Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics As Cults
Big brands are the gods of today’s world, and the algorithm is their gospel. What makes the cult + marketing vortex so attractive to otherwise smart people? How does online manipulation render us victims to the dangerous whims of digital companies, corporations, and conglomerates?
Hoodwinked reveals the new world of digital marketing where steady, seductive tactics once used by spiritual charlatans are now applied to sell everything from toothpaste to apps and even political leaders.
Through a combination of industry interviews, advertising analysis, and business and scholarly research, Dr. Einstein pulls back the curtain to reveal how marketers co-opt our emotions in the name of corporate profits. Armed with this information, readers can learn to spot cult-inspired marketing so they can decide how, or if, they should engage with it.
“Dr. Einstein brings her expertise in both marketing and religion. . . . Easy to read and such a good peek behind the curtain of for-profit companies and the ways they influence and manipulate us, even if we aren’t in any cults.”
DANIELLA MESTYANEK YOUNG, author of Uncultured: A Memoir
Companies have discovered that consumers can be lured by sophisticated and deceptive marketing techniques, like sensory marketing, cult branding, influencers, and AI programmed to induce maximum anxiety. Combined with behavior-modifying apps and persuasively designed UX that compels us to buy things we don’t need or cannot afford, goods and services like prestige education, fitness trackers, makeup, and those viral leggings from American Eagle seem like must-haves rather than luxury extras.
Aided by algorithms and buoyed by the greed of social media CEOs, marketers use the same deceptive and emotionally manipulative tactics that cults do, including scarcity, an all-encompassing ideology, and a charismatic leader. Once indoctrinated, consumer-followers become ensnared in the perfect capitalist loop: anxiety-purchase-anxiety-purchase-anxiety-purchase. Then, social media appearances reinforce the cycle of purchase, performance, and panic.
Using memorable real-life cautionary tales, Dr. Einstein narrates how smart, sensible people are sucked into the cult marketing vortex and, importantly, what enables them to get out. Protection comes from understanding the scope of the problem and knowing how to spot the many pervasive tactics used.