Martin Lindstrom

#1 Branding & Culture Expert, New York Times Bestselling Author. TIME Magazine 100 most influential people in the world, Top 50 Business Thinker in the World 2015-2024 (Thinkers50). Financial Times & NEWSWEEK columnist.

Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading branding and culture transformation firm, operating across five continents and in more than 30 countries, serving a who’s who of Fortune 100 companies and Governments.

Martin has been featured as one of the world’s top 50 business thinkers for 10 consecutive years by the prestigious Thinkers50 list. TIME Magazine has named Martin one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People.” He was recently selected as the #1 LinkedIn Top Voice US Influencer.
He has delivered keynote addresses to Google, UBER, META, Kraft Heinz, Disney, Amazon, LEGO, Unilever, Hallmark, Adobe, UBER, Mattel, the Coca-Cola Company, the World Business Forum (WOBI), TEDx, and the World Economic Forum.

Martin is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of eight books translated into 60 languages. He’s coined such terms as neuromarketing, sensory marketing, texting, small data, and contextual marketing. Lindstrom’s writing has appeared in all major US publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. He is currently a columnist for Financial Times, NEWSWEEK, and Management Today.

The Wall Street Journal praised his book Brand Sense as “one of the five best marketing books ever published” and called his book Small Data “revolutionary.” TIME called his book Buyology “a breakthrough in branding,” and the Economist and Financial Times named his latest book, The Ministry of Common Sense, one of the top books of 2021.

Martin has made more than 20 appearances on NBC’s TODAY show and has also appeared in the late Morgan Spurlock’s movie The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, as well as several times on America’s Next Top Model. He is the host of the popular NEWSWEEK show "Why Do We...?" co-hosted with the legendary Liza Donnelly, the house cartoonist for CBS, the Oscars, and the Emmys. The show features legendary guests such as Tony Robbins, Suze Orman, Jake Tapper, and David Foster.

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Founder & Owner of Lindstrom Company

Martin Lindstrom is Founder of Lindstrom Company, his Branding Expert & Consulting Firm. He is also one of the world's most respected consumer branding experts and a pioneer in the fields of consumer psychology, marketing, and neuro-marketing research. He uses his expertise to help his clients, both individual and corporate, to enhance sales and productivity of the store/service/product brand, while developing a custom consumer/customer experience for their clients.


Most brands fail not because of strategy.
They fail because they misunderstand human behavior.

After decades of studying how people actually think, feel, and decide, one thing is clear:

👉 Marketing isn’t persuasion anymore.
👉 It’s psychology in motion.

These 9 cognitive traps quietly destroy trust, relevance, and conversion, without brands even noticing.

Read them slowly. Your brain will recognize itself in more than one.

👇 Which one hit uncomfortably close to home?

#1 Branding & Culture Expert, New York Times Bestselling Author. TIME Magazine 100 most influential people in the world, Top 50 Business Thinker in the World 2015-2026 (Thinkers50). Financial Times & NEWSWEEK columnist.

Familiarity Bias

We all have that idea, that feedback, or that gut feeling we choose to ignore.

But you’re not avoiding risk, you’re avoiding genius.

Every time you ignore that inconvenient idea, you give someone else the exact advantage you desperately wanted.

9 out of 10 people will keep running from it, the other 1 rewrites the rules.

Be in the 1%.

Reality Check: A visionary without operators is just a daydreamer.


Companies fail at execution 4x more than they fail at ideas.
I’ve audited hundreds of teams, and here’s the pattern I’ve noticed:

Brilliant ideas die not because they’re weak, but because nobody executes them.

Your team can be overflowing with strategy and brilliance, but without doers, the world doesn’t notice. Without them, your “million-dollar idea” is just a 50-slide PDF gathering digital dust.

Slides don’t sell. Ideas don’t convert. Action does.

If your team looks like a council of geniuses with empty chairs for doers, 
You’re not building a company, you’re hosting a fantasy convention.

Check your org chart. Are you worshipping dreamers and ignoring doers?

Disney just invested $1 billion in OpenAI and licensed its characters from Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar.

The same company that spent decades lobbying to extend copyright laws by 20 years to protect Mickey Mouse is now opening its crown jewels to AI. 

Let that sink in.

This isn’t surrender. It's an offensive strategy. 

Disney knows AI cannot replace the spark of human creativity, but it can scale it, personalize it, globalize it, and monetize it faster than a human team ever could.

On the very same day, Google got a cease-and-desist. 

One door opens. 
Another slams shut. 
That’s not luck. That’s calculated domination.

Billions of fans are now licensed content creators, legally multiplying Disney’s cultural power, for FREE.

AI-generated stories, mashups, memes, and interactive adventures mean they’ll spread faster than any studio could ever dream, and Disney profits while keeping its IP safe.

Here’s what it means for brands, creators, and storytellers:

The era of mass personalized storytelling is here.
Cling to control? Ignore AI? You’re handing the next decade of influence to your audience, not your brand.

AI can amplify creativity, but it cannot think, feel, or imagine.
Human creativity is still priceless.

The only question: Will your business adapt, or die clinging to the old guard?

2026 is your chance to be honest… anonymously. 🕵️

Which corporate nonsense do you secretly want DEAD, but can’t say out loud?

Because employees don’t leave jobs, they leave bureaucracy, noise, and nonsense. 

Vote and let’s see what we all really want gone in this year.

 If you could secretly end ONE thing at work in 2026, but HR or your boss had no idea, which would it be?


The author can see how you vote. Learn more

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