Aside from the unfortunate insight that you now have of just how boring I am to meet for coffee; I do so with a very explicit intention, to get people to consider where the boundaries may or may not lie between marketing and manipulation.

Following the initial and audible exclamation of dismay from any marketers in the audience (for which I do apologise), responses come in a variety of different ways, but there are key themes. The first? The most obvious one being legal and the other not. However, the more I have drilled down into this, public perception gets a tad hazy with companies who exhibit anti-consumer business practices and policy, or the quality of the marketing or product they are selling is not quite as advertised. Regardless of the letter of the law and interpretation, that perception and the way social media and technology has altered marketing has certainly blurred this line.

The main response though and the one I am angling for when asking the question, is intention. I want you to click on a link, visit a website, fill in a form, join a community, buy a product, conform to an idea, or simply just… believe me. Whether social engineering, fraud or marketing, the crucial differentiation is the intention of the designer. This, coupled with the ever-increasing ease of creating online content or personas with very little to no grounding in truth; means we are still saturated and exposed to content, products and information that all lie somewhere on a scale of intention, from malicious to genuine.

This is why, from a behavioural perspective, I find it incredibly challenging not to see the escalation of fraud as a symptom of a much larger issue. Dis/misinformation, radicalisation, exploitation, in fact any online-born manipulation, sits on that scale, it is just the intended result that may differ.

The cognitive heuristics or mental shortcuts purposely or inadvertently utilised and influenced in all of them are identical. From authority bias to social proof, from scarcity bias to loss aversion, the list is too long for a blog. Regardless of the flavour of manipulation, though, the key factor is how all these things intertwine with our own emotions.

The phrase I have often heard is that ‘emotions get links clicked’. A cursory online search or a deep dive exploration into marketing academic literature will show that this has been utilised and understood for, well…forever. Loyalty, relatability, nostalgia, happiness, compassion, fear and urgency, the list is endless. All of which are leveraged to get you to take an action based on the intention of the designer. But the action is not just originating from the designer of the content, it is from us. Whether buying a product or believing in something, there is often an emotional need being met, that need does not always have to be an objectively healthy one. Splice this with the rampant emotional subjectivity of our relationship with technology, where we are simultaneously connected, isolated and where our intuition has very little to go on. That connectivity also means that I can influence you to take that action, within a finite emotional window, and keep you there.

As a final thought, you could argue that there is a fine line between fraud and marketing, especially on that scale of intention, but crime prevention is there too. We are competitively marketing against criminality. Creating content to draw attention and to motivate the public to protect themselves, or to take the action needed. The one question I start with though, ‘Why should anyone buy my product?’