Together Digital Power Lounge, Women in Digital with Power to Share
Digital is a demanding and competitive field. And women are still grossly underpaid & underrepresented. But we are not powerless; we have each other. Together Digital Power Lounge is your place to hear authentic conversations from women in digital who have power to share. Listen and learn from our amazing guests along with host Amy Vaughan, Owner and Chief Empowerment Officer of Together Digital. Together Digital is a diverse and collaborative community of women who work in digital who choose to share their knowledge, power, and connections. To learn more, visit www.togetherindigital.com.
Together Digital Power Lounge, Women in Digital with Power to Share
Is Everything a Cult?
In this week’s Power Lounge, host Amy Vaughan welcomes Dr. Mara Einstein, an internationally recognized authority on deceptive marketing and author of Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. A former TV and advertising executive turned academic and media ethicist, Dr. Einstein pulls back the curtain on the dark psychology behind consumer manipulation. Together, she and Amy dive into the question: When does persuasion cross the line into indoctrination? Listeners are invited to examine the uncomfortable parallels between cult behavior and brand loyalty—and to confront just how easily marketing can tap into our fears, anxieties, and identities.
Drawing from her research and insights featured in the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, Dr. Einstein explains how modern marketing operates within what she calls the “anxiety economy.” From endless doom-scrolling to influencer-driven consumerism, she reveals how technology and advertising combine to keep us hooked, anxious, and buying. The conversation unpacks the continuum between brand fandom and fanaticism, using examples from Apple to Weight Watchers to show how manipulation thrives when emotional needs meet persuasive design.
But this isn’t a hopeless picture—Dr. Einstein also offers guidance for marketers and consumers alike. She challenges professionals to embrace ethics without sacrificing creativity and encourages all of us to become more conscious of how we engage with brands. By replacing reflexive scrolling with mindful consumption and by choosing community over cultish loyalty, listeners can reclaim agency in an economy built on influence. This episode is a must-hear for anyone who wants to understand—and resist—the subtle ways marketing shapes our thoughts, habits, and values.
Chapters:
00:00 – Intro & Welcome
00:50 – Meet Dr. Mara Einstein
02:10 – Why Talk About Cults and Marketing?
03:30 – How the Book “Hoodwinked” Began
05:10 – The Cult–Marketing Continuum
06:45 – From Attention Economy to Anxiety Economy
08:50 – How Anxiety Fuels Overconsumption
10:25 – “Buy Now” and Viewer Reactions
12:30 – Black Friday and the “Economic Blackout”
14:10 – Conscious Consumption in a Digital World
16:00 – The Line Between Persuasion and Manipulation
17:30 – The Genius and Ethics of Duolingo’s Campaigns
18:45 – When Brand Community Becomes Brand Cult
20:15 – Weight Watchers: A Case Study in Cult Tactics
27:00 – The Role of Social Media in Modern Tribalism
31:30 – Identity and the Brands We Choose
37:00 – Ethical Marketing and Real Community
41:10 – The Danger of Making It Hard to Leave
44:30 – How AI and Bots Change the Deception Game
50:00 – Building Awareness and Resilience
53:00 – Closing Thoughts & Where to Find Dr. Einstein
Quotes:
“We don’t live in an attention economy — we live in an anxiety economy. The entire system is built to keep us just uncomfortable enough that buying something feels like relief.” - Mara Einstein
“It’s funny — we call it doom scrolling, and yet we treat it like self-care. The truth is, it’s winding us up, not calming us down.” - Amy Vaughan
Key Takeaways:
- Anxiety, not attention, drives modern marketing.
- Persuasion turns toxic when it exploits fear.
- Brand loyalty can slide into cult behavior.
- Algorithms feed anxiety for engagement.
- We shop to soothe stress, not need.
- Ethical marketing connects, not controls.
- AI blurs truth and manipulation.
- Brands now shape personal identity.
- Awareness breaks the consumer cycle.
- Conscious choices beat compulsive clicks.
Connect with Dr. Ma
Hello everyone and welcome to our weekly power lounge. This is your place to hear authentic conversations with those who have power to share. My name is Amy Vaughn and I am the owner and chief empowerment officer of Together Digital, a diverse and collaborative community of women who choose to share their knowledge, power, and connections. You can join the movement at TogetherIndigital.com. And today's conversation might just fundamentally change how you view your relationships with brands. We are joined today by Mara Einstein, an internationally recognized expert on the deceptive marketing and psychology of consumer manipulation, with eight books under her belt, including the latest Hoodwinked, How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. Mara has become one of the most important voices in marketing ethics today. You might recognize Dr. Einstein from Emmy uh Emmy winning Netflix documentary, Buy Now, The Shopping Conspiracy. If not, definitely check it out, where she reveals the secret and hidden tactics brands use to drive overconsumption. As a former TV and advertising executive, returned professional and author, or turned professor and author, she brings a unique insider or outsider perspective that is both deeply informative and refreshingly critical. Today she is here to answer provocative questions. Is every the provocative question is everything a cult? And can Amy say anything right? That's the other question. So glad it's Friday, friends. So everyone, please buckle up, get ready to examine the uncomfortable parallels between cult psychology and brand loyalty and learn how to recognize and resist manipulative marketing in our world, our work, and our lives. Welcome, Dr. Einstein. I am so excited to have you here and to have this very incredible conversation.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this. This this is um, I think it's really important for women. I think it's really important for women in these spaces because uh I talk to so many different groups of um people and haven't really talked that much to marketers um and people working in digital spaces. So I'm really looking forward to this.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, I'm excited to bring it to this crew because there's that duality, right? Of what we do. We solve problems with creativity, we help sell, we help meet needs, but there is like a line, and I think this is something like deep down I've always kind of wondered about it. It's such a provocative topic. Um, and I love disruption, and I just think this is such a great time to be putting some of these things to bear. So thank you so much for all the work that you're doing in this.
