How Marketing Creates the “Sucker Trap”—and Why Responsible Management and Investors Should Stop It
Consumers are rarely misled because they lack intelligence; they become vulnerable when urgency, social pressure, emotional commitment, appeals to vanity, and selective information are deliberately combined to weaken careful decision-making—turning many people into unwitting suckers.
Trust Is Usually the Entry Point
Fear of Missing Out Reduces Deliberation
Social Proof Can Become a Self-Reinforcing Track
Small Commitments Can Lead to Larger Ones
Why People Resist Admitting They Were Misled
Technology Has Industrialized Manipulative Design
Investor, Board, and Management Implications
Click here to subscribe to the ESM weekly e-newsletter.
Many marketers exploit “suckers.” Is your company's marketing department guilty of any of these techniques? Managers should evaluate marketing practices through a simple question: Does the technique help customers make a confident, informed decision, or does it depend on preventing them from thinking carefully? Organizations that rely too heavily on artificial urgency, hidden terms, inflated social proof, or difficult cancellation may improve conversion rates while damaging trust, customer lifetime value, employee pride, and brand reputation.
The word “sucker” is usually applied after the fact to someone who has purchased a questionable product, invested in a dubious opportunity, or believed a misleading claim. That label is not especially useful for management, because it implies that the problem lies primarily with an unusually gullible customer. The fact is that many organizations base their marketing efforts either subtly or not so subtly on tactless to sucker gullible people.
Psychological research suggests that almost anyone can make a poor decision when placed in the right circumstances. Sophisticated marketers, political campaigns, online platforms, and outright scammers often use a predictable sequence of techniques. They establish credibility, create urgency, demonstrate apparent popularity, secure an initial commitment, and then make it psychologically difficult for the person to reconsider.
This process can create what might be called the sucker trap—a situation in which people become increasingly committed to a decision, not necessarily because it continues to make sense, but because reversing course would require them to acknowledge that their original judgment may have been wrong. For responsible organizations, understanding these mechanisms is important to explain why certain marketing practices are effective and to clarify where legitimate persuasion ends and manipulation begins.
Trust Is Usually the Entry Point
Most people begin conversations and commercial interactions with at least a limited presumption that the other party is telling the truth. Communications researcher Timothy Levine describes this tendency in his “truth-default theory.” According to the theory, people ordinarily believe others unless something triggers suspicion.
This default is socially necessary because commerce and relationships would become nearly impossible if every statement had to be independently verified. At the same time, the tendency can be exploited through polished websites, authoritative language, familiar logos, impressive-sounding credentials, distorted research, paid influencers, and testimonials that may be selective or fabricated.
From a management perspective, trust should be treated as an asset rather than a vulnerability to exploit. Organizations that repeatedly use borrowed authority, ambiguous credentials, or misleading research or endorsements may generate short-term response while creating long-term reputational and regulatory risk.
Fear of Missing Out Reduces Deliberation
Urgency is one of the most common tools used to accelerate a decision. Messages such as “Offer ends tonight,” “Only two remain,” or “Prices rise at midnight” shift attention away from the quality of the offer and toward the perceived cost of delay. Research on fear of missing out, commonly called FOMO, has linked it to unmet psychological needs involving autonomy, competence, and social connection. The original widely cited study by Andrew Przybylski and colleagues found that people with higher levels of FOMO were more heavily engaged with social media and more concerned about missing rewarding experiences. The study is available through Computers in Human Behavior.Scarcity can also increase perceived value. A 2022 meta-analysis by Belinda Barton, Natalina Zlatevska, and Harmen Oppewal reviewed 416 effects from 131 studies and concluded that scarcity tactics can increase purchase intentions, although their effectiveness depends on the product, customer, and type of scarcity.
Scarcity itself is not inherently unethical. A hotel can legitimately disclose that only three rooms remain. A conference can accurately state that seating is limited. The issue is whether the limitation is real and whether the communication informs the customer or is designed primarily to prevent careful consideration. Countdown clocks that reset, fabricated shortages, or permanent “today only” offers cross that line.
Social Proof Can Become a Self-Reinforcing Track
People frequently look to the behavior of others when they are uncertain. Ratings, testimonials, follower counts, waiting lists, bestseller claims, and visible customer activity all provide what psychologists call social proof. One important study by Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, and Sean Taylor demonstrated how easily popularity indicators can become self-reinforcing. In a large, randomized experiment involving online comments, a single artificial positive rating increased the probability of receiving another positive rating by 32%. The manipulated comments ultimately achieved final ratings approximately 25% higher than the control group.
