Author: Moh Al-Haifi
Co-Author: Isabelle Drury
Contributors: Odette Bester, Lee Fitzpatrick, Zac Schaap
Something feels profoundly broken in marketing today. As purpose-driven leaders and change-makers, we sense the disconnect between our aspirations for positive impact and the manipulative tactics we’ve inherited. Marketing has become a sophisticated system of psychological triggers designed to drive consumption at any cost, whether it’s selling shoes or squeezing toothpaste ads into every corner of the internet.
To learn more about how we arrived at this moment, check out “Marketing’s Origin Story: The Good, the Bad, and the Colonial.”
This wasn’t always the case. What began as the art of connecting people with genuine solutions has transformed into something more harmful. Yet, here’s the plot twist: in this moment of crisis lies an opportunity for transformation. We can reimagine marketing not as a tool for extraction, but as a catalyst for regeneration. (Think of regeneration as the opposite of “take, take, take”, it’s about giving back, restoring balance, and making sure the pie gets bigger for everyone.)
By understanding the true impact of conventional marketing practices, on individuals, communities, and living systems, we open the door to creating approaches that nurture rather than deplete. (Spoiler: it’s not just about planting trees after your ad campaign.)
For those feeling the tension between purpose and conventional marketing practices, join us as we explore what regenerative marketing could look like…
What Is Marketing Today?
The roots of modern marketing run deeper than most realise. In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud (yes, the “tell me about your childhood” psychoanalysis guy) had a nephew named Edward Bernays, who revolutionised how businesses approached consumer behaviour. His insight? That humans are fundamentally irrational, driven by unconscious desires and fears that could be harnessed to drive consumption.
This shift marked a turning point. Marketing grew from simply informing people about products to actively manufacturing desires. Through sophisticated psychological techniques, marketers learned to bypass rational decision-making and tap directly into our deepest insecurities, hopes, and fears. The goal was no longer to meet existing needs, but to create new ones.
Today, this approach has reached its peak. Algorithms track our every move, analysing our behaviours to predict and shape our desires before we’re even aware of them. We’re sold not just products, but identities, lifestyles, and the promise of unrealistic fulfilment. The freedom of choice we believe we have is carefully orchestrated through psychological triggers and manufactured scarcity.
For more inspiration and deeper thinking on aligning business and marketing with life, explore the Regenerative Marketing Movement–a growing community redefining what’s possible.
What’s Broken With Marketing As Usual?
The cracks in conventional marketing are becoming impossible to ignore. Our planet sends urgent signals through rising temperatures and collapsing ecosystems. Our addiction to fast fashion fills landfills with mountains of discarded clothing, our desire for the newest gadgets creates toxic electronic waste, and our hunger for convenience generates endless plastic pollution. Each new product launch, each planned obsolescence cycle, each “must-have” trend pushes us further toward environmental breaking points.
But something else is breaking too: consumer trust. People are waking up–not just to the manipulation and the calculated use of psychology to exploit their deepest insecurities, but also to the unrealistic expectations of working harder and longer in a world where wealth gaps grow wider and financial security feels increasingly out of reach.
The mental health crisis gripping younger generations speaks volumes about a system that profits from perpetual inadequacy. This isn’t just about individual choices–it’s about the bigger picture.We’ve created a society of “happiness machines“, consumers trained to seek fulfilment through purchasing rather than genuine connection or purpose.
The burden of our excess falls heaviest on those who can least afford it, when we in the Global North try to wash our hands of this waste–whether through recycling electronics, donating clothes, or shipping our plastic–it often ends up in communities in the Global South paying for our overconsumption with their health and wellbeing.
Why Is It Relevant Today?
A new wave of conscious consumption is emerging. People aren’t just buying differently, they’re questioning whether they need to buy at all. They seek brands that offer transparency, repairability, and genuine commitment to regenerative practices.
Industry leaders too are acknowledging this shift and are calling for fundamental change:
✨ Philip Kotler, once known as the father of modern marketing, now advocates for marketing that serves societal wellbeing over pure profit.
✨ Eric Liedtke, after decades at Adidas, left to create a waste-free fashion company, recognising that conventional marketing’s focus on endless growth and artificial needs is incompatible with the challenges we face.
✨ Seth Godin, renowned marketing expert, challenges us to move beyond interruption marketing to building genuine connections.
And many organisations already demonstrating what business aligned with life can look like:
🌱 With Life reimagines marketing and business through living systems thinking, offering pathways to design for thriving futures by aligning work with life itself.
🌱 Framework boldly challenges the tech industry’s obsession with planned obsolescence, designing laptops meant to be repaired and upgraded rather than replaced, putting repairability and longevity at the heart of their business model.
🌱 nRhythm brings together diverse global perspectives across 52 nationalities, reimagining organisational systems that work with life rather than against it, proving that transformative change is possible when we align business with natural principles.
🌱 WoolKind redefines fashion industry standards by crafting sustainable knitwear for every body, prioritising inclusive representation and environmental stewardship over trend-driven consumption, showing how fashion can celebrate diversity while respecting planetary boundaries.
