Peter Drucker had it right: “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” Yet walk through the digital landscape today and you’ll find an army of so-called “marketers” doing the exact opposite—systematically destroying customer relationships one invasive popup, manipulative email, and fear-mongering ad at a time.
What passes for marketing today would make Drucker roll over in his grave. Instead of creating customers, we’re creating enemies. Instead of building relationships, we’re burning bridges. Instead of solving problems, we’ve become the problem.
Let’s call it what it is: customer abuse wearing a marketing badge.
These aren’t marketers—they’re digital stalkers. They’ve weaponized your inbox, flooding it with “urgent” offers that expire in 24 hours (but somehow get extended every day). They’ve turned email into a battlefield where your attention is the prize and your annoyance is collateral damage.
Real marketing respects people’s time and space. What these practitioners do is the equivalent of following someone around a store, shouting about discounts while they’re trying to shop. It’s not marketing—it’s harassment with a CTA button.
The Fear Merchants
Then there are the marketers who’ve confused terror with persuasion. They’ve built entire campaigns around making people afraid—afraid of missing out, afraid of being left behind, afraid of making the wrong choice. They create problems that don’t exist just to sell solutions nobody needs.
“Your competitors are already using this!” they scream. “You’re falling behind!” they warn. “Act now or face the consequences!” they threaten.
This isn’t marketing—it’s emotional extortion. Real marketing shows people better possibilities. It doesn’t manufacture anxiety to drive sales. It builds long-term, trusted relationships with their customers and prospects. It leaves the tickled pink instead of scare or shaken.
These so-called marketers have studied psychology not to understand their customers better, but to exploit them more efficiently. They’ve turned human behavioural patterns into weapons of mass persuasion. They are doing things TO their customers instead of FOR their customers. One is Repellent Marketing (driving your customer to your competitor) and the other is true marketing, building that trusted relationship.
Dark patterns, fake urgency, deliberately confusing cancellation processes, bait-and-switch tactics—these aren’t marketing techniques. They’re con games with better graphic design.
The Attention Thieves
They’ve hijacked every digital surface, turning websites into slot machines of distraction. Popups that won’t close, autoplay videos that follow you down the page, notifications that ping you into purchasing panic, re-marketing that stalks you around the internet. They’ve confused being noticed with being valuable.
Real marketing earns attention by being useful, interesting, or entertaining. What these practitioners do is steal attention through trickery and annoyance. They’re not marketers—they’re digital pickpockets.
Perhaps worst of all are the marketers who’ve forgotten that customers are human beings, not conversion metrics. They’ve reduced people to data points, segments, and personas—anything but actual individuals with real problems and genuine needs.
They celebrate a 2% conversion rate while ignoring the 98% of people they’ve annoyed, frustrated, or alienated. They optimize for the click, not the customer. They measure success in transactions, not trust.
What Real Marketing Looks Like
Real marketing is about understanding people so well that you can genuinely help them. It’s about building products and services that improve lives, then communicating that value clearly and honestly.
Real marketing respects intelligence, honours choice, and builds long-term relationships. It creates value before asking for value in return.
Real marketing doesn’t need to trick, manipulate, or frighten people into buying. It simply shows them something better and lets them decide.
To the marketers reading this: if your tactics wouldn’t work on your mother, your spouse, or your best friend, they’re not marketing tactics, they’re abuse tactics. If you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of your own campaigns, you’re not creating customers, you’re creating casualties.
The internet is littered with the corpses of brands that confused short-term gains with long-term growth. The customers you trick today will remember tomorrow. The trust you break for a quick conversion will cost you years of loyalty. It’s OK, you can blame it on the recession or Trump’s tariffs but your brand is headed for the graveyard faster than you think.
The Choice
You have a choice: you can continue down the path of digital harassment and call it marketing, or you can return to Drucker’s fundamental truth. You can build something worth buying and tell people about it honestly. You can solve real problems for real people and let them thank you with their business.
The choice is yours. Just don’t call what you’re doing marketing if all you’re really doing is making enemies with better targeting. Know that chases customers away. And if they have a real need, they will go to the competitor that respects them more than you do.
Because creating and keeping customers isn’t about finding new ways to annoy people into buying. It’s about finding new ways to serve people so well that they can’t imagine buying from anyone else.
That’s marketing. Everything else is just noise. And it sure is noisy out there.
