The Provocateurs Episode 14: Martin Lindstrom

Self-confessed contrarian thinker and provocateur since childhood, Martin Lindstrom is an international branding expert and one of the world’s leading authorities on the metaverse. Here he joins Geoff Tuff of Deloitte and Des Dearlove of Thinkers50 in a fascinating conversation about branding as an emotional construct, the power of small data, and lying on a bed of Lego. In the 1990s, Lindstrom pioneered how to build brands on the internet and has since coined terms such as clicks & mortar, contextual marketing, and texting. He has published eight New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including Buyology (2008), Small Data (2017), and The Ministry of Common Sense (2021). In 2022, Lindstrom launched the “Engineering our Dreams” project – a $22,000,000 metaverse experiment, with the multi-pronged purposes of understanding human behavior, the role of businesses, brands, work environments, and ethical standards in virtual worlds. Co-founder of several multi-billion-dollar startups, including YellowPages.com and Hitwise, Lindstrom is a Thinkers50 Ranked Thinker, listed by TIME magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and named by LinkedIn as 2021’s most influential business thinker in the USA. He is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company. This podcast is part of an ongoing series of interviews with executives. The executives’ participation in this podcast are solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This podcast should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.