Top 20 Neuromarketing Books

We’ve selected 20 books about neuromarketing that we believe should be on your bookshelf.

Some of them give you a broad overview of neuromarketing and others deep-dive into the conscious and subconscious brain.

Influence

By Robert B. Cialdini

In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984), Cialdini explains in detail the fundamental principles that drive us to say yes. Including how compliance professionals including vendors, marketers, and artists use them against us. Understanding these principles will allow you to become a competent persuader yourself and defend yourself from deceptive attempts.

Pre-suasion

By Robert Cialdini

Pre-Suasion (2016) is about the art of influence. It shows in particular, that the influence of the pre-suader plays a role in our emotions, making his product or agenda more crucial than it is. Be it your mother or educator, a sales manager, sponsors, press and even spiritual candidates, a pre-suader understands how to set the stage and the performance you need.

Hooked

By Nir Eyal

Hooked (2014) explains how and why we integrate certain products into our daily routines through anecdotes and scientific studies, and why these products are the Holy Grail for any consumer-oriented company. Hooked gives concrete advice on how companies can make their products habit-form while at the same time exploring the moral issues involved.

Brainfluence

By Roger Dooley

Brainfluence (2012) explores the unconscious thoughts and motivations that influence our decision-making process and provides tips and tricks on how knowledgeable marketers can use them. You can increase your sales while keeping your customers happier by understanding the mechanisms that trigger behavior.

Neuromarketing

By Patrick Renvoisé & Christophe Morin

Neuromarketing (2002) offers insights into how we make purchasing decisions by drawing on brain research and creative marketing techniques. Understanding the old decision-making processes of the brain will provide you with the tools needed to close deals and motivate people.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

By Rolf Dobelli

The Art of Thinking Clearly helps to illuminate our day-to-day thinking “hiccups” so that we can better avoid them and start making better choices. The author provides us with an informative selection of all our most popular fallacies using both psychological studies and daily examples.

Switch

By Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Switch examines why people often find it difficult to change their behavior, and how it is possible to find shortcuts to make change easier by understanding the mind. Switch provides simple yet effective tools to implement changes through scientific studies and anecdotes.

Made to Stick

By Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Made to Stick is a book that changes the way you convey thoughts. It provides a fast-paced series of success stories (and failures), such as the Nobel Prize-winning chemist who consumed a glass full of bacteria to prove a point regarding stomach ulcers, the “Mother Teresa Effect”, and the elementary school teacher whose experiment actually prevented racial prejudice. Made to Stick illustrates the basic concepts of winning ideas and teaches us how we can use these laws to stick our own messages. It is informative, eyes open, and often surprisingly funny.

Nudge

By Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein

Every day we make choices—about what to purchase and consume, about financial investments, about our children’s health and education, and about the issues that we support or the world itself. We often choose poorly, unfortunately. Nudge is about how these choices are made and how we can make them better. Through hundreds of eye-opening observations and building on decades of behavioral science studies, Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein illustrate that no option is ever posed to us in a neutral manner and that we are all vulnerable to biases that can drive us to make bad decisions. But we can use sensible “choice architecture” to nudge people by knowing how people think.

Predictably Irrational

By Dan Ariely

Predictably Irrational (2010) describes the irrational manner in which we behave each day. Why do we decide to eat less and then give it up once we see a tasty dessert? Would your mother be insulted if you tried to pay her for a Sunday meal that she lovingly prepared? What’s the reason pain medication is more effective when the patient is told it is more expensive? Studies and anecdotes are used to analyse and explain the reasons and solutions for these and other irrationalities.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By Daniel Kahneman

In Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) –a recap of the decades of research that contributed to Daniel Kahnemans’ Nobel Prize winning– he discusses his contributions to our modern understanding of psychology and behavioral economics. Over the years, Kahneman and his collaborators have made a significant contribution to a modern understanding of the human brain, whose research the book addresses at length. We now have a better understanding of how to make decisions, how common mistakes of judgment are so widespread, and how to develop ourselves.

Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ

By Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman explains in this masterpiece how the intelligence of a person is about not only IQ, but also emotional intelligence. It includes the ability to empathize and handle social relationships, as well as the ability to control your own thinking and behavior. With scientific studies and real-life illustrations, the book explains the psychology and physiology behind emotions. He explains why one’s schooling is essential to the growth of emotional intelligence and offers ideas on how to incorporate special training into future generations’ education.

Buyology

By Martin Lindstrom

Day in and day out, thousands of brand photos, logos, and advertisements are bombarding us to buy their products. However, there are only a few ads that motivate us to whip out our wallets. Why? Using state-of-the-art neuromarketing methods, Buyology answers that question and explores the hidden motivations behind our purchasing decisions.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

By Malcolm Gladwell

Blink (2005) is a guide to making the right decision. Malcolm Gladwell suggests that our intuitive gut instincts can generally be trusted. Most of the time, these initial, rapid decisions are less mislead by irrelevant information taken into account during thorough analyses. On the other hand, gut decisions are vulnerable to cognitive biases that influence the perception and attention of an individual. The book tells us in a more thorough and rational way when to listen to our instincts and when to reason through it. To illustrate human decision-making, Gladwell uses research and examples from a variety of fields.

