Professor Mara Einstein was at South by Southwest 2025 to discuss her latest book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. In the Is Everything a Cult? panel, Einstein explained how social media and digital technologies are making us vulnerable to the tactics of marketers, and why industry actors are incentivized to use these approaches in the name of grabbing our attention.
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Einstein is a former television and advertising executive who now spends her time as an industry critic working toward both encouraging more responsible marketing practices and to give consumers better tools as they navigate our increasingly digital society. And she started the panel by addressing the elephant in the room: The theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. “Am I related?” she asked on the audience’s behalf. “Yes, I am.”
But Einstein isn’t at South by Southwest to discuss a famous distant relative. She’s a former advertising executive who has worked for MTV, Miller Beer, and more. So she comes to this discussion with a combination of experience from her work in the field as well as her work in academia. For the past 20 years, Einstein has studied the intersection of religion and marketing. More recently, she became interested in learning how brands that use the same tactics as cults work, succeed, and then ultimately fail.
How did Einstein get the idea for Hoodwinked?
During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, Einstein was watching TV on the elliptical in her Queens, New York, apartment. After she watched the Vow, the story of the Nxivm cult, and LuLaRich, the documentary on the LuLaRoe multi level marketing scheme, she came to an interesting conclusion. “I went, holy smokes, these are the same things. That cult and this multilevel marketing company are the same thing,” she told the audience.
Einstein soon discovered she wasn’t the first one to figure this out. She reached out to someone she knew involved in both cults and MLMs. If there was a venn diagram of the two worlds what would it look like? “A circle,” the person replied.
That got Einstein thinking about brand communities and brand cults. Is there a framework for understanding how brands and cults work together? Is there a continuum? That is what led to her researching and writing Hoodwinked.
What did Einstein learn about how brand cults work?
Einstein said that the modern consumer wants to connect with stories and ideas. The product itself is secondary. Marketers know this, she said, and therefore they spend their time working to identify who we are, divide us into silos, and then target us with advertising.
As the traditional institutions that once held society together fracture, marketing is filling the gap. “We don’t go to church or synagogue or mosque in the same way we used to,” Einstein said. “That is not to say people are not looking for meaning or spirituality—they’re not looking for them in traditional institutions,” she said.
That leads us to the brand cult., which is a specialized community based on the social connections among the admirers of that brand. These brands tap into our fundamental need as humans to be part of a community. And they do this by following a very deliberate playbook, which Einstein describes in her book.
The brand cult playbook
“Brands are doing two things, I would say,” Einstein said, whether it’s Marlboro cigarettes, Tesla cars, or Apple. “They don’t know if you’ll ever see a commercial again, so they want to make sure that the brand is so important to who you are you don’t ever have to see a commercial again. And the other thing that brands are doing is they’re becoming their own media companies.”
The focus is on vulnerable people who are seeking validation and answers to questions. Impressionable and lonely students are a popular target. “It is the key point where cults can dive in and start to grab people,” she said. “If you’ve recently gone through a divorce. If you’re depressed. All of those things open you up for a cult to come in and provide the answer to all of your problems.”
Groups will often offer free services to draw individuals in and then later upsell them to profit. Another tactic is “lovebombing,” which involves overwhelming amounts of flattery. “I would also say I have an entire chapter in the book called ‘the Cult of Higher Education,’” she said. “If you want to talk about lovebombing teenage kids in order to get them to go to a certain college. It’s cult tactics 101.”
After the cult has identified and lovebombed you, they’ll expose you to “tough love.” During this phase, you’re given certain rules to follow and isolated from friends and family. Then you get introduced to the core belief system. “It’s only after you’ve been pulled so far into the cult that you will then buy into whatever it is that they’re selling,” Einstein said.
Cult tactics vs. marketing funnel
Einstein observed that the tactics followed by these cults are not that different from the marketing funnel that preaches making potential customers aware of the product, consider whether to purchase it, and then ultimately become a “conversion” when they do. The last two rungs of the funnel are loyalty and advocacy.
“What do we call the people who are the most loyal now?” she asked the crowd. “Evangelists. Marketing evangelists.”
That’s where social media comes into play. Brand cults prey on the vulnerable with deceptive tactics. The current advertising creates a system in which most people live in very restricted social media silos and do not interact with people outside of those groups.
“We are siloed in social media for marketing purposes,” Einstein said. “Let us not forget. We have been separated, we have been divided, because they want to sell ads. Because of that, we rarely interact with people who don’t believe what we do. And those recommendations are going to push you toward more extreme content.”
Is there any hope?
Einstein acknowledged that the topic of brand cults is very discouraging. She therefore pivoted at the end to what she sees as signs of hope. At the end of the day, she said, most people tend to get out of cults eventually. Very few end in tragic violence that makes headlines.
And she pointed to the MLM movement as an encouraging step forward. The industry’s detractors are making a dent in the industry and convincing people to abandon it. “The anti-MLM movement has been very successful in starting to hurt the industry and take it down,” she said.
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