Is Everything a Cult?

Amy Vaughan:

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 Vaughan 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@togetherindigital.com, and today’s conversation might just fundamentally change how you view your relationships with brands. We are joined today by Einstein, an internationally recognized expert on the deceptive marketing and psychology of consumer manipulation with eight books under her belt, including the latest Hood Winged. How Marketers use the same tactics as Cults Me has become one of the most important voices in marketing ethics today. You might recognize Dr. Einstein from the Emmy winning Netflix documentary ” The Shopping Conspiracy. If not, definitely check it out where she reveals the secret and hidden tactics brands used to drive over consumption.

 

Amy Vaughan:

As a former TV and advertising executive turned professional and author, she brings a unique insider outsider perspective that is both deeply informative and refreshingly critical. Today she’s here to answer provocative questions. Is every provocative question, is everything a cult? And can Amy say anything? Right? That’s the other question. I’m 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.

Mara Einstein:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to this. I think it’s really important for women. I think it’s really important for women in these spaces because I talked to so many different groups of people and haven’t really talked that much to marketers and people working in digital spaces. I’m really looking forward to this.

Amy Vaughan:

Yeah, I’m excited to bring it to this crew because there’s that duality of what we do. We solve problems with creativity. We help sell, we help meet needs, but there is a line, and I think this is something deep down, I’ve always wondered about it. It’s such a provocative topic and I love disruption, and I just think this is such a great time to be bringing some of these things to bear. So thank you so much for all the work that you’re doing in this.

Mara Einstein:

Oh, thanks.

Amy Vaughan:

On that note,

 

Mara Einstein:

My pleasure. Go ahead. Oh, your pleasure. No, I mean it’s interesting. What I thought of just in this introduction, I think 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. I didn’t want to sway how they were going to respond to the questions. And then when I said, it’s called Hoodwink, how marketers use the same tactics as Cults, and the response was, yeah, that’s what we do.

Amy Vaughan:

Or they owned it. Yeah,

Mara Einstein:

They owned it, or the response was, yeah, that’s what we do. So there’s people on both sides of the equation when it comes to that.

Amy Vaughan:

No, absolutely. So yeah, the title was a great title. Thank you. I think it’s just, it cuts right through, right? You’re not dancing around it. I’m kind of curious, what was it like when you finally realized that marketing had crossed that from persuasion to something more cult-like? When did you make that kind of connection?

Mara Einstein:

Well, it was interesting when I was writing the book, 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 Nex Im cult and Keith Ranieri and Lula Rich, which is the documentary about LuLaRoe, which is a 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 was sort of like, wow. But what was interesting to me is as I started researching multi-level marketing and at the time 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.

Mara Einstein:

And what I came to find was I was not the first person to figure this out. And in fact, Keith Ranieri had started in multi-level marketing. And so what I did was 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? Not just multilevel 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 multilevel 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 cult tactics, and you increase the anxiety both for those who participate and those who are the salespeople on the other side.

Amy Vaughan:

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, 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 questions in the chat. So if you have a question for me, please make sure that you drop it into the chat and we will get it asked. You’ve been on both sides of it. You’ve been a TV executive, an advertising executive, and now very much like the critic, the opposite side of that coin. What insider knowledge troubles you the most about how brands manipulate customers? Let’s get to the nitty gritty of this. What are you seeing that’s like a red flag, red flag, red flag?

Mara Einstein:

Yeah. Well, that goes to where I ended up on the last question, which is this idea of anxiety. 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 are living in an anxiety economy because of the way the technology is created, and by and large here, we’re talking about digital technology where people are getting most of their content from its creation in such a way as to get us so ginned up all the time that that anxiety ultimately needs to be released. And it happens in two ways. It happens because of the technology itself 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 are throwing 23 minutes of your life away. 

 

Mara Einstein:

So think about that every time you pick up your phone. 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, 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 brass tax 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 solving. 

 

Mara Einstein:

I have a ring around the collar, I’m going to go buy a whisk and get rid of my ring around the collar. It’s as simple as that, right? And it works. It’s the same way now, but 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 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. You’ll buy a product and remember that all of the content that exists online exists to sell advertising. All of this is to sell to us.

