In every chapter, Martin Lindstrom starts out by sharing some background about the problem his client wanted to solve. After that, he takes you on his journey of discovering small data with all of his right and wrong assumptions. At the end of each chapter, he shares his insights, his recommended actions, and how it all played out. In some cases, he couldn’t give you the final results as the companies or brands just implemented the suggested actions.

In the first chapter, Martin Lindstrom takes on a request by a Russian entrepreneur to find out what business would be most profitable to start in Russia. From researching homes he found an insight about Russian mothers from refrigerator magnets on which he recommended that the entrepreneur should create an E-commerce for and by mothers.

In chapter two he helps a family-owned supermarket chain in the USA conceive a new strategy to face online shopping. He did this by noticing an abundant amount of rules and restrictions in the USA. Based on this he recommended that the supermarket chain does things a bit differently so that customers symbolically disregard everyday rules. For example, they made cakes square instead of round, and this was a hit.

In chapter three he helped a global cereal company find out why their sales in Mumbai were dropping. The brand noticed that young women weren’t buying their cereal. Martin Lindstrom observed that there was friction between young Indian women and their mothers-in-law. The daughter-in-laws were buying while the mother-in-laws were cooking. He noticed this based on how spices were organized in the kitchen (to find out why this was important check out the book). Based on additional research he suggested that the company create a new cereal box with two different color palettes to appeal to both mother and daughter-in-laws.

In chapter four he helped a weight loss program improve their retention rate. His research showed that free charm bracelets would appeal to the people’s tribal need for belonging as they were symbols of success, experience, hope, and more. He even went so far as to emphasize the importance of giving the bracelet with both hands thus giving even more value to the bracelet.

In chapter five he helped a Brazilian beer company develop a branding strategy in which he leveraged transformation zones by creating a live stream event on a massive floating island equipped with a bar where people could embody happier and frier versions of themselves. He came up with this strategy by observing how people in Brazil lived and by appealing to their “twin self” – the desire for the things they dreamed of having and lost or they never had when they were younger.

In chapter six he helped a fashion brand with shops in more than thirty countries to improve its sales by inspecting family phone bills and discovered how much time teens spent taking pictures and sending them to other friends to get approval of what to wear when going out. Martin Lindstrom advised the company to create an app where teens would share what they would like to wear and their friends could vote. By doing this Martin again took advantage of the need for approval and belonging to a tribe.

In chapter seven he helped create a brand image for a chines car manufacturer. He concluded that most Chinese drivers wanted cars that seemed powerful fast and “male” as Lindstrom noticed that people in China associated masculinity with speed and complexity. To provide the driver with a sense of power and control Lindstrom argued that the manufacturer should design the dashboard unnecessarily complex like they were in an airplane cockpit so that it would provide the driver with a sense of power and control.

In chapter eight he shares the seven steps of leveraging small data. To conduct the subtext research you have to embrace the following steps:

1. Collecting – seek out baseline perspectives on macro and micro levels as you work toward a more objective understanding of the culture you study. Create a hypothesis by interviewing sources with insider and outsider points of view.
2. Clues – pay attention to details that seem incongruous to their surroundings or anything that appears missing from people’s lives.
3. Connecting – consider areas of similarity between the clues you gather and whether they validate or invalidate your initial hypothesis.
4. Causations – ask yourself what emotions the clues evoke.
5. Correlation – search for shifts in consumer behavior (entry points). Try to understand the life events that trigger significant personality changes.
6. Compensation – reflect on which unfulfilled or unmet desires lead your research subjects to their behavior.
7. Concept – how can you compensate for what people feel their lives lack?