Manipulative Advertising: 6 Dirty Tricks and Examples

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "Start With Why" by Simon Sinek. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.

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All businesses need to motivate customers to do something, whether that’s buying a product or a service. Does manipulative advertising work? What are the most common strategies of manipulative advertising? If you’re a buyer, how do you spot them? If you’re a seller, should you use them?

We’ll cover the six most common manipulative advertising tactics. We’ll look at their pros and cons and discuss whether they actually work, or if there’s a more effective way to advertise.

• Originally Published: February 1, 2020
• Last Updated: January 21, 2026

Two Types of Advertising

There are two ways we can motivate people to act: manipulative advertising and inspirational advertising. 

• Manipulations use outside influences to get people to buy a product or service. They use the “carrots and sticks” model of behavior reinforcement. While manipulations may produce short-term gains, they don’t create long-term loyalty. This is the WHAT of business strategies.
• Inspiration causes a person to act from internal will, not from outside influence. Commonly, these people are inspired by a company’s WHY. Inspirations encourage loyalty, and loyalty leads to repeat business. This is the WHY of business strategies.

Don’t Start With WHAT

Simon Sinek says that, unfortunately, most companies don’t start with WHY; they start with WHAT. As the most superficial part of a business, WHAT is the easiest to identify and communicate to potential customers. 

This is why so much messaging centers around things like product features, product popularity, and how successful the company is: The company is trying to convince potential customers that WHAT they’re selling is good. However, even if everything the company says is true, such statements aren’t inspirational, and this approach will ultimately fail.

(Shortform note: Sinek says your WHAT won’t inspire people to buy from you without a strong WHY, but other marketing experts disagree. In Purple Cow, Seth Godin argues that products can succeed on their own, but only if they’re remarkable enough to catch people’s attention. To be truly remarkable, a product must be both unique enough to stand out from the crowd and practical enough that people want to buy it. For example, the Volkswagen Beetle’s unique design got a lot of people talking about it (both positively and negatively). That talk served as free advertising, which, combined with the car’s reliability, led directly to the Beetle’s success.)

WHAT Relies on Manipulation, Not Inspiration

When companies lack a WHY to inspire their customers, they must instead turn to what Sinek calls manipulations to sell their products. Manipulations are tactics that artificially influence customers to buy from your company or use its services. Some examples include pricing, promotions, fears, aspirations, peer pressure, and novelty.

Sinek adds that manipulations do work, but only in the short term—none of these methods will create loyal repeat customers. Therefore, WHAT-focused companies have to constantly manipulate people into buying their products just to stay in business. Furthermore, it’s inevitable that such a company will eventually use the wrong tactic or that customers will start to see through its phony messaging. When that happens, sales will dry up, and the business will collapse.

(Shortform note: Sinek says manipulations aren’t effective, but some research suggests just the opposite: Manipulative marketing is so effective (and pervasive) that it’s affecting how people see the world. Such messaging often leverages fear, anger, and outrage to capture attention, which can increase individual stress levels and societal polarization over time. Manipulative marketing also often relies on exaggerated claims that lead to consumer disappointment. This can erode trust in the company, as Sinek says—alternatively, it can lead customers to think something is wrong with them rather than with the product, which contributes to issues ranging from anxiety to eating disorders.)

Six Common Manipulative Advertising Tactics

Here are six common manipulative advertising tactics and why they don’t work.

Manipulative Advertising Tactic #1: Price

Lower prices induce people to buy, so companies engage in price wars and sell at rock-bottom prices.

But price manipulation can be dangerous for a company. When a customer becomes used to paying a low price, it can be nearly impossible to increase the cost of an item. 

This creates a market of commodities, where companies have to create more products to keep their revenue up. So while lowering prices drives business, it also makes it hard to earn a profit in the long run.

Manipulative Advertising Tactic #2: Promotions 

Promotions are short-term programs (often referred to as “value-added” programs) that offer a temporary incentive to make a purchase immediately. Some common promotions include limited-time sales, cash-back offers, coupons, or mail-in rebates.

We’ve all experienced promotions, and they’re a common manipulation in the car industry. 