 

Amy Vaughan:

Yeah, I think that’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. I think over the last few years, as much as I am a creator of content and still a marketer for my businesses, I really try to spend less time 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. 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 you started to get to this and we’ll probably get to it more here soon, but that danger of the echo chamber and the algorithms knowing what you need to see or want to see. And so that confirmation bias, the comparison trap, it’s so many pitfalls. Let’s talk a little bit too about that Netflix documentary by now. Was there any particular reaction that surprised you the most from the viewers that people that you’ve talked to maybe that have watched it after they saw how this whole shopping cycle conspiracy really works?

Mara Einstein:

Yeah. Well, one of the great things that happened was that I’ve been teaching for 26 years, and I had former students from around the world from as far away as Singapore, contact me, say, oh my God, my professor was in the documentary. So that part of it was really wonderful. A lot of what the reaction was was pausing and realizing how much stuff people buy. And there were a lot of people probably saw after the documentary came out, people doing halls of just clothes, bags of clothes, bags of stuff that they took out of their houses and that they were 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 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, and Marin, I think her name was the one who worked for Amazon, and she talked about exactly how Amazon work their UX to get you to buy more and more and more and more buy, and not just them, obviously Sheen and Temu and all of them do that kind of stuff. And it’s really interesting that you mentioned this because remember, this came out just before Black Friday Last year, right?

Amy Vaughan:

Perfect timing.

Mara Einstein:

And so 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. I got nothing from this. You watch it, you want to watch it, but it’s a good reminder for people and especially as we’re heading into the economic blackout, the mass blackout, if that’s really going to happen. And I’ll be curious to see how effective it is. But on the one hand, I think it will be in the sense that people have gotten used to boycotting, they got used to boycotting targets, they got used to boycotting Tesla, they got used to, so they’ve gotten some habits built in terms of that. But also people are out of jobs, the government shutdown still going on. People are worried about their health insurance going up. And so all of those things can contribute to it. But In relation to the last question, 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 stuff on it for Christmas, and 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 going to be your new best friend for that week or a book or a cd. My daughter just got me a turntable, so I’m going to be listening to records.

Amy Vaughan:

That’s fantastic. Yeah, no, it’s so pervasive. It is everywhere. But I think you can make conscious choices, like you said, and where and where and how you spend your time. Even me saying just deciding to put down my phone instead of doom scrolling as a form of Way To unwind, that’s not unwinding, that’s winding me up. And I think another thing I’ve learned over the years is understanding the hedonic adaptation, which I think we’ve talked about on the podcast in the past, which is essentially material things will only get us so far. It is a quick hit of dopamine, which does not last within the body like serotonin. Whereas a nice walk on a beautiful day, a conversation with a friend, something more meaningful, more deep that actually lasts within the body, whereas head out on adaptation, the more we get, the more we want. And it just shows, right? There’s been studies and research on it for decades, and I think that sometimes we forget that these are just inherent byproducts of being human and they’re easy traps to fall within. But I think being aware of them and being mindful of them, it’s not just about, it’s yes, you’re going to save money, but also you’re probably going to be happier and still somehow spending less money.

Mara Einstein:

And also if you do have concerns about making money, it also means you don’t have to make as much money. Exactly. So it all becomes 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, and not buy something from looking in your closet and see how many things you have in your closet that still have a tag on them that you never wore. I think we’ve all gone through a period of time when that happens and look, we’re human. And what I like to say to people is, it’s not a terrible thing to buy. It’s a terrible thing to buy too much Or To buy things you don’t really need

Amy Vaughan:

And to waste a hundred percent. So here’s the rub, right? So a lot of us listening myself included work in marketing and some of those who are listening have struggled with ethical boundaries, and what do those look like? What do those need to be? How do you distinguish between effective marketing and what’s convincing as manipulation?