SPEAKER_00:Um, pleasure. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, your pleasure.
SPEAKER_00:No, I mean it's interesting. What the what I thought of when just in this introduction, I think um this talks to some of the things that we're going to get to, is when I interviewed marketers for the book, I didn't obviously tell them what the title of the book was because I didn't want to sway what their converts what how they were going to respond to the questions. Um, and then when I said it's called Hudwinked, how marketers use the same tactics as cults.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And the response was, yeah, that's what we do. Or they owned it. Yeah. They owned it. Or the response was, yeah, that's what we do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So so there's people on both sides of the equation when it comes to that.
SPEAKER_01:No, absolutely. So yeah, the title had winked. Great title. Um, I think it's just it cuts right through, right? You're not dancing around it. I'm kind of curious, uh, what was it like when you finally realized that marketing had crossed that from persuasion to something more cult-like? Like when did you make that kind of connection?
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's interesting when I was writing the book, um, or actually before I came to the idea for the book, it was during the COVID pandemic. And I was at home and watching a lot of documentaries, and I happened to be watching The Vow, which is the documentary about the Nexium cult and Keith Raineri and Lula Rich, which is the documentary about Lula Roe, which is the multi-level marketing company. And I was watching them back to back and I went, oh my God, they're the same thing. And so I I was sort of like, wow. Um, but what was interesting to me is as I started researching multi-level marketing, and you know, at the time, like you couldn't throw a brick without somebody talking about multi-level marketing, but it wasn't something I had looked into. And then I spent three years researching multi-level marketing and meeting a lot of anti-MLMers, interviewing marketing folks in MLMs, and what I came to find was I was not the first person to figure this out. And in fact, Keith Rainier had started in uh in multi-level marketing. And so what I did was uh, you know, I've been looking at brand communities and brand cults for more than a decade, and I thought, is there a broader way for us to think about this? Because it's not just that multi-level marketing is cults, we're also talking about brand cults. So there's got to be something more that can be teased out of this. And so that's why in the book I created this thing called the cult plus marketing continuum, and it starts with brand cults, and then it goes to influencers who I call cult light, and then influencers to conspiracy theorists or extremists, and then it goes to multi-level marketing. And so as you go along the continuum, what happens is that you increase the extremism in terms of the relationship between the marketer and uh cult tactics, and you increase the anxiety both for those who participate and those who are are the salespeople on the other side.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's an amazing set of observations. And I think a lot of our folks who are listening either after this and recording or live with us right now. So, hi, live listening folks. Thanks for being here. You're feeling that. Like you showed up today to listen because you get a sense, even just probably looking at the title and the summary of this topic today, um, like what it is we're all kind of in for. So, live listeners, I want to make sure you know that you have the opportunity to ask um questions in the chat. So if you have a question for Mara, please make sure that you drop it into the chat and we will get it asked. Um, you've been on both sides of it. You've been um a TV executive, a advertising executive, and now very much like the critic, you know, the opposite side of that coin. What insider knowledge troubles you the most about how brands manipulate customers? Like, let's get to like the nitty-gritty of this. Like, what are you seeing that's like red flag, red flag, red flag?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, that goes to where I ended up on the last question, which is this idea of anxiety. Um, one of the things I argue in the book is that economists will tell us that we're in an attention economy. And I say it's not. We're living in an anxiety economy because the way the technology is created, and by and large, here we're talking about digital technology because that's where people are getting most of their content from. It's created in such a way as to just get us so ginned up all the time that that anxiety ultimately needs to be released. And it's it happens in two ways. It happens because of the technology itself, right? Because as you're scrolling, there is no defined stopping place. So you have to have the presence of mind to say to yourself, okay, I need to stop doing this. But what the statistics will tell us is that the minute you pick up your phone, you're throwing 23 minutes of your life away. So think about that every time you pick up your phone.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:The other part of it is that the influencers are incentivized to create content that is going to increase engagement. And what we know increases engagement is anger-inducing content.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And the technology separates us in terms of silos. So you don't engage with people that you disagree with. So all of this is created to make us more and more anxious. Now, bring it back to kind of brass tacks marketing when I started, which was about a hundred years ago, is that there is no advertising that doesn't want to make you anxious to begin with. I wouldn't say none, a lot, because an ad has to tell you that there's something wrong with you in order for you to be able to want to go out and buy their product. And we know that the most successful form of advertising is problem solution. I have a ring around the collar, I'm gonna go buy whisk and get rid of my ring around the collar. It's it's as simple as that, right? And it works, it's it's the same way now, but it's it's intertwined with the technology and the content in such a way that the problem is always anxiety, and then the solution becomes you you constantly need to find a way to release that anxiety, which can either be more doom scrolling, which you will do because it doesn't have a natural endpoint, or you will buy a product.