• When Japanese automakers started edging out their domestic counterparts, American car manufacturers like General Motors (GM) started massive incentive programs. But while they brought in customers and created a short-term solution, they also cut into GM’s profit. 
• GM had to discontinue some of its promotional programs, which caused its sales to decline. Customers had started to expect promotional pricing, and when it disappeared, they went back to buying from foreign auto companies. 

To avoid the financial penalty of promotions, companies often design rebates to be difficult to cash in on. Nearly 40% of customers never get the rebate, since they don’t follow the steps to get the refund. While this manipulation has a short-term financial advantage, it costs in long-term reputation and repeat business.

Manipulative Advertising Tactic #3: Fear

Fear is the most powerful manipulation because it taps into our survival instinct. 

It’s also a common tactic: think of anti-drug advertisements or public service announcements that caution you to wear your seatbelt lest you die in an accident.

In the business world, fear is often used to convince us that if we don’t buy a particular service or product, something bad will happen to us. (Shortform example: a good example of this is pharmaceutical advertisements, where people are told that not taking a certain drug will adversely affect their longevity or quality of life.)

While often nothing bad will really happen to you if you don’t buy said product/service, fear makes customers feel like it will—which is an effective manipulation.

Manipulative Advertising Tactic #4: Aspiration 

Aspiration taps into people’s desire to have more, do more, or be better. They’re most effective if the people they target are insecure or worry about achieving their goals. 

Aspiration sounds a bit like inspiration, but they’re different things. For example, aspiration gets people to buy gym passes, but it takes inspiration to get a person to use them. That’s why gym memberships rise by 12 percent in January, but only a fraction of those people ever use them. 

The biggest issue with aspirations as a manipulation tactic is that they create a desire for short-term satisfaction when only long-term solutions work. Aspirations might get people to act for a little while, but they fail to maintain their momentum.

Manipulative Advertising Tactic #5: Peer Pressure 

When a company claims that a majority of people or experts are using their product, they’re using social pressure–also known as peer pressure–as a manipulation. That’s why advertisements often make claims like “four out of five experts agree” or that “millions of satisfied customers” believe their product is the best!  

Peer pressure works because it plays into our deep-seated fear that other people might know something we don’t. In other words, by invoking the majority, peer pressure makes us worry that our decisions are wrong. 

That’s why celebrity endorsements can be so effective. When a celebrity talks about a product, it makes people think the product is good, or that buying that product will make us more like the celebrity endorser. Think of examples like Michael Jordan endorsing Gatorade and Nike, or Tiger Woods endorsing everything from Titleist golf balls to GM cars. 

Manipulative Advertising Tactic #6: Novelty 

Novelty — defined as being “new” or “unusual” — is often marketed as “innovation.” 

But novelty and innovation are very different from one another. 

• Novelty is merely introducing something new and will eventually fade into the past. Novelty is more of a gimmick than a real improvement.
• Innovation is a change that is valuable and persists in the industry well into the future. It is a real reinvention, in ways that matter to customers in the long-term.

Ultimately, novelty tricks consumers into thinking that a product or service is innovative when it’s not. 

Manipulative Advertising Example

We can see the difference between novelty and innovation when we look at two “innovative” phones: the Motorola RAZR and the Apple iPhone. 

• The RAZR was billed as “innovative” and the future of mobile phones because it featured innovations like “aircraft-grade aluminum” and a “chemically-etched keypad.” While they sold a lot of phones initially, within four years, Motorola’s stock was trading at 50 percent of its former value. What was supposed to be innovation was actually novelty – it didn’t last. 
• The iPhone was marketed much like the RAZR: as the future of mobile phones. But unlike the RAZR, the iPhone really was innovative, and, Sinek claims, not because of the touch screen and removing buttons. The iPhone changed how the phone industry worked by telling phone manufacturers what their phone would do (rather than phone manufacturers deciding what features they’d support). This was a lasting change that continues today.

Whenever companies introduce multiple minor variants of a product, that’s a sign that they’re just practicing novelty instead of innovation, like Colgate’s thirty-two types of toothpaste.

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