Lot´s of practical insights with one big caveat

The book decoded from Phil Barden is a must read for anyone that wants to go beyond the basics of Cialdini´s principles of influence or the headline grabbing tips of doing more "emotional" brand campaigns.

Phil Barden disects the psychology and brain processes behind how we are influenced, how we form decisions and ultimately how we buy. The book goes to great details explaining explicit and implicit reasons for our actions and provides helpful guidance on things like framing and creating perceptions. He also points out the importance of non-loss (think of fixed interest etc.) as a benefit and describes how this is sometimes much more powerful than trying to argue what you can gain from a product.

In summary the book advocates for a goal-based marketing approach whereby marketers should not only focus on explicit (category specific and more generic) goals but more importantly should work on defining the implicit goals a brand can help achieve. These can be plotted along a continuum of Enjoyment -> Excitment --> Adventure --> Autonomy --> Discipline and Security and depending on where your brand stands along these implicit goal areas a very different but also very distinct positioning for a brand can be derived.

Next to all the good stuff and the undeniable great content, there were also two factors which I did not enjoy at all:

First, the reader of the book made the whole content pretty hard to follow and wasn´t engaging at all. I would have loved to hear Phil himself explain his ideas.

Secondly, Mr. Mack (who was reading the book) refers on countless occasions to "see figure x.y in the print and e-book version of this audiobook". Unfortunately, these figures cannot be downloaded or searched for with Audible and therefore it becomes very cumbersome to follow many of the concepts that are being explained, as the graphics and images seem to build an essential part of how the book works. This could have been avoided by either making sure the listener understands this at the very beginning of the book or even better, by offering a section to download these figures beforehand, so one can actually follow the explanations.

After listening to the e-book I now have to go buy the printed version to make sure I really get the gist of it. Great for the publisher but not so great for me as a consumer.

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