The two faces of marketing: creating demand vs. exploiting it

A coworker said something to me recently that’s been living rent-free in my head ever since: marketing either exploits demand or creates it.

It’s one of those deceptively simple statements that unravels the longer you think about it (and trust me, your girl be thinking and spiralling – uh – unravelling everything.)

Because in the end, everything we do: every brief, campaign and creative strategy meeting, falls somewhere along that spectrum. We’re either responding to what people already want or teaching them what to want next.

That’s the duality of marketing. It’s both mirror and maker, a practice built on empathy and manipulation in almost equal measure. (And as a Libra, I am eating that sh*t up.)

Let’s start with the mirror.

Exploiting demand sounds almost sinister, but it’s actually the more honest side of marketing. It’s about recognising what already exists in culture—the needs, desires, insecurities, and aspirations of consumers bubbling just beneath the surface—and articulating them in a way that resonates.

At its best, this kind of marketing is empathetic.

It listens before it speaks.

And it turns chaos into clarity.

Think of Spotify Wrapped, which transformed our listening data into a cultural ritual by tapping into something deeply human: our need to see ourselves reflected in numbers and nostalgia. Or Airbnb, which didn’t invent wanderlust, but reframed it as belonging. Or Nike, which took ambition—a raw, universal instinct—and branded it as performance.

This kind of marketing feels collaborative. It amplifies the emotional truths people already live with. It works with culture rather than against it.

When you’re exploiting demand, you’re essentially saying, “We get it.”

Then there’s the other face. The one that doesn’t just listen, but leads.

Creating demand is where marketing gets… murkier, so to speak.

It’s when we stop identifying existing needs and start manufacturing them. When we turn minor discomforts into opportunities, and opportunities into obsession.

It’s the difference between selling moisturiser and convincing someone their natural skin texture is a huge problem. Between designing a phone upgrade and making people feel obsolete without it.

Sometimes, this kind of marketing is visionary.

Apple did it when it introduced the iPhone, creating a need for touchscreens before we knew we had one. Netflix did it when it redefined entertainment consumption. This is not exploiting demand, but expanding it. It’s reorienting human behaviour.

And often, demand creation slides into manipulation.

We start designing discontent just to sell the cure. We sell the problem and the solution in the same breath. And when that cycle scales: through social media, influencer culture, algorithmic targeting, it moves from shaping buying behaviour to reshaping identity.

We no longer buy to meet needs. We buy to express who we are, or who we wish to be. Desire becomes not just emotional but existential.

Zoom out far enough, and marketing starts to look less like an industry and more like a cultural operating system. What once responded to the world, now writes it.

When we exploit demand, we’re playing historian: capturing the mood of the moment and reflecting it back. When we create demand, we’re playing god: designing the next version of reality.

Neither is inherently good or bad, but both carry power.

And power, by its nature, has consequences.

We see this in the beauty industry’s decades-long reinforcement of narrow ideals. In fast fashion’s transformation of self-expression into disposability. In wellness culture’s subtle pivot from health to moral performance. Marketing has become the architecture of desire. Shaping what we think is normal, possible, and necessary.

The irony is that marketers often describe their work as “meeting people where they are.” But increasingly, we’re deciding where that is.

Today’s marketers are living through an identity crisis of their own.

We’re told to be purpose-driven, empathetic, and transparent, yet still deliver quarter-on-quarter growth in an attention economy that rewards urgency and excess.

We want to make things people love, not things that quietly break them. But the system rarely rewards restraint. It rewards demand. The louder, the faster, the newer, the better.

So we try to split the difference. We chase metrics that measure awareness but not impact. We frame consumption as self-care. We use the language of empowerment to justify the machinery of persuasion.

Maybe that’s the real double bind: we can’t fully tell if we’re creating desire or simply feeding it.

And the monster grows bigger than our little minds could ever fathom – or control.

So then, maybe the question isn’t whether marketing exploits or creates demand, maybe it’s how consciously we do either (wishful thinking perhaps.)

There’s nothing wrong with amplifying desire. The human drive for novelty, comfort, beauty, and belonging is ancient. What matters is what we attach it to. Are we inspiring curiosity or insecurity? Empowering autonomy or dependence? Helping people connect, or just scroll faster?

It would be nice to think the next era of marketing will be less about creating demand from thin air and more about redirecting it toward ideas, products, and movements that add meaning rather than noise. Toward brands that meet real needs and reflect the world responsibly.

But again, that’s probably just a nice thought.

Marketing will always shape culture, whether we mean to or not. The only choice we really have is the direction in which it tilts.

-Sophie Randell, Writer