This article will explore two industries plagued by predatory marketing practices in an attempt to help readers healthily interact with these industries. Before these analyses, we must first define predatory marketing. The purpose of marketing is to make potential customers want to buy what you have to sell. To do so, advertisements or other outreach methods are used to convince these people that they, for whatever reason, ought to want your product. Yet, what happens when companies spread potentially harmful messages to sell a product? This is predatory marketing, a scheme that attempts to fabricate and exploit insecurities in potential customers for the sake of profit. It manifests itself in many forms, yet it is identifiable with some level of analysis.
Let’s first examine the beauty industry. The beauty industry’s entire basis is selling products that make customers feel more beautiful. To do so, the beauty industry utilizes conventionally attractive models to make customers envious. This creates insecurity about customers’ bodies. Customers might think: why don’t I look like them? Beauty marketers profit from customers feeling insecure about their bodies, as advertisements using models associate their products with conventional beauty. People who feel that they are ugly end up buying products that they believe will make them feel better, yet some people may never look like Victoria’s Secret models, even after buying hundreds of dollars of clothing and skincare products. This would be far more manageable if modern society wasn’t so insistent on bombarding all of its’ (perhaps unfortunate) members with messages like these, that consistently reinforce that you just aren’t good enough, but maybe you could be if you hand over your hard-earned wages. The beauty industry is everywhere. It’s on billboards, websites, and YouTube videos; its messages are imprinted on the psyches of millions of people, who unknowingly go on to spread its gospel of inadequacy and self-loathing. Women, particularly women of color, are the most strongly impacted and are expected to shell out their money for cosmetic products or even surgery just to maintain social status. This is a textbook case of predatory marketing. It is clear-cut but widely ignored. Now, onto the next.
A more deceptive industry is that of self-help. At first glance, it appears to be full of useful advice for people struggling with any aspect of their life. Yet, this industry is far more sinister. Most self-help advice is snake oil and the rest is widely known information that doesn’t demand much attention. Unlike the beauty industry, self-help introduces itself to customers often via YouTube. Content creators make videos that aim to teach people, typically young men, how to better live their lives. One common trope is “hustle”, which refers to the notion that those who aren’t living as well as they’d like to only need to work harder to live a better life. Not only is this incredibly elitist (some people have the hustle more than most ever will just to put food on the table or pay for their higher education), it encourages people to put working hard before their livelihood. Sometimes, “hustling” can be bad for your health, leading to burnout or depression. However, these videos and also books that make up the industry will describe your inability or lack of desire to “hustle” as something fundamentally wrong with you. This is a similar attempt to make consumers insecure about themselves. Self-help diagnoses a nonexistent problem and attempts to sell snake oil or basic mental health advice that can be found on reliable medical sites with a google search as the solution to the problem.
However, this trope is far from the only one. Self-help preys on those who are struggling to find a romantic partner by telling these people that they are doing their love life wrong and providing advice that can often encourage toxic behavior. Beyond all of this, the most harmful trope of self-help is a common falsehood repeated far too often in mental health discourse: that you can simply will yourself to be happy or will yourself into changing your perception of the world in a way that will make you happy. This flat-out doesn’t work. It’s a claim that only delegitimizes people with depressive disorders while doing nothing to resolve the underlying problems that have caused their depression. It’s rather ironic that an industry that encourages insecurity and shame purports to be able to make people happy with a snap of their fingers. While it is true that, to some extent, people can feel better about themselves by using several techniques to encourage gratitude and optimism, these alone will rarely succeed in alleviating depression. It certainly is nowhere near as simple as a mindset shift that so many self-help books seem to encourage. This also reinforces the idea that people with depression are fundamentally broken, due to their inability, or even unwillingness, to just will themselves to be happier. Those who are made to view themselves as somehow inferior due to this are more likely to buy self-help books or supplements of questionable effectiveness, as they are marketed as the solution to people’s mental health ills.
To conclude our little guide, I’d like to note that these two industries are far from the only ones that employ predatory marketing techniques. As consumers, we are all potentially at risk of falling prey to these schemes. With these examples as guides, hopefully, now, you will be able to spot and avoid companies and industries that employ these techniques to manipulate potential customers.
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