Sarah Levinger explains how marketers can use psychology ethically. The difference: persuasion helps people understand why a brand is better, while manipulation triggers negative emotions to coerce them. She argues for careful, selective tactics that add value to decisions, not harm.
What do you feel is like the really big difference between emotional hooks and then kind of more like manipulative tactics, right? So how do you stay ethical essentially?
Yeah, so I find a lot of brands struggle with this because they think that if I use psychology hacks or psychology tactics, that I'm gonna automatically be manipulating people into doing whatever I want them to do. Which again, we as marketers are here to be persuasive. Like this is growth, this is paid. I work primarily on the paid side. We have to be persuasive. That's a part of the game and that's a part of our business because we have to make money to grow. But on the opposite side of that, I always like to Follow up their question with a question, which is, which psychology tactics are you already using? Which ones do you use that you don't know you're using? I would so much rather be very careful about the psychology that we are aware of and use it very carefully so that we're not activating people in a negative way. Because again, we don't trigger people into feeling negative emotion in ways that would damage them or hurt them in any way, shape, or form. But we do want to be very selective about the psychology tactics that we do use. So ethically speaking, I think it's incredibly important to select your psychology tactics carefully and use them in a way that helps people understand why you are the better option as a brand or as a business, and not use them just to trigger people's emotion and to try and make them feel bad about themselves to force them into a decision. That's the worst way to use this. Selective, very careful. Yeah.
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