🌱 Climate Farmers supports the transition to regenerative agriculture in Europe, building a community of farmers and organisations to scale solutions that heal the land and restore ecosystems.
🌱 Purpose Economy is creating a business model revolution, helping organisations embed stewardship and purpose into their ownership and governance structures, ensuring long-term alignment with the common good.
🌱 Capital Institute explores and promotes regenerative economics, showcasing a new paradigm for finance and business that respects planetary boundaries and nurtures human flourishing.
🌱 FairPhone challenges the electronics industry with its ethical smartphone, prioritising fair wages, sustainable sourcing, and repairable design to ensure technology serves people and the planet.
🌱 Vyld innovates sustainable menstrual care, creating products made from renewable marine resources like seaweed while promoting inclusive and eco-conscious solutions that work in harmony with nature.
They aren’t just changing their marketing, they’re transforming entire business models, governance models, and leadership styles to align with life. As the true costs of extractive marketing become clearer, purpose-driven organisations face an opportunity: embrace regenerative practices and help create the future our world is calling for.
What Is Life Aligned Marketing?
So, what does regenerative marketing actually look like? It begins with a fundamental shift in intention. Rather than manipulating desires, regenerative marketing starts with truth–about our products, their impact, and the real needs they serve.
This means moving beyond polished perfection to authentic communication that builds genuine trust. We ask different questions: How does this truly serve our community? What problems are we genuinely solving? What impacts ripple out from our marketing choices?
Regenerative marketing transcends individualistic consumption to create community resilience. Instead of selling personal identity through products, it creates spaces for collective value and shared purpose. This looks like building communities around repair and reuse, creating educational content that empowers rather than exploits, and celebrating collective impact over individual consumption.
Perhaps most radically, regenerative marketing abandons the myth of endless growth. It acknowledges planetary boundaries and designs within them. This means embracing circular systems where every “end” becomes a new beginning. Beyond conventional KPIs, success is measured through the full spectrum of impact: customer wellbeing flowing into community resilience, ecosystem health intertwining with resource circulation.
And while we’re here, let’s softly introduce a concept that’s guiding our thinking more and more: the importance of coming back to place. Regenerative marketing invites us to reconnect with history, context, and story, rooting our work in the natural ecosystems and bioregional contexts we’re part of. It’s a shift from a globalised, one-size-fits-all approach to something grounded in specific places, people, and shared histories.
This approach isn’t perfect, and it’s not supposed to be. We’re at the beginning of a new evolution in marketing–a lens we’ll spend decades refining. But the direction, this deep curiosity, and the initial shift from Ego to Eco (from “I” to “We All”) are crucial right now. In facing mounting environmental and social challenges, regenerative marketing offers a pathway toward genuine sustainability and deeper meaning in our work.
The Future Of Marketing
We can continue with practices we know are harming society and the planet, or we can embrace marketing’s potential as a force for regeneration. The choice is ours, but the stakes have never been higher.
To become a catalyst for the necessary change, begin by deepening your understanding. Documentaries like Buy Now and Century of Self reveal the historical roots and hidden impacts of today’s marketing practices. They offer crucial insights into the systems we must transform. Take time to reflect deeply on what you learn: How do these revelations connect to your own marketing work? What patterns do you recognise in your campaigns?
As you examine your current marketing practices, consider:
- Messaging: How might your brand story celebrate collective wellbeing rather than individual status? What messages could create genuine connection instead of insecurity?
- Channels: Where are you meeting your audience–in spaces of anxiety and scarcity, or in communities of learning and growth? How could your content nourish rather than drain attention?
- Metrics: Beyond tracking conversions, how might you measure the depth of relationships you’re building? What would success look like if you valued ecosystem health alongside business growth? And how can you shift intentions away from obsessing over a final outcome, focusing instead on setting healthy conditions for all stakeholders–from your team to your consumers, suppliers, partners, and the wider society you’re a part of?
You’re not alone in sensing that marketing needs to change. Through our network of partners–including the Regenerative Marketing Movement, Conscious Marketing Movement, Agency for Nature, and many others–we’re part of a growing community reimagining what’s possible. These networks are just one part of the broader ecosystem of practitioners actively transforming marketing practices, and we invite you to connect with these spaces.
As we explore these vital questions together, frameworks like our Go-to-Ecosystem (GTE) help us reimagine marketing as a source of emergence rather than extraction. We invite you to join this learning journey, with tools like the GTE Cards offering pathways for discovering what regenerative marketing could mean for your work.
This is just the beginning, though. We’ll soon be rolling out more regenerative marketing tools to support this shift, including playground fireside virtual chats and both live and on-demand training offerings. These resources are designed to help you approach marketing and growth through a living systems and regenerative lens.
As we face the challenges ahead, we have a profound opportunity to reshape marketing’s role in society. The path toward regenerative marketing starts with a single question: How might your work contribute to a thriving future for all?
Co-writers: Isabelle Drury and Moh Al-Haifi
Contributors: Odette Bester and Lee Fitzpatrick
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