Mara Einstein:

Well, what I always like to say to people is I don’t dislike marketing. If somebody does some amazing marketing campaign, I’m like the first one to say, good on you. That’s really smart. So something like the first thing that popped up to me was Duolingo Duolingo first. Their stuff online was really great. Then they started doing it, not so great, but where they were before that was they did 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 and go to a Charlie XEX 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 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 pay for.

Mara Einstein:

So those kinds of things that tap into what is culturally popular, connect your brand to something that is already going on and people are already engaged with. I mean, that was just kind of brilliant stuff. The thing if we’re going to talk about brand cults, and the thing to stay away from with that is there was a time in the early two thousands when we talked about brand community, and that was things that brands did to bring people together around the brand, and that was fine. It’s when you jump from the brand community to the brand cults, 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 Elon Musk, that’s when you’re getting into dangerous cult territory, and that’s something you want to avoid.

Amy Vaughan:

Right, right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There was something I was going to say, and then it left my brain because 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. I was just listening and like, ah. But yeah, brands using cult tactics. Oh, I remember what mine was. I was going to mention Patagonia because I think that they’re really good because they have values as a brand, and then they use those to actually just live the brand versus forcing you to what to consume. So one of their Black Friday things was go outside, they sell outdoor stuff and they closed 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 the day off and we’re going to spend the day outside. You should do it. To me, that’s more living the brand and living in your values than being a cult. On the flip side of

Mara Einstein:

Go ahead. The other example I would give for that is Lush Cosmetics.

Amy Vaughan:

Yes.

Mara Einstein:

Right after Francis Haugen, who was the Facebook whistleblower, talked about how bad Instagram was on their webpage, they put up somewhere else because they knew that’s who their target audience was, and three years later they’re still not there. They have something up that says what the Zuck and all kinds of Right. I love, and then all kinds of information and statistics about how bad social media is, particularly for young girls, teen girls.

Amy Vaughan:

Yeah. Lash has been a brand I’ve been a fan of for probably 15 years, and it’s like, I love that they’re still going strong and despite social media and not having it, I think that’s a great example. On the flip side, could you walk us through maybe a specific brand that exemplifies this in maybe a breakdown of their playbook?

Mara Einstein:

Oh, somebody that’s a brand cult, the one that you can always talk about is Apple. I mean, they sort of exemplify all of this, but you’re talking about brands. If I talk about it more broadly, one of the first steps in the brand recruitment process is to find vulnerable people. Oh, you know what? Let me use a weight loss example. This may be one that would be good because the next book I’m working on is titled The Cult of Thin. And so I’m taking this and applying it to the diet and fitness and weight loss Industry. 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 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, you create the problem so you can provide the solution. There’s the problem with that, and then you recruit people with deception. So diets, the statistic is 94 to 98% of diets fail, and it’s depending on whose statistics to use as much as 160 billion a year annual business. So you are telling people that you come in and you will pay us money, and then you will lose weight. But what we won’t tell you is that even if you lose the weight, you’re not going to keep it off.

Mara Einstein:

So they’ve lured them in with deception. Then of course, you upsell. So if you’re something like Weight Watchers, 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 food. So it’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 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. Then you go to see the leader every week and the leader says, oh, I remember Mara, you talked about the fact that you are an emotional eater, and every time you get into a fight with your friend, this is what happens. So if you just stuck with the program, you’d be okay. So those texts, this is straight out cold tactics, one for one, sensory deprivation and meditation. That doesn’t happen so much except that they’re telling you exactly what you can eat And

Mara Einstein:

What you can’t eat. Renouncing those who question, oh, this doesn’t happen so much on something that’s more mainstream like Weight Watchers, but could happen on something like CrossFit where they tell people you should work out until you throw up. Some of your family might say, that’s probably not really good for you, but if you’ve gotten into the cult of CrossFit, you’re going to say, no, no, no, you don’t understand. You don’t understand.

