Marketing: A Wonderful Tool That Has Too Often Been Badly Used

Making the case for a different logic: marketing that helps people recognise the value already in their lives, rather than manufacturing a lack to sell against it. And, as it turns out, one that businesses have good reason to believe in too.

Marketing, at its root, is an act of translation. It takes something of value - an idea, a service, a way of living - and finds the words, images, and moments that let another person recognise: this is for me. This could help. Done honestly, it is one of the most generous crafts there is. It listens before it speaks. It asks what someone actually needs, not what can be extracted from them.

But somewhere along the way, a large part of the industry stopped asking that question and started asking a different one: not “what does this person need?” but “what does this person lack, and how can I make them feel that lack more sharply?”

That is not a small shift. It is the difference between a craft and a weapon.

We have all felt it. The advert that doesn't sell a product so much as sell a wound - you are not thin enough, not young enough, not successful enough, not loved enough - and then, conveniently, offers the cream. The scroll of ordinary life engineered to feel deficient by comparison. The scarcity countdown timer with no scarcity behind it. None of these techniques are new; what's changed is the precision. We now have the data to find exactly where a person is frail, and the reach to press on it a thousand times a day.

This is marketing turned against the very people it should serve - using real skill, real insight into human psychology, and pointing it at appetite rather than need. Over-consumption isn't an accident of good marketing; too often it is the intended outcome of it. The planet pays for it. So do the people whose sense of enough has been quietly, deliberately eroded.

It didn't have to go this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way.

Here is what's easy to miss: even the more honest alternative to exploitative marketing still tends to sell you something. Meet the real need, not the manufactured one - but still point outward, still add something. There is a further step, and it is the one worth taking. The best use of this craft isn't convincing someone they need more. It's helping them notice what they already have.

Coercive marketing runs on a simple logic: you lack, therefore acquire. It manufactures a gap and sells the bridge. But there's a different logic available, built from the same materials - story, image, attention, timing - pointed the other way: you have, therefore attend. The best marketing for a garden isn't convincing its owner they need a bigger one. It's helping them actually see the one they're standing in - the particular life in it, the years it took to grow, the fact that they walk past it half-noticing most days. That is not a lesser use of persuasion. It is a harder one, because it asks the marketer to hold back rather than push, to illuminate rather than provoke.

The same skill that can locate someone's insecurity can locate someone's real need and meet it plainly. But further still, the same attention that studies human frailty could study human sufficiency instead – rather than ask "what's missing?" we could rephrase to "what's here that deserves more care than it's getting?" A message built on that question doesn't manufacture desire. It restores attention. And attention, freely given to what's already precious, looks a great deal more like gratitude than like a sale.

So here is the bid we're making: that you can build something - a message, an offer, a brand - that respects the person on the other end of it enough to tell them the truth, including the truth that they may already have more than they've been letting themselves see. That measures success not by how effectively it exploited a weak moment, but by how honestly it pointed someone back toward what was theirs all along.

But does it pay?

This is the question every business owner is actually asking when they open their marketing budget, and it deserves a straight answer rather than an appeal to conscience alone. Because the honest case for this approach isn't only moral. It's practical, and arguably much more durable than the alternative.

Coercive marketing is a rented asset. Manufactured urgency works until the audience gets used to it, at which point it takes more noise, more pressure, and more spend to produce the same result - a treadmill that only ever accelerates. Marketing built on genuine attention earns something that doesn't behave the same way: the customer's trust in their own judgement, now tied to your name. Strengthening all, not weakening.

Coerced purchases carry a cost most dashboards never show. A customer who bought because they were made to feel lacking often finds, afterwards, that the purchase didn't touch the lack - because it couldn't - and the business meets that disappointment eventually, as a return, a cancellation, a quiet loss of trust. A customer who bought because they clearly understood their own need rarely produces that same come-down. Less regret is less cost, even when it never appears on a balance sheet.

And in a market where nearly every competitor is reaching for the same scarcity language, calm honesty stops being a naive choice and becomes a genuine point of difference. A business willing to help people see clearly, rather than feel lesser, stands out precisely because so few others are doing it.

It also happens to be sharper targeting. A person helped to notice what they already value has, in effect, just told you what they'll actually pay for - a more accurate signal than any manufactured urgency could produce. Businesses that ask "what does this person already care about?" instead of "what can I make them feel they lack?" tend to find they are speaking to buyers who convert with less friction and stay longer, because the fit was real rather than engineered.

So the question “what can this do for me, for that money?” has not been answered incorrectly because businesses are too demanding of their marketing. It has been answered incorrectly because almost an entire industry treated persuasion and honesty as opposites, when they were never required to be. Coercion is a short-term extraction strategy that must keep escalating to keep working. Attention, done well, is a long-term trust strategy that compounds.

Marketing doesn't have to make people feel smaller so a product can feel bigger. It can do something closer to the opposite: help people see clearly enough to recognise what they already hold - the people, the places, the ordinary practices - genuinely worth their care and their joy, without needing to acquire a single thing more to feel it. And a business built on that kind of honesty tends, in the end, to be a business people choose to stay with.

That's not a compromise on effectiveness. It's a different definition of what effective was always meant to mean.

On using the tools we have ... better – Richard Maddrell - September 2026.