This helps explain the creation of what could be called a sucker trap. Once some people begin buying, subscribing, investing, or endorsing, their activity becomes evidence used to persuade others. The original momentum may have been generated by advertising, incentives, selective exposure, or even manipulation, but later participants see only apparent popularity. By this point, the suckers have become believers and to reinforce their commitment seek to entice others to join them.
Responsible management should therefore distinguish between authentic customer evidence and manufactured momentum. Incentivized reviews, undisclosed sponsorships, filtered testimonials, and inflated usage claims may produce immediate results while undermining confidence when the practices are discovered.
Small Commitments Can Lead to Larger Ones
Many questionable offers do not begin with a major request. They start with a free trial, a small deposit, a low introductory price, a questionnaire, a consultation, or a seemingly risk-free registration. Research on the “low-ball” technique shows that once people make an initial decision, they may remain committed even after the terms become less attractive. In an influential study led by Robert Cialdini, participants who had first agreed to an activity were more likely to follow through after learning about an inconvenient condition than people who were told the full terms at the outset.
After commitment comes the sunk-cost effect. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, research by Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer, found that people often continue investing in an activity because of money, effort, or time already spent, even when those past investments cannot be recovered. This tendency is particularly relevant to subscriptions, investment programs, professional services, loyalty schemes, and large projects. A customer who has spent $100 may be willing to stop. A customer who has spent $10,000 may invest still more because walking away would make the original loss feel final.
Ethical marketers encourage customers to assess additional spending on its own merits. Manipulative marketers frame further expenditure as the only way to validate or recover the original decision.
Why People Resist Admitting They Were Misled
In marketing, this can help explain why dissatisfied customers sometimes continue to defend a purchase, brand, investment, or political choice. Publicly recommending the decision to others provides social reassurance. Each additional supporter makes the original choice appear more reasonable. This creates a management challenge. Customer advocacy is not always the same as customer satisfaction. High referral activity can reflect genuine enthusiasm, but in some cases it may also reflect identity, community pressure, financial incentives, or a desire to validate a previous decision.
Technology Has Industrialized Manipulative Design
Digital marketing allows these psychological mechanisms to be tested, personalized, and deployed at scale. Researchers led by Arunesh Mathur at Princeton University examined approximately 53,000 product pages across 11,000 shopping websites and identified 1,818 examples of “dark patterns”—interface designs intended to steer, pressure, or deceive users.
These included hidden costs, false urgency, misleading button designs, difficult cancellation procedures, and messages suggesting that other users were actively viewing or purchasing a product.
At the extreme end, fraudsters maintain actual “sucker lists.” The Federal Trade Commission warns that scammers buy and exchange information about previous victims, including how much they lost and which type of offer persuaded them. Those individuals may later be targeted with recovery services, replacement investments, or new schemes tailored to their previous behavior.
Investor, Board, and Management Implications
The central lesson is not that consumers are irrational or easily fooled. It is that human judgment is highly sensitive to context. Trust, scarcity, popularity, commitment, identity, and fear of regret are legitimate parts of decision-making. They become problematic when an organization deliberately manufactures false evidence, conceals material information, or makes reconsideration unnecessarily difficult.
Managers should therefore evaluate marketing practices through a simple question: Does the technique help customers make a confident, informed decision, or does it depend on preventing them from thinking carefully? Organizations that rely too heavily on artificial urgency, hidden terms, inflated social proof, or difficult cancellation may improve conversion rates while damaging trust, customer lifetime value, employee pride, and brand reputation.
The strongest defense against the sucker trap—both for consumers and organizations—is not superior intelligence. It is a sound decision process: verify claims independently, distinguish real scarcity from manufactured pressure, calculate the complete cost before committing, treat every additional payment as a new decision, and make it acceptable to acknowledge and correct a mistake.
A healthy marketplace depends not on proving that a company can manipulate customers, but on demonstrating that it can create enough real value that manipulation is unnecessary.
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 17th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
- ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards since 2020
Management Academy to enhance future equity value for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
Contact: Bruce Bolger at TheICEE.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230.