Mara Einstein:

And then the last part of it is the second to last part is to introduce the core beliefs. So if you become a core member of Weight Watchers, you become a lifetime member. 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. So once you’ve bought into Apple, yeah, try to leave that cult. But Weight Watchers too is like, no, you should stay. You should stay. And for me, I mean the first time I went on Weight Watchers, I was 13 years old, and so I was doing it up until my early fifties and I was going through menopause, and I had been working the program as I had done for 40 years. And I said, I went to the leader and I said, what’s the deal? And she said, oh, I told her I was going through menopause. She said, this won’t work for you. I was really, she said, the choir part out loud, this won’t work for you. And What’s really interesting is that Weight Watchers has now come out with a plan specifically for women going through menopause.

Amy Vaughan:

Yeah.

Mara Einstein:

Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise. So that’s a preview for the next book, but anyway, but it’s just such a perfect, and if you want to talk about cult leaders also, obviously an aspect of this, If You’ve been on any kind of diet, you don’t need an external cult leader or you have an internal cult leader, how many points you’re allowed to eat.

Amy Vaughan:

Oh my gosh, you’re right. Yikes. The point. Yikes.

 

Mara Einstein:

Yikes,

Amy Vaughan:

The pause coming from inside the house, weight watcher people,

Mara Einstein:

And it’s not just Weight Watchers, they’re just a really key example of how all this stuff works.

Amy Vaughan:

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Not to pick on ’em for those it’s worked for, but you’re so right. There’s all those control mechanisms that are in place. Even as you’re talking, you see the parallels. And Scientology is another really well known

Mara Einstein:

Cult. Yeah, Scientology, they follow you after you leave. And the other thing is too, whether you’re talking about a cult or you’re talking about multi-level marketing companies are really key to that. And they’re exactly the same thing as we discussed earlier, part of it is making it really hard to leave. 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 and I will be successful at this. And then when you finally realize, no, I am not and I can’t, and you’ve extricated yourself from everybody in your life, then you have to go back to them. And that’s really hard. It’s also why people go from cult to cult to Cult or MLM to m, LM to MLM because they think, oh, it’s not the MLM, it’s that ML, M, But if I try the other m, LM, then I’ll be successful. Same thing with weight loss. Oh, it was just Jenny Craig who went out of business.

Amy Vaughan:

That’s so true. Right?

Mara Einstein:

Try one more and then it’ll work for me.

Amy Vaughan:

Hopping from one to the next versus alliance. And so true. All right. So yeah, I mean 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 tribalism. How has digital marketing accelerated those kinds of cult-like dynamics that we’re seeing? You alluded to some of them before. Yeah,

Mara Einstein:

So I’ve been studying the intersection of religion and marketing for 30 years, and so I’ve seen all these sorts of transitions. So my first book specifically talking about this topic was called Brands of Faith, marketing, religion, and Commercial Age. And the way that I started the book was talking about Mel Gibson’s crucifixion of Christ or whatever the name of that book was, and the movie was, and one of the things that they did back then was Mel Gibson would create a phone call that he would then send out to all these pastors. So the pastors got a phone call from Mel Gibson. They did those kinds of marketing things and what’s often done in terms of books and movies that 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 they have the person come speak at the congregation, they buy all the books for them and all of that kind of stuff.

Mara Einstein:

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, 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, they were as isolated as they could possibly be, or the branch Ians down in Waco, Texas or Rajni up in Oregon, they were separated. And 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 cults. 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 a group, everybody pounces on them and says, no, you’re wrong. And so that person doesn’t come back again. So we don’t have this interaction with other people who don’t agree with us in those online spaces. And this happens whether we’re talking about, it certainly happens in terms of politics,

Mara Einstein:

But it can happen 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 an intro to media studies, I had them create a fake Gmail account. I didn’t want them to get flooded and then to create a fake count on what was then Twitter, but be completely opposite from the person you are. So start following someone who is, if you are liberal, follow someone who’s really conservative and if you’re comfortable engaged with it. But if you don’t feel comfort, because sometimes people don’t, they begin 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 kinds of information and content that was being sent to them. And now with ai, I don’t even want to think about it

Amy Vaughan:

