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Martin Lindstrom shook up internet branding – is this the guru the web yearns for?

Martin Lindstrom has a new hotel. “They give me a new one every time”, he burbles in Danish-inflected English, marching past blank doors in a dimly lit corridor on the second floor of the London’s oh-so-trendy Sanderson. “I’ve never been there before. What’s it like?”

He’s about to find out. Oh, he says, finding the right door and stepping into a tiny, white, cube-like room dominated by a very large white bed and a glass walled bathroom. For a moment, the only moment during the two hours we are together, he is speechless.

So there we are, Lindstrom, his PR woman and me, perched in a corner on two over-designed chairs and a bed edge, conducting an interview against the tireless rumbling of an eager air conditioning unit in a room that has taken a lot of stumbling to find. Lindstrom, a skinny, blond smudge in black shirt, black trousers and black shoes, fiddles with the temperature console but can’t work out the punch codes. That’s technology for you. Like the murky lift, the door numbers on the floor and the nightclub lighting in the corridor, everything seems just a bit unintelligible. But we preserve.

Anyway, Lindstrom is so fuzzily up-beat that it takes more than air conditioning to upset his rhythm, Just 31, he has already made a name for him self in ad-land as a multimedia expert and business author. His first book, Brand Building on the Internet, published in 1997, became a surprise must-read for terrified executives trying to work out how to get their businesses online. His second, Clicks, Bricks & Brands, out last month, digs around much the same are: how to get established brands to work on the net now that the hype has blown away.

But it’s not so much the subject matter that has caused a ripple this time, rather the claim of Clicks, Bricks …. To be the first book to have every page constantly updated online. Technical tomes have long carried links to websites for occasional updates, but this takes in into a whole new league. The concept, tagged DualBook and developed by Lindstrom him self, is the furthers leap so far in publishers cautious forays into the online world. Quirky gimmick or important landmark? No one quite knows. But it does meet an important marketing need. Business books, especially those about the Internet, go out of date very quickly nowadays. This way, they need never age.

A bit like Lindstrom himself, perhaps. Despite a decade working for some of the biggest marketing services companies around the world, he looks barely older than a teenager. Height 5ft 8inc, mop of blond air, blue eyes sparkling, impish grin never far from his lips, he exudes youthful enthusiasm, which is probably a prerequisite for the average web wizard these days, especially one who cut his teeth developing innovative sites for kiddie-targeting LEGO and Mars. Lindstrom, however, is anything but average. He leans forward to reveal a secret. “I’ve got this joke, Andrew, “he says. “The reason I look so young is that in Denmark, where I grew up, it is so fucking cold, it’s like living in a freezer!” And then he giggles like a nervous schoolboy, rather maniacally.

He’s just returned from a longer than expected sting in Australia escaping that cold- three years in which he set up an interactive agency, sold it, made millions, fell out with the buyers (he had to fight a court case to get the money) and wrote his latest book. He’d only popped down there because travel is a big hobby and he thought it would be interesting to see the country. “The best way to be a tourist is to live there, isn’t it?” he says.

Now he’s back, publishing his DualBook idea had taking a top slot with the US technology agency Digitas, helping build its European business from a base in Paris. Which is odd because I thought Digitas European operation was headquartered in London, but Lindstrom prefers Paris. He’d one a sting in London and Sydney working for BTLookSmart, the US internet market-maker in which BT has a stake, and remembered the weather here. Not so cold in Paris, he giggles. He’s so pale I can’t believe he sees enough sun to make a difference.

But Paris or London, who cares? There aren’t that many European Internet gurus that we can afford to be choosy. Lindstrom’s reputation is based on the fact that he writes simply and, being and agency man, is switched on to the commercial imperatives of his business readers. He also has a column syndicated in newspapers and business mags worldwide, giving him a weekly potential audience of 4 million readers, which is pretty good for his own branding.

And that’s the key. Lindstrom is quite open about the fact that he is on a long-term quest to establish himself as an important on- and offline branding author, brand consultant, executive, all-round marketing whiz. It’s a smart attempt to practise what he preaches = which is that, now more than ever, there are huge opportunities for banding on the internet. Hence he has turned the whole projection of his views into a branded, online business, with a neat-looking Martin Lindstrom website, links to books, columns, appearances. One of his friends tells me he even used to have a webcam broadcasting from his amazing, hi-tech flat in Sydney – but only when he wanted to sell it. Is there no stopping the man? “Yah,” Lindstrom laughs. “I am the brand.”

Now he is doing more branding building with DualBook. He says he developed the proposition (you buy Clicks, Bricks…, you get four months membership to the DualBook website) because he loves innovation, and he likes the interaction it gives him with his audience.

“It’s amazing. Last week I had 89,000 members of Clicks, Bricks worldwide…I can monitor what people do, see where they bought the book, what pages they looked at before my book, what pages they are looking at in my book, what the favourite chapters are. “ (In June, chapter seven: M-commerce, mobile phones and the Internet). It all generates a ton of e-mails and he can then use that feedback to work out what topics to pursue each week in his syndicated column. But how can he afford to update it constantly? It turns out that the Martin Lindstrom brand is more of a team effort than you might think. For a start, he doesn’t actually write what we read, but has a copywriter rewrite his initial thoughts. Danish is his first language, not English, so perhaps that’s forgivable. But he also has reachers pulling out pertinent, local case studies, so he can slot in different references for different audiences.

It is the team that will update his book constantly online, paid for by the money from the column. And the online action is all his. Its take-up is good, he plans to charge members 19 pounds a year to retain access. He needs other authors to join DualBook to make it fly and says that he will cut deals accordingly. How much? He grins. “So long as you will promise me as an author that you will maintain the DualBook brand and keep it on a quality level then my price is low. “Building up the same thing from scratch, he says, would probably cost you 100,000 pounds. Even so, the weekly running costs – up to 3000 pounds – would, you might think, put it out of most authors reach. Perhaps syndicated, technical columnists only need apply.

Lindstrom ascribes his entrepreneurial streak to his genes. Both his parents are their own business. He was raised an only child in Skive on Jutland, the large chunk of Danish mainland separated from the capital Copenhagen by a stretch of Baltic and a lot of good-humoured prejudice. “You think you have a problem with Irish jokes, “ he laughs. “It’s the same for Jutlanders.”

His father ran a fishing company, his mother headed her own cosmetics business. Lindstrom’s fascination with the Internet developed out of a childhood obsession with toys, particular LEGO (Danish-owned and invented). He was a sick child, laid up in bed with a debilitating disease that affected his limbs for three years. “While other kids were playing football, I was lying there. So I got a box of LEGO in my hands and just fell in love.”

That love became an obsession that culminated in Lindstrom, having recovered from his disease, winning competition as best LEGO builder in Denmark. He then set about developing a LEGO channel-land in his parents back garden. “I had over 1,000 visitors in my first year after opening, each paying 2 pounds”, he says proudly.

Two of those guests were from LEGO. Their response? “First they threatened to sue me and the they offered me a trainee position at LEGOLAND!” He laughs. So little Lindstrom started to work in LEGOLAND’s design department at the age of 14. It was, he says like a dream come true. “These big LEGO trucks would come up with hundreds of thousands of bricks, for me! It was amazing. What do you call that story about the boy who eats chocolate and takes over a chocolate factory? Willy Wonka? Yeah, beautiful story, just like that”

At the same time, an interest in publishing his creation led to a teenager fascination with marketing. He helped his mother sell her products, set up his own tiny marketing outfit. He was determined to get off Jutland – moved to the capital, went to advertising school, was offered seven jobs at top agencies, and ended up at the global giant BBDO.

He says he choose it by consulting an astrologer, who looked at the “birth dates” of each company, and declared BBDO the most compatible with Lindstrom’s. Really? ‘Yeah!” he laughs. Does he believe in astrology? Well, no, he says, but if you are in a state where you can’t decide…

Another who knows him well, David Pakeman, CEO of the Lloyd Group recruitment consultancy, who worked with Lindstrom on building up the BTLookSmart team, says the Dane is a renowned joker but has packed a huge amount of experince into his short working life. “I don’t think I have ever seen such an extraordinary early cv as his,” says Pakeman.

It was at BBDO that he made his name, developing innovative websites for LEGO (again) and Mars (M&M’s). Then he jumped south to Sydney, setting up an interactive subsidiary for Clemenger, Australia’s biggest ad agency; later joining BTLookSmart. Now, he says, there’s never been a better time to build a presence on the net, the hype has gone, expertise is available and cheap. The companies that succeed, he argues, will be those who understand consumers and have a presence on- and offline, bricks (as in bricks and mortar) and clicks.

“I am not a pure online person, I don’t believe in that, “he says.” “You and I live more in the offline world than on, so why should everything be online? It doesn’t make sense. It’s about finding a balance.”

So what does he spend his money on? Gadgets, yeah, he says, and nice design. His apartment near the opera house in Sydney is, he says, one of the most “innovative homes” in Australia. “I tell you it’s all totally controlled by one Bang & Olufsen handset: heating, water, music, blinds, curtains. I like that kind of thing.”

And travel and surprises. He says he has a philosophy of seeing at least four new countries a year. He also likes to take “a lot of chances”. He gives me an example. For his 30th Birthday he flew 24 workmates to Bangkok. What he hadn’t told them was that he had hired a private detective to spend a month secretly filming them going about their everyday lives. When everyone was assembled, they were shown a five minute review of each of their lives, with identities concealed. They had to guess whose life it was. “Martin, “ as one colleague from Australia puts it drolly, “is a man of unique surprises.”

Didn’t his friends mind being filmed? No, everyone was shocked but pleased, “ laughs Lindstrom. “It cost me a fortune. “HE lives with the same Danish partner he’s had for 10 years, travel, they trow parties and like to do things “with a difference”. He doesn’t go back to Denmark much, he adds, just because he has been so busy. “I haven’t forgotten about them, you know, and I’ve received some press in Denmark, I can always go back, but it’s a small market.”

What about the US? “Yes,” he says, “I’d like to live in New York, but don’t think I’d want to go anywhere else. The good think about America is that it’s a major country, the bad thing is there are too many Americans there.” He bursts out laughing. I ask him if he has a problem with Americans – that might be news to his Boston-based bosses – and he sobers up quickly. “No! No, of course not.”

An his long-term ambitions? To build his brands, make his new Digitas client happy and reacquaint him self with Europe. Friends don’t expect him to stay more than a few years at Digitas, however, just long enough to rebuild his European contacts – “he is the most amazing net worker”, says one – and firmly establish that Martin Lindstrom brand.

And, despite the vaulting nature of his ambitions and his gusto for recognition, you can’t help warming to his child-like glee with which he presents himself. When we finish, we all leave together, getting hopelessly lost again, down through the hotel’s back stairs (we couldn’t find the lift button), round the store rooms, through the basement kitchens, till a kindly waiter shovels us out the staff exit.

All the while, Lindstrom never stops chirruping away, never moans, treat it all as a big adventure. Within a week, he’s sending me a e-mail wanting another meeting, suggesting a drink – that networking nous in action. Will he transform book publishing? Will he achieve business guru status? Who can be sure. But while he is not puffed up with self-importance you can only which him well.