Webs of Influence

By Nathalie Nahai

The hidden brain

By Shankar Vedantam

Consciousness Explained

By Daniel C. Dennett

Consciousness Explained is a full-scale human consciousness discovery. Daniel Dennett disproves the conventional theory of consciousness in this groundbreaking book and presents a new model based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Our current theories of conscious life-of humans, animals, even robots-are transformed by the new perspectives in this book.

Decoded

By Phil P. Barden

In this groundbreaking book, Phil Barden discusses what the science of decision says about the purchasing behavior of people and clearly shows its importance in advertising and marketing. He shares the latest research on the reasons behind consumer choices and what happens when consumers make their choices. To explain why people purchase them, Phil decipheres the’ secret codes’ for goods, services and brands. And finally, by dramatically improving key factors such as importance, distinction and reputation, he shows how to apply this insight in day-to-day advertising to significant effect.

Neuro Design

By Darren Bridger

Today, companies of all sizes are generating a lot of creative graphic media and content, including websites, presentations, videos and posts on social media. Many large companies now use neuroscience research and hypotheses to improve their digital content, like Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Tesco, and Google. Neuro Design opens up this new world of neuromarketing design concepts and suggestions and presents insights from the growing neuroesthetics sector that will allow readers to improve their website’s customer engagement and raise profitability. Online resources provide references to motivational reading and additional resources on the website.

The Buying Brain

By A. K. Pradeep

Up to 95% of our decisions are made by the subconscious mind. As a result, the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world are applying for the latest advances in neuroscience to create brands, products, package designs, marketing campaigns, store environments, and much more, designed to appeal to our brains directly and powerfully. The Buying Brain provides an in-depth overview of how state-of-the-art neuroscience influences how we make, purchase, sell, and enjoy everything, and also asks deeper questions about how this new knowledge can improve the lives of consumers.

Bonus: How emotions are made

By Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD

How Emotions Are Made (2017) questions everything you think you know about emotions. By learning how our brain detects anger, fear, and happiness, to thinking historically about these emotions, you can come up with a new understanding of how emotions are formed and how culture as a whole defines their scope.

Introduction to neuromarketing & consumer neuroscience

By Dr. Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy

How do we make decisions on what to buy and what to pay for it? Why are we affected by brands and pricing when making our choices or just experiencing something? Recent advances in modern neuroscience, and how it combines with economics and psychology, have allowed us to study of how different brain functions serve consumer behaviour. This book offers a comprehensive insight into the workings of the brain and its mind, and how this knowledge can inform our understanding of consumption behaviours. The book offers both basic and front-end academic insights, and includes chapters on sensation and perception; attention and consciousness; emotion and feeling; memory and learning; motivation and preference; and decision making. It also offers up to date and comprehensive insight about how the tools of neuroscience can be applied to assess consumer cognition and emotion.

Decoding the new consumer mind

By Kit Yarrow

A decade of swift and stunning change has profoundly affected the psychology of how, when, and why we shop and buy. In Decoding the New Consumer Mind, award-winning consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow shares surprising insights about the new motivations and behaviors of shoppers, taking marketers where they need to be today: into the deeply psychological and often unconscious relationships that people have with products, retailers, marketing communications, and brands. Drawing on hundreds of consumer interviews and shop-alongs, Yarrow reveals the trends that define our transformed behavior. For example, when we shop we show greater emotionality, hunting for more intense experiences and seeking relief and distraction online. A profound sense of isolation and individualism shapes the way we express ourselves and connect with brands and retailers. Neurological research even suggests that our brains are rewired, altering what we crave, how we think, and where our attention goes. Decoding the New Consumer Mind provides marketers with practical ways to tap into this new consumer psychology, and Yarrow shows how to combine technology and innovation to enhance brand image; win love and loyalty through authenticity and integrity; put the consumer’s needs and preferences front and center; and deliver the most emotionally intense, yet uncomplicated, experience possible. Armed with Yarrow’s strategies, marketers will be able to connect more effectively with consumers—driving profit and success across the organization. If you want to learn more about behavioral insights, read our blog or watch 100+ videos on our YouTube channel!

About Neurofied

Neurofied is a behavioral science company specialized in training, consulting, and change management. We help organizations drive evidence-based and human-centric change with insights and interventions from behavioral psychology and neuroscience. Consider us your behavioral business partner who helps you build behavioral change capabilities internally. Since 2018, we have trained thousands of professionals and worked with over 100 management, HR, growth, and innovation teams of organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Deloitte, Novo Nordisk, ABN AMRO, and the Dutch government. We are also frequent speakers at universities and conferences. Our mission is to democratize the value of behavioral science for teams and organizations. If you see any opportunities to collaborate, please contact us here.