Have brands gotten out of hand? Are they taking over our lives? Is our obsession for them leading to alarming consequences for society? Yes, according to Lucas Conley. And it makes for fun reading. The book is full of engaging stories, ranging from over-the-top spectacles to tales of subtle subterfuge. All of these branding efforts with the intent, as the designer David Butler would say, "to help you sell more stuff." But even after reading this book, has it really influenced my buying decisions? Probably not. Probably because brands speak to that part of us that, perhaps, we don't really consciously control - although we like to think that we do.  It reminds me of what Hubertus Bigend explained in Gibson's Pattern Recognition: 

“The heart is a muscle.  You ‘know’ in your limbic brain.  The seat of instinct.  The mammalian brain.  Deeper, wider, beyond logic.  That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex.  What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness.  The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda.  And makes us buy things."

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