The Cold War

When marketing becomes manipulation, trust stops being renewable

Marketing was once about building a relationship between people and brands:

shared values, trust, consistency.

Today, a lot of what we call “marketing” is simply volume and pressure — more exposure, more push, more optimization for clicks and conversions.

With the rise of digital tools and AI, we’ve become very good at predicting behavior and nudging it.

But there’s a fine line between understanding people and exploiting their emotional patterns.

When marketing focuses only on transactions, several things happen:

• brand values become decorative, not operational

• short-term wins override long-term loyalty

• customers feel more manipulated than understood

We lose something important: advocacy.

Advocacy is when customers don’t just buy from a brand — they believe in it.

They feel aligned with its decisions, values, and behavior.

Not because of slogans, but because of lived experience.

Reclaiming that requires a shift:

• from “How do we get them to buy more?”

• to “How do we design experiences that respect their intelligence, time, and emotional reality?”

Technology is not the enemy.

It’s a tool.

The real question is:

Do we use it to deepen manipulation or deepen understanding?

Advocacy returns when marketing becomes an extension of empathy and clarity — when brands act in ways that people can trust, even when nobody is watching.