You may not like it, but marketers need a lot more than just “Buy Now!” as a mantra

This idea is the basis of Buy Now! “The Shopping Conspiracy” – the new Netflix documentary reveals the world of consumerism, marketing and the global waste crisis. And these truths hit a nerve. The documentary was a top 10 hit for Netflix worldwide – with over 11 million views in less than two weeks – and is sending TikTok into a frenzy as Generation Z is deeply shocked by the ugly underbelly of overconsumption. Their response should be a wake-up call for retailers and marketers. But more than that: Buy now! is a wake-up call from those of us who worked in the trenches, only to find out that we were essentially part of the problem.

I had my epiphany 25 years ago. I left the glamorous world of Seinfeld and Friends to teach at a decidedly underfunded public university. Using the classroom as my laboratory, I wanted to explore how best to educate people about how they are being manipulated by marketing.

What I learned is that everyone thinks they know how it works because we are completely immersed in consumer culture. Or even worse: people think they are immune. This is called the third-person effect. It’s the belief that advertising influences everyone else but not me. This was usually said by a student wearing a baseball cap with the “Pabst Blue Ribbon” or equivalent pattern on the brim.

Over time, I was able to step back from my corporate training and begin to look at the world of marketing from a bird’s eye view. From this vantage point, I was able to spot trends that others simply don’t have time for because they are plagued by customer calls and the demands of KPIs. My contribution to Buy Now! emerged from my work in Compassion, Inca book I wrote more than a decade ago about cause marketing and corporate social responsibility and how ineffective they are. Today we call it “purpose washing” or, more pejoratively, “woke washing,” but back then no one called this practice what it was: consumer manipulation.

But my goal in writing this book wasn’t just to make people aware of how they can make a real difference to the causes they care about. The goal was to highlight the work of people who got their impact right, and in doing so, give other marketers a benchmark for how they could do their work better.

These days, marketing is much more insidious. It’s no longer messages that you can see, but rather convincing technology that manipulates people right down to the brain stem. Marketing is no longer transactional. It’s about relationship marketing and digital surveillance and the rise of brand cults. Seeing all this, I wrote a book called Hodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. When I mention the title to anyone who works in marketing, the response was, “Absolutely. That’s what we do.”

Some are proud of it, but more seem embarrassed.

I get both answers.

Certainly marketing has been about the psychological manipulation of people for more than 75 years. If we told consumers that they were perfect the way they were, no one would buy our products. But today’s technology has all but killed the marketing funnel. The time from awareness to conversion to purchase – the time when people could take the opportunity to think – has been virtually eliminated. This is not good.

I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I believe social media may be past its prime. X will soon have gone the way of the dodo, except for white supremacists, and that’s not a target most advertisers are interested in. Threads has announced that it will add advertising in January, and I expect a mass exodus from there too. The growth platform is Bluesky, an ad-free social website. This is entirely consistent with “enshitting,” a term coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow. It eloquently explains the progression of every social media site: attract content creators, attract followers, then bring in advertisers and watch as people slowly stop engaging on the platform.

If all of this is true, now is a good time to ask ourselves: What should a new world of marketing look like and how can we use it for good? Because that is possible.

CUNY professor Dr. Mara Einstein has worked in the media industry for the past 30 years, holding key executive positions at NBC, MTV Networks and major advertising agencies, where she worked on brands such as Miller Lite, Uncle Ben’s and Dole Foods. Her latest book, Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults, examines the psychological strategies marketers use to influence consumer behavior. Dr. Einstein is also one of the lead authors of the new Netflix documentary “Buy Now!” The shopping conspiracy.

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