INTERVIEW:Can a man who remains on the payroll of huge global corporations, such as McDonald's and Coca Cola, really claim to have changed tack? Or is this just another marketing trick to reposition Brand Lindstrom, asks RICHARD GILLIS

“IF ANYONE here is in marketing or advertising, kill yourself . . . Seriously, you’re Satan’s little helpers, kill yourself.”

Pause.

“You know what the marketing people are saying now? Hey, Bill’s going for the anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market, he’s very smart . . . Now he’s going for the righteous indignation dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation right now. We’ve done research – huge market.”

Bill Hicks (1990)

CAN WE TRUST Martin Lindstrom? Having spent nearly three decades creating a very successful career as author and marketing consultant, Lindstrom says he’s changing tack. He has seen how badly companies treat consumers, the mind games they play to get us to buy. Now he wants them to change their ways. Or, is he, as Bill Hicks so memorably put it, going for the anti-marketing dollar?

The 42-year-old Dane has a reputation for spending much of the last decade ahead of the curve and, as such, has garnered some heavyweight third-party endorsement. In 2009, Time magazine made him one of its 100 people of the year. Chris “Long Tail” Anderson wrote a citation celebrating that year’s must read, Buyology. Lindstrom, wrote Anderson, “took a brave leap into neuroscience to figure out why we buy – or don’t. Using functional MRI and other brain-scanning techniques, he went beyond the flimflam of the Mad Men and measured the minds of more than 2,000 consumers, all observed under the influence of marketing.”

Stephen Levitt, author of Freakonomics, is quoted on the cover of Brandwashed as saying: “I’ve only read two business books from cover to cover in the last five years: Buyology and Brandwashed.”

Brandwashed is, says Lindstrom, a radical departure from his previous big sellers. “We’ve sold out,” he says of the marketing world. “I’m part of the industry and I feel we have reached a level that there is so little ethical education and they are so desperate to sell products. I went into advertising when I was a teenager, but only learned about ethics four years ago. That’s bad, isn’t it?”

As we eat lunch in London, the question of authenticity is never far away. Outside, the marketing noise of Piccadilly Circus is deafening. Across town, anti-corporate feeling is given human form by the occupants of the tented village outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Can a man who remains on the payroll of huge global corporations, such as McDonald’s and Coca Cola, really claim to be one of them? Or is this just another marketing trick to reposition Brand Lindstrom?

“I fundamentally don’t believe you have to sit on one side of the fence or the other,” says Lindstrom, dressed head to toe in his trademark black. “It is perfectly okay to sit on the fence because of the convergence we see in the real world. The concept of the businessman doesn’t exist anymore. We look at our work emails at home and our home emails at work. It’s not like in the 1960s when you took your business hat off when you left work.

“A consumer can tear down a brand in a matter of weeks if they are keen to do it. There are no them and us walls. Across every touch-point this is happening – just as there is acceptance of me as a marketing consultant sitting on both sides, advising on ethics while taking money for doing that. Why shouldn’t I?

“It’s very arrogant, but I’ve had to say to companies, ‘Unless you clean up your act, the customer will see through you.’ We will soon have a Wikileaks of brands. It’s happening now, it was the biggest debate at Cannes .”

He could have, he says, chosen to write a dry textbook about ethics: “Nobody would read it and you and I would not be talking. Alternatively, I write a provocative book that upsets some people or makes them think.”

Central to his thesis is that the customer will change the companies. This allows him to have his cake and eat it. “If, behind the scenes I am pushing my clients to behave better, that is better than doing nothing. I have a background of publishing books, with a tone of voice that may be heard. I’m very transparent. I’m evaluating my own position every day.”

Lindstrom tells a story about having ethics put to the test. “I was contacted by the tobacco industry 14 times last year. One tobacco company offered me £5 million for two months’ work. That was Indecent Proposal all over again.” His mother, he says, “is about to die from smoking”. This made the decision a simple one. But he says the middle of the fence is not 100 per cent defined. “Every day I will get a different challenge from a new brand.”

For fundamental change to take place, however, the appetite must lie deep within the corporation. The job of marketing, in the eyes of the public at least, is to mask the bad stuff.

“I work for McDonald’s. I said to them, ‘The only way I want to work with you is to change the Happy Meal.’ So we did. We made a Happy Meal contain fruits and vegetables. A fantastic concept, it was released in Germany to great success, based on storytelling. If I say I work for McDonald’s, my readers will assume I have evil intentions and that I’m letting my readers down. But actually I’m not.

“In that case, McDonald’s showed courage to change. But politics is eating up our corporations. People are fundamentally afraid of being fired. When that happens, you won’t have courageous opinions. Most companies work harder on the excuses for not changing than they do on finding solutions to the problems.

“Companies have lost contact with the consumer. They sit in offices, looking at spreadsheets of AC Nielsen data, and think that’s their consumer. That’s why Nokia and Blackberry are derailing.”

Lindstrom’s previous book, Buyology, positioned him as the poster boy for neuromarketing. This was lucrative but it also exposed him to criticism from the medical profession, who questioned his findings.

Brandwashed has received rougher treatment. In the Wall Street Journal, Eric Felten questioned some of Lindstrom’s claims, including one on behalf of McDonald’s: “And then there is the insidious power of McDonald’s and its clown.” “What’s the first word recognised by most kids all over the world?” Lindstrom asks. “No, it’s not ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’. It’s ‘McDonald’s’ (or ‘Ronald’).”

For this truly preposterous claim, Lindstrom cites Bryan Urbick, a consumer researcher in England. I popped Urbick a fact-checking email. He denied saying any such thing. “I would never say that a complex word would precede a simply constructed word such as ‘Ma-ma’,” he responded. “I suspect that the confusion lies in that I have said (and regularly say) that McDonald’s logo is one of the first brand icons recognised by young children.”

What does Lindstrom think about this and other criticisms of the “science bit” in his books? “I take it seriously,” he says. “I never said that this (neuromarketing) was the answer. In Buyology, I said it might give us an indication of the direction. People want to believe in neuroscience as having the complete answer. But it doesn’t. Wouldn’t you criticise someone who has no degree going on TV to talk about the thing you’d spent 30 years studying? Of course, you would. So would I.

“Taken out of context, it sounds silly. If you read the books you know I don’t take myself too seriously. I use third parties to carry out the research and hopefully that is solid enough.”