Frankly. I understand that. I understand that. Well, I think that’s why, that’s the beauty of 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, a hundred percent taking in what’s happening on the other side. I have some friends who are very, very good at 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 stuff that’ll be flat out racist and they’re black. It’s like, how can you, I don’t know, they’re stronger than me,

Mara Einstein:

But it’s a good exercise to do. Once in a while, there’s a book called The Wrong Way Home, and it’s written by a psychiatrist, psychiatry professor about cults, and he wrote it in the nineties and it was right after Waco had happened, and he talks at the end about seeing people face to face and walking in another person’s shoes. And we do that so rarely now, and again, it’s not necessarily to agree with them, BuTo 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, Zoran Ma Dani’s campaign in New York. That was brilliant. And the reason why it was so smart, I mean just looking at dissertations on what this campaign did, but the fact that he had Gaze for Mom, Donny and Jews for Mom, Donny and Hot Girls for Mom Donny. And there was niche after niche after niche after niche, but they were all in support of him. So what the marketing group did is play on the fact that we are so separated, but in fact we can come together behind somebody who is willing to make all of our lives better. Mind blowing. So good.

Amy Vaughan:

So very good. A hundred percent. Yeah, definitely look it up if you haven’t 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 if we aren’t willing to slow down and try to have some understanding, again, not making excuses, but just holding space to understand one another. We have a whole lot less to fear than what we realize. And again, all those mechanisms are in place to give us 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. There’s so much about, there’s a big role that identity plays in making us vulnerable in brand manipulation, especially online. How would you start to dive into that and help our listeners start to understand and even recognize how that could be a bit of a pitfall for us? Yeah.

Mara Einstein:

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. So if you belong to a faith, what church you went to or what synagogue or what mosque you went to was a defining factor of who you are. But early in the 1970s, people were starting to change religion. And that’s happened because in large part, the Immigration Act of 19 65, 19 65 allowed more 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 ways they never had before, and you had all these cults and you had the Beatles hanging out with the Maharishi. And so people started thinking of religion as much more fluid than it had been before. Same thing, true with your jobs. People would work for IBM for 30 years.

 

Mara Einstein:

I know people at MTV networks that are still there after 40 years, but 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. 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. 

 

Mara Einstein:

Now some are fleeting. Like a month ago we were talking about the booboos, and I’m like not hearing any, I’m not saying anything about Booboos anymore, talk to my kids. That’s different, but we’re talking about things like Apple and we are talking about the car you drive, particularly if you live in Los Angeles or something, the car you drive becomes very important about saying who you are. 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, but if I pull out Tom Ford lipstick, somebody knows that I paid way too much money to put color on my list. Right.

Amy Vaughan:

Girls got a healthy makeup budget. Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. I can see that for sure.

Mara Einstein:

And then we get talking about the lipstick effect, right? So yes. Right, because we’re going to see a lot of that now, which is 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 money on things like lipstick so they can feel better about themselves.

Amy Vaughan:

It is so true. Right? Charles Revlon, one of the quotes I always will remember is women don’t buy lipstick, they buy hope.

Mara Einstein:

And David, my favorite David Ogilvy is The consumer isn’t stupid, she’s your wife. Yeah, I love that one. That one. Yeah. And that’s obviously from a different time period, but you get the idea.

Amy Vaughan:

Exactly, exactly. Classic stuff there. Alright, so for marketers who want to be more ethical and yet effective, 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 be more aware of this and do better

Mara Einstein:

That it’s fine to create a brand community, but be careful that you’re not pivoting into a brand cult. And the key thing that gets you into a brand cult, we talk about in and out groups, so Coke versus Pepsi, that’s okay. Nobody’s going to get hurt if you’re cult versus Pepsi, but when you get into the idea of introducing a cult leader into the use of your brand, that’s when things start to get a little rocky. Okay, look, some people really like being Harley Davidson writers, right? That’s been a brand cult for a long time. That’s been one of the OGs in the cult brand, cult area, but I don’t think anybody thinks that there’s a leader. It’s that people like this brand Harley do or die, and that’s not going to hurt anybody. When you get into, and people may have seen this, the documentary on HBO Max Brandy Ville, which was about Brandy Melville and Brandy Melville, and I hadn’t known about that brand at all because my daughter is Gen Z, so they’d be popular I think a little bit before her. And even if you go to their website now, it’s horrifying. 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.

