Hoodwinked: How Cult Marketing Tactics Left Us Anxious, Broke, and Conned

Big brands are the gods of today’s world, and the algorithm is their gospel. What makes the cult marketing vortex so attractive to otherwise smart people, and how does online manipulation render us victim to the dangerous whims of digital companies, corporations, and conglomerates? Hoodwinked reveals the new world of digital marketing where steady, seductive tactics once used by spiritual charlatans are now applied to sell everything from toothpaste to apps and even political leaders.

Companies have discovered that us consumers are lured by sophisticated and deceptive marketing techniques, like sensory marketing, cult branding, influencers, and AI programmed to induce maximum anxiety. Combined with behavior-modifying apps and persuasively designed UX that compels us to buy things we don’t need or cannot afford, goods and services like prestige education, fitness trackers, makeup, and those viral leggings from American Eagle seem like must-haves rather than luxury extras. Aided by algorithms and buoyed by the greed of social media CEOs, marketers use the same deceptive and emotionally manipulative tactics that cults do, including scarcity, an all-encompassing ideology, and a charismatic leader. Once indoctrinated, consumer-followers become ensnared in the perfect capitalist loop: anxiety-purchase-anxiety-purchase-anxiety-purchase. Then, social media appearances reinforce the cycle of purchase, performance, and panic.

Using memorable real-life cautionary tales, Dr. Einstein narrates how smart, sensible people are sucked into the cult marketing vortex and, importantly, what enables them to get out. Protection comes from understanding the scope of the problem and knowing how to spot the many pervasive tactics used. Combining industry interviews, advertising campaign analysis, and business and scholarly research, Hoodwinked offers an insider’s view into how marketers co-opt our emotions in the name of corporate profits. Armed with this information, readers can learn to spot cult-inspired marketing so they can decide how, or if, they should engage with it.

Dr. Mara Einstein is a powerhouse marketing critic. After working for a decade in corporate marketing for some of the biggest names in the business (hello, MTV), she left to become an academic. . She is a tenured professor and former chair in the department of media studies at Queens College (CUNY). . She is a tenured professor and former chair in the department of media studies at Queens College (CUNY).

Mara will be featured in a Netflix documentary on greenwashing being produced by Grain Media. Principal shooting is in March 2023 and the film will start streaming in 2024. Mara is regularly quoted in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and The Wall Street Journal, among many others, and has appeared on HuffPost Live, The Brian Lehrer Show, NPR’s Marketplace (multiple times) and popular podcasts, such as The Majority Report with Sam Seder. She has also written for Advertising Age, Harvard Business Review, Newsday, and Fastcoexist, and given talks from Brazil to the UK on topics from marketing religion to social media influencers.

Mara serves as the inaugural chair of the research and academic group of The Impact Guild, which empowers people to use media, technology, and pop culture for social good and healthy democracies. She has served as an expert for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), was named one of 100 Significant Women in Native Advertising by the Native Advertising Association, and is an Emmy-voting member of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Locally, she is on the board of the Kew Gardens Civic Association, fighting against building new jails and for the MTA to support local businesses.

Dr. Einstein (and, yes, she is distantly related) holds a PhD in Media Ecology from New York University, an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.