Non-Coercive Marketing: A Manifesto

Traditional marketing is about saying what's necessary to make the sale. Often, this leads to omitting inconvenient facts, or bending the truth. Some common examples are over-promising and hype, wearing inauthentic masks, artificially inflating one's expertise and experience, creating false illusions of scarcity, etc. There are all sorts of reasons

When you optimize for both alignment and empowerment, you end up with the highest calibre of customers. People who take your work seriously, who tell their friends, who keep buying for years to come. In other words, non-coercive marketing is aimed at creating true, lifelong fans. If you're invested in the 1,000 True Fans model, as I am, non-coerciv

Non-coercive marketing, by contrast, doesn't create emotional pressure, but actively seeks to relieve it. If what you're selling has some kind of time-bound component—live events, cohorts, etc—some pressure is inevitable. But otherwise, non-coercive marketing never puts you in a place where you have to make an emotional snap decision. Instead of of

But beneath the surface, non-coercive marketing is a trojan horse, designed to regenerate trust, connection, and empowerment in a world where all three are increasingly scarce.

When you cede authority, and you trust people, it creates emotional ripples in the world around you. You begin to be seen as the most trustworthy option in said market. Even people who choose not to transact with you will feel warmly towards you, and generate word of mouth. And for the people who do choose to transact with you, they will do so from

Here are the principles.

1. Optimize for aligned, empowered customers




2. Surrender control, and embrace emergence




3. Cede authority




4. Treat people as ends, not means




5. Enough is enough




6. Play long games




7. Tell the truth, even when it's scary




8. Create invitations, not ultimatums




9. Trust fully and unconditionally

Play long games

As non-coercive marketers, we don't agitate insecurities or spin up new ones to make the sale. We strive to see the inherent enoughness of everyone, and speak directly to that part. That's at the core of how we enable empowered decisions—by speaking to people as if they are already enough , and giving them the time and space to start trusting that