Mara Einstein:

Not only that, they cut their heads off and only show their body, which is also very dehumanizing and 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 plays into that whole cult aspect. And then in 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, telling people what to wear, what to eat, who to sleep with, all that kind of stuff. All of that is cult activity stuff. One should be avoided

Amy Vaughan:

A hundred percent. And the one that stuck with me too is you making it hard to leave, making it hard to leave as a brand, as a company, as a community, whatever that is, are you allowing people to say, my time here is done, I’m going to move on trying to not do that? To me, that’s also very scary.

Mara Einstein:

I mean, a good positive one is Nutella, people love Nutella and World Nutella Day was actually created by fans. It wasn’t created by the company. And so you have that organic love of a brand that’s love and

Amy Vaughan:

Appreciation for it. Yeah, I agree. I got to work on Pringles way back in the day before Pay to play API on social, and that 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

Mara Einstein:

Oh, Fun.

Amy Vaughan:

We were always so creative with the cans and how they used them after it was really delightful. It was very delightful. 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 as, and I think there’s something,

Mara Einstein:

Yeah, I think there’s also something about providing opportunities for people to engage with each other, but not doing it in a way so to the brand. Maybe you’re doing, I don’t know, I’m making this up off the top of my head, so maybe you’re doing something like get together with three of your friends and come up with your favorite logo creation or something versus create the back of your cell phone case, and if you post it, then maybe we’ll give you something, a $50 gift card. So I’m like, no, find a way to make this really useful to your consumer. Yes,

Amy Vaughan:

Exactly. Give them a reason. Like you even said the Harley example is a good one. They build community often, their love of bikes and riding. That’s really what it’s about. It’s about the enjoyment of the togetherness and the connection, the community. It’s not just about the product itself. That makes a lot of sense. Alright, 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?

Mara Einstein:

I think a lot of it has to do with what we’ve talked about. The digital space really changed everything, and 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 going to happen in terms of going to ultimately be the downfall of social media, which is when people begin to realize that they’re not engaging with other people, the love of the space, right? Yeah, absolutely. I’ve met a lot of people, some of whom have actually met offline and become friends with, but when you start to realize, oh, this person who is fomenting hate in this space, oh, that’s actually a bot. Why do I need to be engaging with that anymore? I think that’s what’s been really horrible in terms of the deception, I think that something like the hashtag TikTok made me buy it, 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 13 times. And so because our media space is so fragmented that 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 that’s part of the issue. The other part of the issue is the collapse of the marketing funnel. 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, is to take that time and take a breath and say, you know what? Maybe I don’t have 150 bucks to spare to spend on a pair of jeans.

Mara Einstein:

And you would’ve had the time because you would’ve actually had to go to the store and spend that time and do it. But the technology is created. The whole idea, Daniel Conneman’s idea of thinking fast and slow is that thinking slow is taking the time really being considered about what you do and thinking fast isn’t thinking. It’s about 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 the increased use of sensory marketing, And Particularly all factory senses, which are the most powerful. And so 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

Amy Vaughan:

Or popcorn or Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. Cinnamon Cinnabon every month. Right. That’s so hard. That’s so possible. A hundred percent. It’s so true. It’s so true. This has been so awesome and amazing, and I think this whole conversation, 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 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 hyper individualism, hyper capitalism, like the space of the rear, literally, and right now as a society within the United States specifically. So yeah, we could go on and on, but we’re coming close to time, so I’m going to take a minute and let our live listening audience know that you again have some opportunities to ask some questions. They’re all in an existential crisis right now, though. I can feel it if they’re with me. Jump into the live chat, make sure you have your question there. If you’d like Mera, if they would like to reach out to you, connect with you. Where’s the best place to find you in your work?

