Why Marketing Can’t Work in Isolation.

I’ve spent the better part of two decades in marketing. I’ve also spent the last few years researching how digital platforms use manipulation at scale, what it does to people, and why organizations keep doing it despite knowing better. I sit between these two worlds, the practitioner and the researcher, and from where I’m standing, something has become impossible to ignore.

We cannot fix marketing in isolation.

When we started The Ethical Move in 2018, the focus was on manipulative marketing. Countdown timers, false scarcity, guilt-tripping copy, dark patterns designed to override people’s ability to make informed choices. We created a pledge, a badge, a community of people who said: not us. We’re doing this differently.

And that work still matters, but it was always incomplete.

Here’s the thing: our community already knew this. When we read through our pledges, so many of them don’t just talk about marketing. They talk about their values, their business practices, how they treat their teams, how they want to show up in the world. The language of the pledge was about marketing, but the mindset was always bigger. Our community was already there. We’re just catching up.

Because marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It lives inside organizations that have sales targets, growth mandates, investor expectations, hiring practices, product decisions, technology choices. Marketing is the visible layer of a much deeper system. And when that system is built on extraction, manipulation, and the relentless pursuit of more, no amount of ethical copywriting will fix it.

I think about this a lot through the lens of Donella Meadows and leverage points. Meadows taught us that systems resist change when you push at the wrong level. You can tweak the parameters all you want, swap out a dark pattern here, rewrite a landing page there, but if the underlying goals and rules of the system remain the same, the system will keep producing the same outcomes. Ethical marketing inside an unethical organization is a contradiction. It’s pushing at the wrong leverage point.

The real leverage is deeper. It’s in the assumptions an organization holds about growth, about people, about what success looks like. It’s in whether an organization sees the people it serves as autonomous humans or as targets to convert. That distinction runs through everything: how you recruit, how you sell, how you design your product, how you treat your team, how you communicate your impact.

This is also where we have to talk about growth. About capitalism. About consumerism. About the assumptions so deeply embedded in how we do business that we barely notice them anymore. What happens when we stop treating endless growth as the default? When we stop assuming that more users, more conversions, more revenue is always the goal? A lot of manipulation exists because organizations are trapped in growth logic that demands it. Scarcity tactics exist because someone needs the numbers to go up this quarter. Misleading job listings exist because someone needs to fill seats fast. Dark patterns in tech exist because engagement metrics drive funding. These aren’t isolated bad decisions but symptoms of a system that rewards extraction over everything else.

And the world around us is making this worse, not better. We are living through a period where trust in what we see, hear, and read is eroding fast. AI is generating content at a scale that makes it harder to distinguish what’s real. Political institutions are fracturing. Disinformation is not a side effect of our information ecosystem, it’s a feature. The tools of manipulation are getting cheaper, faster, and more sophisticated every day.

In this context, transparency, honesty, and respect in how organizations communicate with people is not a nice-to-have. It’s urgent. And it can’t stop at marketing.

This is why we’ve expanded The Ethical Move’s scope. We are now the movement for ethical organizations, because the manipulation we originally set out to fight in marketing is the same manipulation that shows up in sales, in recruitment, in product design, in technology, in every interaction where an organization has something to gain from bypassing people’s ability to choose freely.

Our pledge stays at the core. It always will. But it needs to reflect this reality: that ethical marketing without ethical sales, ethical hiring, ethical technology, and ethical leadership is just a better-looking façade on the same broken system.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m a researcher, a practitioner, a person who has been thinking about this for a long time and still finds new questions every day. But I know this: we started The Ethical Move because we believed that how we sell matters. We still believe that. We also believe that how we sell is connected to how we do everything else. And if we’re serious about changing the way organizations treat people, we have to be willing to look at the whole system.

This is the work. It’s bigger than marketing. It always was.