Marketing, but With Consent

What even is marketing? One answer is: marketing is when you manipulate a person into buying a thing. It’s not wrong.

Working in marketing full-time, I’ve really had to reconcile this angle with my personal values. I prefer to word it like this: marketing can remove obstacles between a person and a product, so if they need and want it, they know how and where they can get it. Marketing has a long history of manipulation, exploitation, and overreach. But that’s not the only way to do things, it’s certainly not the best if you’re trying to build a good reputation for your business.

Historically, marketers have always pushed boundaries until somebody pushed back. Now, laws like the GDPR and California’s CCPA are tightening the rules around privacy, consent, and data collection. Some in the industry see this as a hassle. Features we once took for granted, like embedded YouTube videos or Google Maps, now come with… friction. It is certainly that, but it is also progress, and forcing marketing to change for the better.

 

Black Hat vs. White Hat

I’m going to borrow a framework here to make a point: The terms black hat and white hat come from the world of hacking. A black hat hacker uses illegal means or exploits loopholes in bad faith. A white hat hacker does the same thing with permission, to expose vulnerabilities and help systems improve. They may or may not be using the same tools. The difference is in intent, ethics, and respect.

In marketing, there’s a similar divide:

• Black hat marketing relies on invasive tactics, legal grey areas, and exploiting loopholes. Examples include: scraping data without permission, manipulating search rankings through spammy backlinks, or relying on dark patterns to trick users into consent.
• White hat marketing plays fair. It is focused on building trust. It centres value, transparency and consent, and in doing so, earns more lasting results.
  If your marketing tactic falls apart when the user has a real choice, maybe it wasn’t a good tactic to begin with.

I’ve been in marketing long enough to remember when cold-emailing wasn’t just legal, it was standard. As always, some of us were taking things way too far, and the consequences caught up: consumer trust eroded, regulators stepped in, and now we live in a world where unsolicited emails and phone calls are automatically marked as spam. And honestly? Good.
Marketing doesn’t need to be about tricking people. It can be about understanding them and supporting them in finding solutions to their actual problems. It’s my guiding principle that I only want to do marketing that respects the human on the other side of the screen. Similarly, I also won’t sell my own clients any service that I don’t believe will serve them in their business goals.

And just like that, the tension between my values and my profession just evaporated 🙂

Now back to the issue at hand, user consent:

 

Respecting boundaries and consent – treating your end users like you wish to be treated

Large parts of traditional marketing were built on taking instead of asking (tracking without disclosure, retargeting without permission, messaging without consent). These tactics will very likely get short-term results, but they erode long-term trust.

Consent matters – not just legally. It’s a sign of respect for the end user. When you respect users’ boundaries, you’re also respecting their intelligence, their autonomy, and their time. You can focus on serving them, instead of just “targeting” them.

 

The rules will keep changing

Yes, the rules keep changing, that’s how it goes in life. We’ve seen this play out many times before, in IT security, privacy policies, web accessibility… Let’s just use web accessibility as an example. Laws requiring accessible websites were, at first, seen as a burden. Compliance takes time, it limits design freedom. It feels like an imposition.

And what happened? We got a better internet.

• Bigger font sizes and higher contrast help people with low vision – and also users over 40 with tired eyes, and all of us trying to read on our phones in direct sunlight.
• Logical heading structures help people using assistive technologies like screenreaders – and also help with SEO and AI comprehension.

The more we make things usable for those with different needs, the better the experience becomes for everyone. We don’t have to treat it like a compromise.

It’s the same with privacy laws. They force us to simplify, clarify, and be more intentional. They slow us down just enough to ask: Is this respectful? Is this necessary?

Yes, it’s annoying when an embed no longer works without explicit consent. Yes, it’s frustrating when tools we’ve relied on become less effective due to stricter laws. But we can respond by finding better alternatives, such as serving videos through CDNs like bunny.net instead of YouTube, or using less invasive analytics tools.

We adapt, we improve, and we raise the bar. If you think that this is a bad thing in the era of “enshittification”, please tell me.

 

Change is good, actually

The rules will keep changing. They should!

That means we, as marketers, get to keep learning. We get to keep rethinking our assumptions. We get to keep proving that marketing can be done with consent, clarity, and care, and still get results – longer-lasting, cleaner results at that.

And lastly, let’s be honest – we can’t expect small business owners to keep up with all of this in their spare time… so these changes, especially the inconvenient ones, are what keep us marketing folks in business. 🙂