Here’s the description:

Putting our heads together, we hit upon the idea of a self-published book. Blurb.com came to the rescue, providing an easy way for us to design, publish and distribute the book. But then – it was a matter of stories.

Putting the call out, we asked for other men to join us – sharing your thoughts on a blog is one thing – but committing them to print is quite another (plus we needed various disclaimers and so on) – so we didn’t know who would respond.

In the end, 30 writers heeded the call. The resulting book is a compilation of stories about reinventing manhood. It follows the life-arc of a man, from its beginnings through the trials and tribulations, challenges and jubilations that we all face.

I’ll definitely order a copy. 30 different writers writing about their own perceptions of being “male” sounds like a gold mine for different meanings and ideas. If you want to just download the free e-book, just click here.

I created a draft for this post over a week ago but I thought I’d wait a while to wait for enough second hand opinions to emerge on Martin Lindstrom’s new book Buyology (link to Neuromarketing.com’s take on the book) before I’d post my impression on it. I haven’t read the book (I might in the future) and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of giving my opinion on it just based on a few reviews and the book’s sleeve text. But it’s been featured in Neuromarketing enough times that I think I know what the book is about and what its main strengths and weaknesses are. Here’s a consolidated list of reviews on it

The book seems to be getting mixed reviews: academics dismiss it and criticize it (I’d guess a bit unfairly too, since Lindstrom himself is not an academic but a, gasp, popular writer), magazines and blogs handle it with more praise and they seem to be buying into the hype. It has always been my impression that Lindstrom is a very good salesman (hell, you have to be if you get to promote your book on the Today Show), in that he knows the topic du jour and is not ashamed to ride the wave: in early 2000 he was hyping sensorial branding (his book “Brand SENSE” is bible of sorts for many advocates of Emotional Branding) and now he has turned his attention to neuromarketing, which some see as the next Holy Grail of marketing. So in short, it seems like one of those books that create a lot of buzz but eventually fail to make a lasting impact or change the field of marketing. We’ll see how my prediction fares in the long run.

But back to why wanted to write about Buyology in the first place. When the book came out, this was the first paragraph from Lindstrom’s newsletter:

It is probably one of the most controversial scientific findings of 2008. In his $7 million neuroscience-based research study, Lindstrom has spent over four years peering into the minds of 2,000 consumers across five countries to discover if there’s a parallel between brands and religion. Without disclosing too much (the findings will be published on October 20th), we can reveal that brands indeed activate the same areas in the brain as religion. By analyzing brands like Harley Davidson, Apple, Guinness and hundreds of other commercial icons, Lindstrom discovered that we are hardwired to believe in some brands. Lindstrom went further, interviewing religious leaders from across faiths and cultures. He discovered that the ingredients that create powerful religions may also be invaluable for branding of the future.

I can’t see how this is news to anybody who has been studying marketing beyond reading a few books by Seth Godin. Branding has become more and more about managing meaning, and religion is to a lot of people the ultimate path of seeking meaning, so it’s not hard to see parallels between the two. Jesus Christ is as much a cultural icon as is a bottle of Coke or a Harley Davidson. Also, people have valued the same kind of behavior in brands and religion: purity of intentions and non-profiteering motifs.

I’ve posted this link before, but Douglas Holt’s “Why do brands cause trouble?” (PDF) is an absolute must read for any marketer. In it, Holt outlines the historical change that has undertaken the world of branding from “cultural engineering” (from a time when people actually trusted brands somewhat) to the post postmodern paradigm where the best brands get a strong following by appearing “disinterested” in making money, and are more mission and meaning driven. In later works Holt has detailed what kind of missions and meanings are appealing to people through brands like Harley-Davidson, Apple etc. (like Lindstrom did above), and I’ve blogged about the subject here many times, but let’s not get into that. As for religion, it’s fairly obvious that the same kind of criticism that brands receive about profiteering and purity of intentions would be devastating to any church. For example, the church of Scientology is vilified for being nothing more than a money-making scheme, and people oppose it with a passion. People have a need to believe in something, but people also absolutely love to expose somebody as a false prophet. Hey, doesn’t the word “sellout” actually originate from what Judas did to Jesus (anyone care to fact check)?

I think by claiming this revelation of brands being similar to religion to be so “shocking”, Lindstrom had failed to do what I wrote in my previous post that brand thinkers need to drill deeper to uncover the “why” of a phenomenon. If Lindstrom had drilled deeper, he would have realized that brands and religion both are about meaning, and the similarities in neurology they create shouldn’t have come as a shock (a cynic might argue that this “shock” is feigned to create interest in the book). Of course, I’m not arguing that brands can be as strong as religious movements (and I doubt that Lindstrom isn’t arguing either), but I do think that brands and religion fit on the same scale (along with other cultural products, such as books and films) where religion sits a the top and everything else comes after it.