Building Marketing Skepticism Muscles

Marketing works. It does its job of selling. In fact, it does it too well. And when marketing turns deadly, it’s time to act.

Last week, we kicked off marketing month with a deep dive into how marketing can be blamed for many preventable deaths, as well as for a range of other health, environmental, and economic harms that many social change organizations look to address, making harmful marketing a vital but under-appreciated point of intervention for many. We also showed how deceptive and manipulative marketing practices are widespread. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There are plenty of things that non-profit, public health, and social change organizations can do to improve the marketing environment for all of us, empower their beneficiaries to navigate their marketing environments in a way that supports the organizations’ social mission, and ensure the organizations don’t reproduce harms in their own marketing strategies. 

But before we get to that, it’s notable that, aside from our professional roles, all of us are consumers. All of us are subjected to an onslaught of obvious and hidden marketing tactics every single day, especially in our digital environments. 

So, while we fight for incentive, regulatory, and cultural changes around harmful marketing that we describe in more detail below, here are a few things you can do to mitigate some of its worse effects on yourself and your loved ones.

For decades, scientists have been fascinated by how people resist influence, including marketing influence. They’ve documented cognitive mechanisms that shield people from corporate influence. They’ve also described more intentional coping strategies people can use in small everyday acts of resistance against marketing.

Psychological reactance is what happens when people perceive that an important and expected freedom is under threat, leading them to take actions to restore that freedom. Reactance is why some public health policies, programs, and messaging can fall flat and even backfire. Like, say, when so many people felt that COVID-19 quarantine orders, mask mandates, and business and school closures trampled on their liberties.  

The good news is that you can use your reactance strategically to resist harmful marketing. If you read last week’s deep dive into marketing’s strategies and harms, we’ve hopefully convinced you that marketing influences every single one of us, every single day. And it often does so by bypassing our normal decision-making processes and by playing off of our cognitive, emotional, and social biases to get us to buy things we otherwise might not. If knowing that your decisions in the marketplace have been manipulated by corporations upsets you even a little bit, that’s reactance. Hold on to that feeling to cultivate your own private rebellion against marketing.

One of the ways that marketers work to avoid activating your reactance – yes, marketers absolutely know that it’s a thing, and a powerful one at that – is to not appear to try to directly sell you anything at all. Instead, brands develop creative ads and marketing campaigns that seek to entertain, make you laugh, or feel joy, like the eagerly awaited and expensive Super Bowl half-time ads in the U.S.

Causing positive emotions in people does a lot of legwork in getting us to like brands, which over time leads us to prefer and buy their products. What’s an effective way to resist this affective appeal? Refuse to smile! Psychologists find that an effective marketing rebellion power pose of our time is to control your facial muscles into a frown instead, signaling to your brain to not engage in a positive emotion with the brand. It’s a sort of “fake it till you make it” embodied tool for your marketing resistance toolkit.

To lessen the effects of marketing, cultivate a broader skepticism against all forms of it and corporate activity in general. Encouraging people to adopt a general skeptical attitude towards marketing messages is proven to be more impactful at lessening their effects (like leading us to like the product, company, or ad, or to develop the intention to buy it) than teaching people how to spot specific misleading marketing tactics. But research also shows that skepticism alone might be ineffective if people don’t know how marketing functions.  This means that learning about marketing’s tricks and dark patterns can help too, including for the adolescents in your lives.

One way to resist marketing messages you can see is to argue with them. Psychologists call this counter-arguing or contesting. When you feel you’re being influenced, tell yourself reasons for not buying that product or liking that brand. This short-circuits the message’s effect, so you can reduce its influence on your brain.

Of course, so much marketing happens outside of our conscious awareness, especially online. Dark patterns and nudges, i.e., tricks that make users do things they don’t mean to do, work precisely because we’re not immediately aware of their effects. By reading Commercially Determined, you’re more aware of them than most. Still, researchers point to different strategies that work for resisting different dark patterns. One of them is simply taking a beat when buying something. A short cooling off period between adding a product to your cart and checking out can help you delete unwanted items from the cart instead.

While consciously rebelling against marketing messages can help a little in our personal lives, it would be a monumental task and more than a full time job to try to resist them all. Marketing studies estimate that adults see upwards of 10,000 marketing messages every single day. A recent study in New Zealand using headcam footage found that just in their physical environment, kids saw an average of more than 54 marketing messages per hour while at school and 62 per hour when outside of school. This totals to around 1,000 a day, a number that does not take digital marketing into account.

So while you work on your personal corporate marketing skepticism muscle, in your professional life, consider: