Brown is the new black. And brands are the new cults.
That’s the fascinating argument CUNY professor Dr. Mara Einstein makes in her latest book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. I invited her on the Back Row podcast to talk about how brands use cult-like marketing tactics to get us to buy, especially around Black Friday and the holiday shopping season.
“Advertising is always about finding where you are most vulnerable — ‘my hair isn’t good enough’ or ‘I’m not thin enough’ or ‘my car is not great enough.’ They try to find ways to get you to buy to make you feel better,” says Einstein, a former marketing executive who has written eight books on marketing, religion, and advertising.
As technology increasingly takes over how we relate to the world, Einstein explains, we have become even more vulnerable to such marketing. Ahead, Dr. Einstein talks about why the attention economy is really the “anxiety economy”; the real reason brands pushed Christmas shopping before Halloween (!) this year; and more. She also offers practical advice for consumers and marketers alike.
This is an edited excerpt of our interview. You can watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Follow the show so you don’t miss a single episode and if you like the podcast, please leave a rating and a review.
You write in Hoodwinked about how brands mirroring cults stems from our lack of community. People are not finding community and belonging in religion, for instance, or in their workplaces. So they’re turning to brands.
Brands came in to fill this void [because] we don’t have the cultural and social institutions that we used to have that became means for us to form our identity. Religion used to be something that people connected to and that was very much a part of who they were. Every Sunday you went to church or Saturday you went to temple or you went to mosque. Or your job — people worked for IBM for 30 years.
Most people don’t have that anymore. And so brands came in to fill the void. They [started] purpose marketing, right? Brands began to connect themselves to causes. Some companies do it better than others. Patagonia is very much connected to sustainability. Rihanna’s brand Fenty is very much connected to this idea of being all-inclusive. When people go to the store they think, Do I want to connect myself with Fenty and Rihanna and this idea of being part of a group of people, or do I want to buy a product by a brand like Maybelline that doesn’t mean anything?
How exactly are brands like cults?
Cults lure people in with deception. So what cults do is invite you to have a free dinner, have a free meditation class. You start to connect with the people and you come for another dinner and another yoga class, then they upsell you to take another class, and eventually you become part of the group.
Before digital spaces, cults had to be in far off places, like Guyana for Jonestown. But because of digital, we are separated from people who disagree with us, and so we have cult-like spaces now online. This replicates what we talk about as the marketing funnel — at the top of the marketing funnel, you introduce your product to people, you make them aware of it. Then the next part of the funnel is to convert. It’s really funny that we use the word convert when you buy because of the connection to religion.
And then finally loyalty. We think in terms of paid, owned, and earned media. Paid media is advertising that you have owned. Media is your website or any of your social pages. So you try to get people to be part of your cult because then they become your source of earned media.
Hermès has this whole racket with Birkin bags, which you see talked about online endlessly. People make videos of trying to go and buy bags and getting rejected. Hermès sells bags to people who spend a certain amount on other stuff. Sometimes when they offer you a bag, it might not be the bag that you want — it might be a big red bag. They’re like, “Well, this is the bag I have for you today.” You can take it or leave it, and maybe they’ll call you again or maybe they won’t. Hermes is like a cult, right?
This gets into the whole idea of scarcity marketing. Scarcity marketing is when companies suggest to you that they don’t have that many so if you’re able to get it, it’s a wonderful thing. At the holidays, Nintendo or Xbox will say, “We don’t have that many.” They do. They’re going to try and sell as many of those machines as they possibly can. They create hype around it so that people are lining up outside stores before they open. Same thing every time an iPhone comes out, which I think is ridiculous — people stand in line to get the latest iPhone, which has maybe a slightly different functionality than the last phone.
Hermès is doing the same thing. How much money are people spending before they spend the $15,000 on the bag?
Six figures.
It becomes a win-win for the company in two ways. One, they make sure that people are going to spend a bucket ton of money in the store before they’re ever deemed [able] to buy the bag. And two, it becomes a source of conversation in multiple spaces online, which is earned media
Black Friday is approaching. How does that mirror cult tactics?
The idea of you have to buy that day, you have to be out at the store. It’s like you have no control. That’s part of what happens in a cult. This is almost a social cult. Tying into people’s vulnerabilities — how are we vulnerable around the holidays? It’s this idea that how much I spend on you, how much I give to you is my communication to you about how much I care about you. That’s tapping into our vulnerabilities. If I don’t buy all of them gifts, if I don’t have a gift for the hostess who’s throwing the party — all of that starts to create all this anxiety in us that we have to go now. We have all these social cues telling us that it has to be on Black Friday.
I think this has to do with the possible mass economic blackout that people have been talking about. It’s supposed to happen from November [26] to December 2, which will cover Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Explain what that is.
In particular, people who were involved in the No Kings marches and have been protesting against the current administration feel like the best way that they can show their disdain for what’s going on in our country right now is not spend for that period. Unless it’s necessities or you can buy local or thrift — but no big companies, no unnecessary items. So it’ll be interesting to see whether or not people actually stay home during that period of time. It’s hard for a lot of people because it has been so ingrained in us that the day after Thanksgiving, you go to the stores and you go shopping.
This started in the 1980s. So people who are in their forties who are going to be some of the biggest spenders, this has existed for their entire lives. So you have this feeling of being left out. And at the same point, you go to the store and what happens? You get love-bombed. “Can I help you?” People often go shopping so they can have a personal interaction with someone.
I hear about that all the time. I do these interviews with luxury retail workers where clients are coming in and spending literally hundreds of thousands of dollars if not in one sitting then in a year, let’s say. I ask them why people do this because they don’t need anything and theoretically they could spend this money in all sorts of ways. But one of the most common responses is they just want someone to hang out with. They’re just lonely.
Black Friday isn’t a single day anymore. Deals and promotions felt like they started so early this year.
I was seeing holiday stuff in stores at the end of October. It wasn’t even Halloween yet, and I was seeing Christmas stuff. I’ve never seen that before. Have you?
Black Friday is like a season now. Around Halloween I was thinking, Why are these gift guides coming out in October? Goop sent out a press release in October about its gift guide.
I think there are a couple of reasons this is happening. A lot of people don’t have money right now, certainly during the [government] shutdown — and now those people are hopefully are getting their back pay.
You have people that are not just calling for this economic blackout, but also people that are saying, let’s cancel Christmas this year, let’s stick it to the corporations and let them know that we’re not happy with them supporting the administration that we don’t agree with.
So brands and retailers are doing Christmas marketing at Halloween to capture a greater share of a smaller amount of spend?
Yes.
I didn’t realize, as you say in Hoodwinked, that FOMO is a marketing term. I thought it was just internet lingo.
People started using FOMO in relationship to social engagement, but it was created by our marketing strategist to make people feel like they were going to miss out if they didn’t buy this thing right now. It’s all about creating anxiety for us.
Can you talk more about that and the “anxiety economy”?
Economists would tell us that we live in an attention economy, meaning that every time you look down at your phone, they want you to be engaging with it. As long as you engage with it, that’s where the money is coming from. Data is the new oil, because that’s where the value is for these companies. But what I argue in the book is that we are living in an anxiety economy — not just that they want your attention, they want you to be so ginned up that you have to stay engaged, that you have to stay online, and both the technology and the content come together to work in such a way as to get you to feel that anxiety.
If you spend time on social media, there isn’t a natural break. You have to physically stop yourself. You close a book, you’re done — it’s over. The movie’s over, you’re done — goodbye. But there isn’t that natural break. So you continue to scroll, and if you’re reading some of the stuff that’s going on in the world right now, you can get pretty darn anxious. So that anxiety needs release. One of two ways that that happens is either you scroll some more, which means you’ll be engaging with a lot more advertising, which is what companies want. The going gets tough, and the tough go shopping, which is also the ultimate goal. So it’s a win-win for these platforms. You’re seeing more ads or you end up buying something. That’s the technical side of it.
The content side of it is, what gets engagement? Heightened emotion, something’s amazing and then you send it to someone. Or rage. And there’s an awful lot of rage-baiting and rage-farming. People know that they will get more engagement and then the influencers will make more money the more outrageous they are.
A lot of people listening work in fashion marketing. What’s your advice to both them and to consumers?
If you are going to do marketing where you’re connecting yourself to a cause, only do it if you’re going to really commit yourself to it, which means that you’re going to do it year after year — that it is fundamentally embedded into your company and everything that you do. If you’re going to do a float at the Pride parade and never think about the implications on that community any other day for the rest of the year, really don’t bother. It’s really not worth it either to your company, ultimately, or to your consumer.
What I also say is it’s not bad to buy — it’s bad to buy too much. If you want to go out and spend $500 on a really good leather backpack, and you’re going to use that backpack for 20 years, then do that. It’s probably better than buying a bunch of $20 backpacks that you’re going to have to throw out every six months.
From a marketing perspective, to try to be as honest as you can be within the work that you’re doing. Look, fashion is amazing. You’re talking about art and you’re talking about beauty.
Here more from Dr. Einstein in the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Follow the show so you don’t miss a single episode, and if you like what you hear, please leave a rating and a review.
Follow Dr. Mara Einstein on TikTok and Instagram, and check out her Hoodwinked podcast and book. Learn more about her research on her website.
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