Mara Einstein:

My website is dr mara einstein.com. It’s DR Mara Einstein, M-A-R-A-E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N. I’m on TikTok. It’s my primary social network, but I’m also on Instagram, YouTube, and Threads. Most of the stuff on Instagram and YouTube is repurposed from TikTok. I also have a Substack, which I never talk about. Yay. Only because I do a newsletter 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 in my social media spaces and turn it into written content for people. Wonderful.

 

Amy Vaughan:

Okay. Fantastic. That’s good. I’m not sure if you’re going to have some new followers here soon, and then I’m going to go ahead and switch to our fun little quick hit power round questions, a few questions from the audience. We’ll get to those right before we sign off. Alright. What is the most cult-like brand you see right now? Can you name one other than the ones we’ve named already?

Mara Einstein:

The most cult? Because you’re going to talk about the worst. Is this the worst question? You’re, what I think of as the most cult-like thing going on right now is crypto, and that’s probably not one that people think about very often, and particularly when you’re talking about multi-level marketing for women’s products tend to be hair care and weight loss and supplements and that, but for men, it’s financial instruments and in particular crypto, and it’s the people at the top that make the money and the people that bother ’em that don’t. And if you read anything about Trump’s coin right now, a handful of people made money and everybody else lost a bucket. So I would say crypto.

Amy Vaughan:

Yeah, crypto is a good one. I would say also I feel like gambling is falling into that because the gambling’s 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.

Mara Einstein:

Yeah, a couple of my students wrote papers about the betting apps and they were scholar athletes and they’re really not happy about it. They’re really not happy about it.

Amy Vaughan:

Imagine, and I hope more athletes start to speak up about it. Maybe that might change the mindset and shift the paradigm.

Mara Einstein:

Yeah,

Amy Vaughan:

We’re almost there. All right, cool. All right. One marketing task tick that you wish was illegal. If you could just make that call, what would it be?

Mara Einstein:

I’m going to pivot that slightly and say what I would love to see is the elimination of section two 30. Section two 30 is the part of the communications code that says that online platforms are not responsible for the content that appears on the platform. And so Facebook always says, 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 platform.

 

Amy Vaughan:

Fantastic answer. I love it. That’s a good pivot. All right. Finish the sentence, you’re in a brand brand call, not your brand call. You’re in a brand cult when

Mara Einstein:

You cannot leave.

Amy Vaughan:

Right.

Mara Einstein:

If it becomes impossible for you to say to yourself, I can’t buy this product. I want to walk away from this group, but if I walk away, I lose too much stuff, then Yeah, That’s The key. You can’t walk away.

Amy Vaughan:

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 we’re all consumers. What is the best mental defense against manipulative marketing?

Mara Einstein:

I think the best, we’ve talked a couple of times about vulnerability and being vulnerable, and you want to do a gut check about how you’re feeling about yourself before you pick up your phone. Because the thing is, 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 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 at the end of the day, when you’re really tired, it’s probably the last time that you want to do it. I would just say to just be more intentional, and I think the statistic now is we pick up our phone 150 times a day. Yeah. Find times of the day where you can be away from your phone, stick it in another room, don’t plug it in by your bed. Right? All those simply, 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.

Amy Vaughan:

No, exactly. 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 find my phone. That’s the only feature I use on my watch at the time is to find my phone.

 

Mara Einstein:

I can’t tell people not to use the phone because it’s like, when was the last time you made a phone call on your phone? Yeah, you can get rid of apps, but get of apps. If you need to call an Uber or a Lyft or whatever it is, then you need to have the phone Or People send you calendar updates, and so you need that.

Amy Vaughan:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been amazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Mayor, 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. Your insights are reminding us that as digital professionals, we both have the power and responsibility to shape marketing that 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. It’s the first step to doing more ethical marketing and by creating that awareness, so definitely check out her book Could Winked Catcher on Netflix, the Buy Now Shopping Conspiracy, so 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 in our podcast, wherever you happen to stream and listen, we hope to see you all next week, everyone. Until then, keep asking and keep giving and keep growing. We hope to see you soon. Bye everybody.

Mara Einstein:

Bye now. Thank you.