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:And remember that all of the content that exists online exists to sell advertising. Yeah, all of this is to sell to us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think it's such a good frame of mind to go into it. I think it's like that self-awareness of it's so funny. We get anxious and then we get on our phones to somehow think that that's going to alleviate. We even call it doom scrolling, and then we just sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. And I think over the last few years, you know, as much as I am a creator of content and still a marketer for my businesses, like I really try to spend less time. Like if I want to default to my phone as a way to escape, I'm like, no, I need to put it aside. It's not the way you escape. You're right. It's it's there are certain mechanisms in place that if we are not in a good place ourselves that we can't consciously recognize. And I think like you started to get to this, and we'll probably get to it more here soon, but like that danger of the echo chamber and the algorithms kind of knowing what you would need to see or want to see. And so that confirmation bias, the comparison trap, there's just it's so many calls. Um let's talk a little bit too about that Netflix documentary by now. Um, was there any particular reaction that surprised you the most from the viewers that, you know, people that you've talked to, maybe that have watched it after they saw how this whole kind of shopping cycle conspiracy really works?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, uh, one of the great things that happened about it, I've been teaching for 26 years, and I had former students from around the world from as far away as Singapore contact me and say, Oh my god, my professor was in the documentary. So I had that part of it was really, was really wonderful. Um a lot of what the a lot of what the reaction was was a pausing and realizing how much stuff people buy. And there were a lot of people probably saw after the documentary came out, people doing hauls of just clothes, bags of clothes, bags of stuff that they took out of their houses and that they were, you know, taking to the local Goodwill or wherever it was, the local thrift store, in order to be able to sell it. And so people began to realize, you know, how much that starts to weigh down on you, not only in terms of all of the stuff that you have around you, but how it starts to weigh on your credit card. And so that combination, um, and and uh Marin, I think is her name, was was the one who uh worked for uh Amazon, and she talked about exactly how Amazon worked their UX to get you to buy more and more and more and more. And it's yeah, and it's not just yeah, and not just you know, and not just them. Obviously, you know, Sheen and Timu and and all of them do that kind of stuff. And it's really interesting that that you mentioned this because remember, this came out just before Black Friday last year.
SPEAKER_02:Perfect time.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And so uh, you know, I I keep suggesting to people that now is a really good time for them to look at the documentary again. I don't get anything from it. Uh I got nothing from this. I, you know, you watch it because you want to watch it, but it's a good reminder for people, and especially as we're heading into the economic blackout, the the mass blackout, if that's really gonna happen. And I'll be curious to see how effective it is. But I on the one hand, I think it will be in the sense that um people have gotten used to boycotting, right? They got used to boycotting Target, they got used to boycotting Tesla, they got used to the, you know, so so they've gotten some habits built in terms of that. But also, you know, people are out of jobs. Right. The the government shutdown's still going on, people are worried about their health insurance going up. And so all of things, those things can contribute to it. But in relationship to our last quest, the last question, I I just did a TikTok about it, and I said to people, think in terms of analog over that period of time. Because one of the things you want to do is make sure that you're not engaging with advertising, because it will trip you up. You will start to say, Oh, I need that thing. And they put all the the stuff on it for Christmas, and you you start to equate that with family, and it gets all those layers of emotion attached to it. But I said if you have a streaming service that doesn't have advertising on it, that's gonna be your new best friend for for that week or a book or a CD. My daughter just got me um a turntable. Uh huh. I'm gonna be listening to records.
SPEAKER_01:That's fantastic. Yeah, no, it's so pervasive. Like it's it is everywhere, but I think you can make conscious choices, like you said, in the where and where and how you spend your time, even me saying, like just deciding to put down my phone instead of doom scrolling as a form of way to unwind. Like, that's not unwinding, that's winding me up. And I think another thing I've learned over the years is like understanding hedonic adaptation, which I think we talked about on the podcast in the past, which is essentially um, you know, material things will only get us so far. It is a quick hit of dopamine, which you know does not last within the body like serotonin. Whereas like a nice walk on a beautiful day, a conversation with a friend, you know, something more meaningful, more deep, that actually lasts within the body. Whereas head on adaptation, the more we get, the more we want. And it just shows, right? Yeah, there's been studies and research on it for decades. And I think that sometimes we forget that these are just inherent um byproducts of being human and they're easy traps to fall within. But I think being aware of them um and being mindful of them, it's not just about like it's yes, you're gonna save money, but also you're probably going to be happier and still somehow spending less money.
SPEAKER_00:And also if you're if if you do have concerns about making money, it also means you don't have to make as much money. Exactly. Right. So it all bec it all becomes, you know, this cycle of I don't need to make as much money. I could be doing something where I could spend more time with my family and my friends. That is the thing that is going to feed my mind, my body, my spirit, right? Um, and and not buying something from, you know, look in your closet and see how many things you have in your closet that still have a tag on them that you never wore. Yeah. You know, I think we've all go through a period of time when when that happens. And and look, we're human, and and what I like to say to people is it's not a terrible thing to buy. Right. It's a terrible thing to buy too much or to buy things you don't really need.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And to waste 100%. Um, so here's the rub, right? So a lot of us listening, myself included, work in marketing. And you know, some of those who are listening have struggled with ethical boundaries and what are those like? What do those need to be? How do we how do you distinguish between effective marketing and and what's kind of seen as manipulation?
SPEAKER_00:Well, what I always like to say to people is like, I don't dislike marketing. Like if somebody does some amazing marketing campaign, I'm like the first one to say, good on you. That's that's like really smart. So something like um, the first thing that popped up to me was Duolingo. Duolingo, first their stuff online was really great, then they started doing AI, not so great, but where where they were before that was they did this um just this promotional event where they got a bunch of, I think maybe 10 tickets for people to dress up in their iconic character that's this bright green color, right? And go to a Charlie XEX um concert. And she was doing Brad at the time, which was this bright green color, which is exactly the same color as them. Now, no matter how much they paid for those tickets, and they probably paid a lot of money for them, they were in the mosh pit right in front of her. She called them out, there were pictures taken, and and so everybody was posting online about Duolingo and all of this kind of stuff. It was a brilliant marketing campaign. That kind of promotion you can't, you you can't pay for, right? So those kinds of things that tap into you know what is culturally pop, you know, popular, connect your brand to something that is already going on and people are already engaged with. I mean, that was that was just kind of brilliant stuff. The thing, you know, if we're gonna talk about brand cults, and the thing to stay away from with that is there was a time in the early 2000s when we talked about brand community, and that was things that brands did to bring people together around the brand. And those that was fine. It's when you jump from the brand community to the brand cult. And we started talking about brand cults like five years later. It wasn't that much later that we started talking about brand cults, and particularly if you start to bring in a charismatic cult leader. So if you have a Tesla with an Elon Musk, that's when you're getting into dangerous cult territory. And that's something you want to avoid.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Um, there was something I was gonna say, and then it left my brain because you know, it's just Friday, and that's the way it's been lately. So maybe I'll come back to it if I remember. I didn't even jot it down because I was so like just listening and like, ah, but yeah, um, you know, brands using cult tactics. Oh, I remember what mine was. I was going to mention Patagonia because I think that's another really good. Yeah. Because they have values as a brand, and then they don't they use those to actually just live the brand versus force you to like what to consume. So, like the one of their Black Friday things was go outside. Yeah. They sell outdoor stuff and they close their store. So they're not saying go outside and then come to see us at Black Friday. They were like, no, we're giving all of our employees a day off and we're gonna spend the day outside. You should too. To me, that's more living the brand and like living in your values than than being a cult. On the flip side of go ahead.
SPEAKER_00:The the other example I would give for that is Lush Cosmetics. Yeah. And they right after Francis Hagen, who was the Facebook whistleblower, talked about how bad Instagram was, on their webpage, they put up be somewhere else because they knew that's who their target audience was. And three years later, they still they're still not there. They have uh something up that says what the zuck and all kinds of right, and then all kinds of um information and statistics about how bad uh social media is for particularly for young girls, teen girls.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Leg is been a brand I've been a fan of for probably 15 years, and it's like I love that they're they're still going strong and despite social media not having it. I think that's a great example. Yeah. On the flip side, um, could you walk us through maybe a specific brand that exemplifies this in and maybe break down a little bit of their playbook?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, somebody that does that's a that's a brand cult. Um I had one. I I mean the one that you can always talk about is Apple. I mean, they sort of exemplify all of this. But you know, if you're talking, you're talking about brands. If I talk about it more broadly, one of the things the first kind of step in the in the brand recruitment process is to find uh vulnerable people. Um oh, you know what? Let me let me use a weight loss example. This may be one that that would be good. Um, because the next book I'm working on is is um working title is The Cult of Thin. Um and so I'm taking this and applying it to the the diet and fitness and weight loss industry. So um so the first step in the process is to find a vulnerable target. Who could possibly be more vulnerable than people that are unhappy with their body? Now, of course, this has been this dislike of what we look like in our bodies has been created by the people who did this, right? And that's also something that marketers do unethically, right? You create the problem so you can provide the solution. There's the there's the problem with that. Um, and then you recruit people with deception, right? So, so diets, diets the statistic is 94 to 98 percent of diets fail. And it's depending on on whose statistics you use, as much as 160 billion dollar a year annual business.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So you are coming, you are telling people that you come in and you will pay us money and then you will lose the weight. But what we won't tell you is that even if you lose the weight, you know, you're not gonna keep it off. Right. So so they've lured them in with deception. Then of course you upsell. So if you're something like Weight Watchers, right, you you bring people in, you have them come to the meetings, and then the next thing you do is you're selling them the bars, right? You're selling them Weight Watchers food. And it used to be that Weight Watchers was owned by Heinz, and so Heinz owned Weight Watchers food, so then they would want you to buy the food, right? So that's this constant upsell, upsell, upsell. And then the next step in the process is love bombing. So as part of Weight Watchers, you're going to weekly meetings, and what are you doing? You are having other people tell you how well you are doing, how wonderful you are, just keep it up. Even if you didn't lose weight this week, you'll be able to lose weight next week. And then then the tough love part of it is to extract information from people so you make sure that you keep them in. So, what else happens in those rooms? In those rooms, you're telling people your deepest, darkest secrets about the issues that you are having in losing weight. And so that then gets used against you because then you go to see the leader every week, and the leader says, Oh, I remember, Mara, you talked about the fact that you know you are an emotional eater, and every time you get into a fight with your friend, you know, this is what happens. So, you know, if you just stuck with the program, you'd be okay, right? So those tactics, this is straight out cult tactics, one for one for one for one. Um, sensory deprivation and meditation, that doesn't happen so much except that they're telling you exactly what you can eat and what you can't eat.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, renouncing those who question, oh, you know, this doesn't happen so much on something that's more mainstream like Weight Watchers, but could happen on something like CrossFit, um, where they tell people you should work out until you throw up, right? Some of your family might say, you know, that's probably not really good for you. But you know, if you've gotten into the cult of CrossFit, you know, you're gonna say, no, no, no, you don't understand, you don't understand. Um, and then the last part of it is or the second last part is to um introduce the core beliefs, right? So if you become a core member of Weight Watchers, you become a lifetime member because you finally, you finally made it. And then the last part is making it really hard to leave. So Apple is really good with that one too, right? So once you you bought into Apple, yeah, try to leave you try to leave that cult. But um, but Weight Watchers 2 is like, no, you should stay, you should stay, you know. And for me, I mean, I I the first time I went on Weight Watchers, I was 13 years old. Oh, uh yeah, yeah. And so um I was doing it up until my early 50s, and I was going through menopause, and I had been working the program, you know, as I had done for 40 years.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:And I said, you know, this, you know, I went to the the leader and I said, What's what's the deal? And she said, Oh, you know, I told her I was going through menopause. She said, This won't work for you. I was really she she said the quiet part out loud, this won't work for you. And what's really interesting is that Weight Watchers has now come out with um a plan specifically for people for women going through menopause. Yeah, surprise surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise. So um, so that's a preview for the next book. But anyway, but it it it's just such a perfect. And if you want to talk about cult leaders, because that's also obviously an aspect of this. If you've been on any kind of diet, you don't need an external cult leader, you have an internal cult leader. You know how many points you're allowed to.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my gosh, you're right. Yikes, the points. Yikes, yikes, whoa.
SPEAKER_00:And it's not just not just Weight Watchers, they're just uh yeah, just just like a really key example of how all this stuff works, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_01:Not to pick on them for those who it's worked for, but you're so right. Like there's there's all those control mechanisms that are in place because even as you're talking, like you see the parallels and like you know, Scientology is another really well-known of cult.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Scientology, they follow you after you leave. And the other thing is too, and whether you're talking about a cult or you're talking about, you know, multi-level marketing companies are really um key to that, and they're exactly the same thing as as we discussed earlier, is part of that, the key part of it is making it really hard to leave.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And a lot of that has to do with the amount of shame that the person faces because remember, you've told everybody else in your life, no, this is really good for me, and this is a place I should be. Right. And I I will be successful at this. And then when you finally realize no, I'm I'm not, yeah, and I can't, and you've extricated yourself from everybody in your life, yeah, then you have to go back to them. Yeah, and that's really hard. It's also why people go from cult to cult to cult or MLM to MLM to MLM because they think, oh, it it's not, it's it's not the MLM, it's that MLM.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:But if I try the other MLM, then I'll be successful. Same thing with weight loss. Oh, it was just it w it was just, you know, that it was just Jenny Craig who went out of the world. That's so true, right? It's you know, I try one more, and then I'll then it'll work for me.
SPEAKER_01:Hopping from one to the next versus reliance and so true. All right. Um, you know, I so yeah, I mean, like Weight Watchers and a lot of those started long before the presence of social media, but now social media is here, it definitely has amplified brand tribalism. How has digital marketing accelerated those kind of cult-like dynamics that we're seeing? You alluded to some of them before.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So um I've been studying the intersection of religion and marketing for 30 years. And so I've seen all these sort of transitions. So my first book specifically talking about this topic was called Brands of Faith, Marketing, Religion, and Commercial Age. And it the way that I started the book was talking about Mel Gibson's um crucifixion of Christ or whatever the name of that book was, the movie was. And one of the things that they did back then was like Mel Gibson would create a um uh a phone call that he would then send out to all these pastors. So the pastors got a phone call for Mel Mel Gibson, and like they they did those kinds of marketing things. And what's often often done done in terms of books and um and movies is that they would buy out full theaters and then bring the congregation to go see it. This is also why a lot of Christian books end up on the top of the New York Times bestseller list, is that you know, they have the person come speak at the congregation, they buy all the books for them and all of that kind of stuff. We move some of that into the digital space, and all of it gets amplified because again, we talked about this earlier. You end up in silos with people who agree with you, and so they amplify the information. So we get put, you know, it used to be if you were part of a cult, you had to go to a compound somewhere. So we think about Jim Jones and Guyana, right? They were as isolated as they could possibly be, or the branch Davidians down in Waco, Texas, or Rajneesh up in Oregon. They were separated, and then there was a the you had to do that because you had to make sure that they weren't going to be in association with people who would tell them that there was something wrong with the cult. Now that's no longer true because in the digital space, what happens is we already get separated into the groups of people who will agree with us. And what happens when somebody comes into the group who disagrees with the group? Everybody pounces on them and says, No, you're wrong, right? And so that person doesn't come back again. So we don't have this interaction uh with other people who don't agree with us in those online spaces, and this happens whether we're talking about. You know, it certainly happens in terms of politics. Oh, uh but yeah, but it could it can happen in in lots of other spaces too. But we are being separated. So it's almost one of the things I do with my students, or I did when I taught like an intro to media studies, I had them create a fake Gmail account because I didn't want them to get flooded, and then to create a fake account on what was then Twitter, but be set completely opposite from the person you are. So start following someone who is, if you're liberal, follow someone who's really conservative. Start and and if you're comfortable, engage with it. But you know, if you're not filled, because sometimes people don't. But they began to see what the feed would look like. And they also began to say, you know what, I still don't agree with them, but I understand why they think the way that they do, given the the kinds of information and content that was being sent to them. And now with AI, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Like I information, I don't even want to think about it. I understand that. I understand that. I think that's why that's the beauty of like questioning everything and then just getting us back to a place where we can be curious and we can have conversations and not necessarily have to agree, but understand that there's different points of view. And of course, there's boundaries and safety that need to all be considered and respect for humans in general that need to all be there. But yeah, 100% kind of taking in what's happening on the other side. I have some friends who are very, very good at that. That if you saw them and knew them to know what they sometimes will listen to because they're like, I just need to know what other people that don't like anything like me are saying, right. You know, stuff that'll be flat out racist and they're black. It's like, how can you lie? I don't know, they're stronger than me. Um, you know, but if you can, but if it it's a good, it's a good exercise to do once in a while, you know.
SPEAKER_00:There's a book called The Wrong Way Home, and it's written by uh a psychiatrist, psychiatry professor, um, about cults. And one and he wrote it in the 90s, and it was right after Waco had happened. And he talks at the end about, you know, um see about the seeing people face to face and walking in another person's shoes. And we do that so rarely now. And it's not again, it's not necessarily to agree with them, but to understand why they think the way that they do, because that's the only way that you start to have community. And that's what these social spaces, remember, we're supposed to be about, that we're supposed to be about creating community, and that's not what happened. And you want to talk about another really good advertising campaign was Zoran Mom Donny's campaign in New York. That was brilliant, and the reason why it was so smart, besides I mean, just looking, dissertations will be written on what this campaign did. But the fact that he had gays for mom donny and Jews for mom Donnie and hot girls for mom Donnie, and there was, you know, there was niche after niche after niche after niche, but they were all in support of him. So what he did, what the marketing dep group did is play on the fact that we are so separated. Yeah, but in fact, we can come together behind somebody who is willing to make all of our lives better.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Mind-blowing. So good.
SPEAKER_01:So very good, 100%. Yeah, definitely look it up if you haven't um heard or seen anything about it. I think at the end of the day, it's just we keep forgetting that understanding is the antidote to fear. And that, you know, if we aren't willing to slow down and and try to have some understanding, um, again, not making excuses, but just holding space to understand one another, um, we have a whole lot less to fear than what we realize. And again, all those mechanisms are in place to give us the confirmation bias, to make us feel better, to inflate our sense of self and worth and value. And that really leads to my next question. You know, there's so much about there's those a big role that identity plays in making us vulnerable in brand manipulation, especially online. Um how would you kind of start to dive into that and help our listeners start to understand and even recognize how that can be, you know, a bit a bit of a pitfall for us?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. Well, the reason for that is that these larger social and cultural institutions just don't have the same impact on us that they used to, right? So if you belong to a faith, you know, what church you went to or what synagogue or what mosque you went to was a defining factor of who you are. But, you know, early in, you know, by the 1970s, people were starting to change religions. And that's happened because, in in large part, um, the Immigration Act of 1965, 1965 allowed more um Asians into the United States. So we had this influx of religions that people had never heard of before. And so people started experimenting in a way that way they never had before. And you had all these these cults, and you had the Beatles hanging out with the Maharishi, right? And and so so people started thinking of religion as much more fluid than it had been before. Same thing true with your jobs. People, you know, would work for IBM for 30 years. I know people at MTV networks that are still there after 40 years, but you know, you look at my students' generation, and they don't expect to stay in a job for more than a couple of years. So it doesn't have that same kind of play on them. So when you begin to see those things not becoming personal identifiers in the way that they used to be, the corporations and brands came in to fill that void. And what happens with that, and this goes back to talking about something like Patagonia or Lush and so on, is that consumers are looking for brands to have values embedded in them. Yeah. Because if I'm going to take on a brand as part of my identity, then I have to know that they believe in the same things that I believe in. And so that's why brands become so much more important to people than they used to. Now, some is fleeting. Like, you know, a month ago we were talking about la boo-boos, and I'm like not hearing anything. I'm not seeing anything about laboo-boos anymore. It's how we're talking that's different.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But we are talking about things like Apple, and we are talking things about, you know, the car you drive, um, you know, particularly if you live in Los Angeles or something, the car you drive becomes very important about saying who you are. And you know, and so those things start to have more importance to people than they used to. Now, this is not across the board. Nobody will ever know what brand of toothpaste I use unless they come over to my house.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, but if I pull out um uh uh Tom Ford lipstick, yeah, you know, somebody knows that I paid way too much money to put color on my lips. Right, right.
SPEAKER_01:Girl's got a healthy makeup budget. Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. I can see that for sure.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I and that, you know, and then then we get talking about the lipstick effect, right? So yes, right, because that we're gonna see a lot of that now, which is this, you know, when people start feeling like they don't have any money to spend and they can't treat themselves to anything, they do go out and spend um money on things like lipsticks so they can feel better about themselves.
SPEAKER_01:It is so true, right? Charles Revlon, one of the quotes I always will remember is women don't buy lipstick, they buy hope.
SPEAKER_00:And David my favorite David Ogilvy is you know, the consumer isn't stupid, she's your wife. Yeah, I love that one. That was a yeah, and that's obviously from a different time period, but you get the you get the idea.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. Exactly. Classic stuff there. Um, all right. So for marketers who want to be more ethical and yet effective, what maybe what are some practices they really should avoid? We've called a couple out, but I want to make sure we're really driving it home for those folks that want to kind of be more aware of this and do better.
SPEAKER_00:That it's fine to create brand community, but be careful that you're not pivoting into a brand cult. And the key thing that gets you into um a brand cult, like you know, we talk about in and out groups, so you know, Coke versus Pepsi, that's that's okay. Nobody's gonna get hurt if you're cult versus Pepsi. Um, but when you get into the idea of introducing a cult leader into the use of your brand, that's that's when things start to get a little rocky. Because it's okay. Look, you know, some people are really like being, you know, Harley Davidson writers, right? Yeah. That that's been a brand cult for a long time. That's been one of the the OGs in in the cult brand cult area. But I don't think anybody thinks that there's a leader, it's that the people like this brand and you know, you know, Harley do or die. And there's there's nothing that's not gonna hurt anybody. When you get into um, and people may have seen this, the documentary on HBO Max uh Brandy Hellville, which was about Brandy Melville, and Brandy Melville, and I hadn't known about that brand at all because my daughter's Gen Z, so they'd be popular, I think, a little bit before her. And even if you go to their website now, uh it's it's horrifying. The the bodies of these young girls look like they came out of a concentration camp. I mean, there's no other way to describe it. Um, not only that, that they cut their heads off and only show their body, which is also very dehumanizing and you know, works in all kinds of ways to make women less than what they're supposed to be. And so that idea that a very thin anorexic body type is appropriate for, again, a very vulnerable target audience of young girls, right, plays into that whole cult aspect. And then on the documentary, they talk about the fact that the man who runs the company has to see a picture of all the people who are going to be on the floor of the store so he can decide whether or not what they're wearing is appropriate. So again, you know, telling people what to wear, what to eat, who to sleep with, right? All that kind of stuff, all of that is cult activity stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and the other to be avoided. 100%. And the one that stuck with me too was you making it hard to leave. Yes, you know, making it hard to leave, like as a brand, as a company, as a community, whatever that is, like, are you allowing people to say, My time here's done, I'm going to move on? Like, yeah, trying to not do that, like that's to me, that's also very scary.
SPEAKER_00:So I I mean, like a good positive one is is Nutella. People love Nutella, right? And World Nutella Day was actually created by fans, it wasn't created by the company. And so, you know, you have that organic, yeah, you know, love of a brand. That's that's fine.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. I agree. I got to work on Pringles way back in the day before API on social. And it was one of the most fun communities and social brands I ever got to work on because people just loved a good Pringle and it was global. And see different flavors in different countries, and people were always so creative with like the cans and how they use them after. And it was just it was really delightful. Um, because it was just easy and fun and friendly and open and just really kind of for everyone. It didn't feel exclusive or excluding as well.
SPEAKER_00:And I think there's something yeah, I think there's also something about um providing opportunities for people to engage with each other, but not doing it in a way that's so self-serving to the brand. You know, if you're you're you know, maybe you're doing so, I don't know, I'm making this up off the top of my head. So maybe you're doing something like, you know, get together with three of your friends and come up with your favorite logo creation or something, versus, you know, create the back of your cell phone case, and if you post it, then uh, you know, maybe we'll give you something, you know, a$50 gift card. So I'm like, no, like find a way to make this really useful to your consumer.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. Give them a read. And like you even said, like the Harley example's a good one. Um, you're they they they they build community off of their love of bikes and writing, you know? That's really kind of what it's about. It's about the enjoyment of the the togetherness and the connection, the community. It's not just the product itself. Right. So that makes a lot of sense. All right. So you've written a couple books, eight total on this topic. It sounds like you've got another one in the works. How has the sophistication of deceptive marketing evolved since you started doing this work?
SPEAKER_00:Um, I think a lot of it has to do with what we've talked about. The digital space really changed everything. And um, I think what's happening now that's kind of more distressing than anything else is the introduction of AI and bots and people not knowing when they are not engaging with human beings, and that becomes a waste of their time. This is also what I think is gonna happen in terms of gonna ultimately may ultimately be the downfall of social media, which is when people begin to realize that they're not engaging with other people, because that's the love of the space, right? Is fine, you know, I I've met a lot of people, some of whom that have actually met offline ultimately and become friends with. But you know, when you start to realize, oh, you know, this person who is, you know, fomenting hate on this space, oh, that's actually a bot. Like, why do I need to be engaging with that anymore? Um, I think that's what's been really horrible in terms of the deception. I think that, you know, something like the hashtag TikTok made me buy it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And I spent some time in the book talking about this. And it used to be that we used to talk about effective frequency being three times, and now we talk about effective frequency being like seven to thirtees. And so, you know, because our media space is so fragmented that we, you know, we may actually have engaged with something in multiple spaces and not even realized it. And it happens to be that the TikTok person is the last person that you got to. And so, you know, that's part of the issue. The other part of the issue is the collapse of the marketing funnel. You know, it used to be that there was time and space within the marketing funnel for you to take the time to think about whether or not what you were buying, and this goes back to the beginning of our conversation about buy now, right? Is to take that time and take a breath and say, you know what? Maybe I don't have a 50, 150 bucks to spare on uh to spend on a pair of jeans, right? And and you would have had the time because you would have actually had to go to the store and spend that time and do it. But the technology is created, you know, the whole idea, Daniel Kenneman's idea of thinking fast and slow, is that thinking slow is taking the time, really being considerate about what you do. And thinking fast isn't thinking, it's about you know reacting with our emotions. And that's what the technology is designed to do is to override our critical thinking. And if you want to talk about it in terms of other ways in marketing now, is is the the increased use of sensory marketing, and particularly um, you know, olfactory senses, which are the most powerful, and so it it overrides our critical thinking when we go in a store and we smell something and it smells like Christmas and makes us want to buy something.
SPEAKER_01:Popcorn or yeah, 100%.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Cinnabon, Cinnabon, like every month, popcorn, right? That's so hard, that's so massable. Oh, a hundred percent. It's so true. It's so true. This has been so awesome and amazing. And I, you know, I think this whole conversation, it's like it's like it's a balance, right? It's a balance of understanding our roles in the world and the things that we do for our customers, our clients, and the people that we work for. And you know, it is it's all just a balance. And I love that you're breaking this lens to it, because I think they're all critical questions we need to be asking about ourselves in the bigger picture of what's happening to, you know, like hyper-individual hyper-individualism, hyper capitalism, like the space that we're literally in right now as a society within the United States specifically. Um, so yeah, we could go on and on, but we're coming close to time. So I'm gonna take a minute and let our live listening audience know that you again have some opportunities to ask some questions. They're all in existential crisis right now, though. I can feel it. If they're with me, um jump into the live chat, make sure you have your question there if you'd like. Um, Mara, if they would like to reach out to you, connect with you, where's the best place to find you and your work?
SPEAKER_00:Um, my website is drmeraeinstein.com. It's D-R Mara Einstein, M-A-R-A-E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N. Um, I'm on TikTok as my primary um social, but I'm also on um Instagram, YouTube, and threads. Most of the stuff on Instagram and YouTube is is um repurposed from from TikTok. I also have a stuff sub stack, which I never talk about. Um only because I I do a newsletter, I do a newsletter once once a month. I don't bombard people. That's great. And what I do is I take the best of what I've talked about um in my social media spaces and turn it into written content for people.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, fantastic. That's good. I'm not sure if you're gonna have some new followers here soon. Um, and then I'm gonna go ahead and switch to our fun little quick hit power round questions. Um questions from the audience, we'll get to those right before we sign off. All right, what is the most cult-like brand you see right now? Can you name one other than the ones we've named already?
SPEAKER_00:Um the most cult like um, because I was because you're gonna talk about the worst. Is this the worst question? If you're gonna talk about what I think of as the most cult-like that thing going on right now is crypto. And I that's probably not one that people think about very often. Um, and particularly when you're talking about multi-level marketing, you know, for women's products tend to be like hair care and weight loss and you know, supplements and that, but for men it's it's uh financial instruments and and in particular crypto. And um, you know, it's the people at the top that make the money and the people at the bottom that don't. And if you read anything about, you know, Trump's coin right now is is you know, handful of people made money and everybody else lost a bucket ton. So I would say crypto.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, crypto's a good one. I would say also I feel like gambling is falling into that because the gambling is becoming more pervasive and present and more of a common type thing that I'm seeing throughout, especially with sports betting and everything as well.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. A couple of my students wrote wrote papers about the the the betting apps, and they they were um scholar athletes, and they're really not happy about it. They're really not happy about it.
SPEAKER_01:And I hope more athletes start to speak up about it because maybe that might change the mindset mindset and shift the paradigm.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Whoo, we're almost there. All right, cool. All right. One marketing tactic that you wish was illegal, if you could just make that call. What would it be?
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna I'm gonna pivot that slightly and say what I would love to see is the elimination of section 230. Section 230 is the part of the communications code that says that online platforms are not responsible for the content that appears on the platform.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so, you know, Facebook always says we're we are not um, we we are not creating content, we are not editorializing. And I say the second you have an algorithm on your website, you are editorializing because you are deciding what people see and don't see. So you are responsible for what appears on your con on your platform.
SPEAKER_01:Fantastic answer. I love it. That was a good pivot. All right, finish the sentence. You know, you're in a brand call, in a brand call, not you're a brand call. You're in a brand call when you cannot leave. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Right? If it becomes impossible for you to say to yourself, I can't buy this product, I you know, I want to w walk away from this group, but you know, if I walk away, I lose too much stuff, then yeah, that's the key. You can't walk away.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a good one. All right. This is the last one that I've got. I think it's just a really good question to end on for the rest of us as we're listening, as a, you know, we're all consumers, right? What is the best mental defense against manipulative marketing?
SPEAKER_00:I think the best, you know, we've talked a couple of times about um vulnerability and being vulnerable. And you want to do uh a gut check about how you're feeling about yourself before you pick up your phone. Because the thing is is that, you know, when we when I was growing up, at the end of the day and you were tired, you turned on your TV set. And if you turned on your TV set, you know, you might see commercials, but it was based on certain assumptions about who might be watching at that particular time. It wasn't about people grabbing all your data and looking at what you've clicked on, how much time you've spent on it, all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, at the end of the day, when you're really tired is probably the last time that you want to do it. I would just say to just be more intentional. And I I think the statistic now is we pick up our phone 150 times a day. Find yeah, find find times in the day where you can be away from your phone, stick it in another room. Yeah, don't plug it in by your bed. Yeah, right. All of all those simple, you know, you really don't. I mean, unless you know that there's an emergency that's going to be happening in your family, you don't need your phone by your bed. You really don't.
SPEAKER_01:No, exactly. I've um I literally have a watch because I am losing my phone all the time. I forget it everywhere, I leave it behind, I lose it, I misplace it, and I hope it always continues. But then I'm like, I need to buy my phone. That's like the only feature I use on my watch all the time is find my phone.
SPEAKER_00:But because I can't tell people not to use the phone because it's like what when was the last time you made a phone call on your phone? Yeah. You know, you can get rid of apps, you know, but you can like if you need to call an Uber or a Lyft or whatever it is, you know, then you then you need to have the phone. Right. Or people send you calendar updates, and so you need that.
SPEAKER_01:So absolutely. Well, uh, this has been amazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Mara, for challenging all of us to think more critically about the intersection of cult psychology and customer culture and consumer culture. Customer culture too, why not? Sure. Right. But your your insights are reminding us that you know, as digital professionals, we both have the power and responsibility to shape marketing that um respects rather than manipulates. And so to all of our together digital community members of today's conversation made you question your own brand relationships and marketing practices. That was exactly the point. So thank you for sticking with us through it. Um, it's the first step to doing more ethical marketing and by creating that awareness. So definitely check out her book, Hoodwinked, catch her on Netflix, the buy now shopping conspiracy. You can dive more into these topics. If you found today's Power Lounge very helpful and it needs to be shared, please share it. We'd love for you to share it with someone who needs to hear it. And remember the recordings are always on YouTube and our podcast wherever you happen to stream and listen. Um, we hope to see you all next week, everyone. Until then, keep asking, keep giving, and keep growing. We hope to see you soon. Bye bye, everybody.
SPEAKER_00:Bye now. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Produced by Heartcast Media.
