboard led to the redesign of the Roomba vacuum.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today's message-cluttered world? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds, we're barely aware of them?

In BUYOLOGY, Lindstrom, who was voted one of Time Magazine's most influential people of 2009, presents the astonishing findings from his groundbreaking, three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy. Among the questions he explores:

Does sex actually sell? To what extent do people in skimpy clothing and suggestive poses persuade us to buy products?
Despite government bans, does subliminal advertising still surround us – from bars to highway billboards to supermarket shelves?
Can "Cool" brands, like iPods, trigger our mating instincts?
Can other senses – smell, touch, and sound - be so powerful as to physically arouse us when we see a product?
Do companies copy from the world of religion and create rituals – like drinking a Corona with a lime – to capture our hard-earned dollars?

Filled with entertaining inside stories about how we respond to such well-known brands as Marlboro, Nokia, Calvin Klein, Ford, and American Idol, BUYOLOGY is a fascinating and shocking journey into the mind of today's consumer that will captivate anyone who's been seduced – or turned off – by marketers' relentless attempts to win our loyalty, our money, and our minds.

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

Brand Sense: Sensory Secrets Behind the Stuff We Buy.

The definitive book on sensory branding, shows how companies appeal to consumers’ five senses to sell products.

Did you know that the gratifying smell that accompanies the purchase of a new automobile actually comes from a factory-installed aerosol can containing “new car” aroma? Or that Kellogg’s trademarked “crunch” is generated in sound laboratories? Or that the distinctive click of a just-opened jar of Nescafé freeze-dried coffee, as well as the aroma of the crystals, has been developed in factories over the past decades? Or that many adolescents recognize a pair of Abercrombie & Fitch jeans not by their look or cut but by their fragrance?

In perhaps the most creative and authoritative book on how our senses affect our everyday purchasing decisions, global branding guru Martin Lindstrom reveals how the world’s most successful companies and products integrate touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound with startling and sometimes even shocking results. In conjunction with renowned research institution Millward Brown, Lindstrom’s innovative worldwide study unveils how all of us are slaves to our senses—and how, after reading this book, we’ll never be able to see, hear, or touch anything from our running shoes to our own car doors the same way again.

An expert on consumer shopping behavior, Lindstrom has helped transform the face of global marketing with more than twenty years of hands-on experience. Firmly grounded in science, and disclosing the secrets of all our favorite brands, Brand Sense shows how we consumers are unwittingly seduced by touch, smell, sound, and more.

Brand Sense: Sensory Secrets Behind the Stuff We Buy.

Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy

Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars.

Picking up from where Vance Packard's bestselling classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off more than half-a-century ago, Lindstrom reveals:

• New findings that reveal how advertisers and marketers intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age – starting when they are still in the womb!
• Shocking results of an fMRI study which uncovered what heterosexual men really think about when they see sexually provocative advertising (hint: it isn’t their girlfriends).
• How marketers and retailers stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares.
• The first ever neuroscientific evidence proving how addicted we all are to our iPhones and our Blackberry’s (and the shocking reality of cell phone addiction - it can be harder to shake than addictions to drugs and alcohol).
• How companies of all stripes are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives, then using that information to target us with ads and offers ‘perfectly tailored’ to our psychological profiles.
• How certain companies, like the maker of one popular lip balm, purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive.
• What a 3-month long guerilla marketing experiment, conducted specifically for this book, tells us about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all.
• And much, much more.
This searing expose introduces a new class of tricks, techniques, and seductions – the Hidden Persuaders of the 21st century- and shows why they are more insidious and pervasive than ever.

Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy