“This is marketing”, which could sound like praise for the effectiveness of a strategy, became a complaint. The tone is that of someone who has just discovered a lie. “It’s just marketing” has become synonymous with a farce, a well-packaged lie.
The word that was born to describe the relationship between brands and people has become a form of disqualification. When someone says that “so and so is a great marketer”, it is rarely a compliment to strategic competence; it is, in fact, a way of judging you as superficial, performative or unreliable.
The internet committee is sovereign. All it takes is for a brand to take some “opportunistic” action for someone to appear saying, with some contempt: “that’s marketing”. As if it were a blatant act capable of ending the debate.
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Data from Timelens shows that the term “marketer” lives almost exclusively in the heat of social media, with very little presence in online news. The word “advertiser” has a more balanced distribution, appearing much more frequently on news portals, which reinforces its use in more formal and professional contexts.
Although both terms have predominantly negative connotations, the negative sentiment in conversations using the term “marketer” is almost twice as high as in those using “advertiser”, and the positive sentiment is significantly lower.
More marketing, less belief
For decades, marketing has sold aspirational promises, narratives of the future. Brands exaggerated a little, people tolerated a little, and the market took its course. The irony is that marketing itself helped dig this hole when every brand wanted to “have a cause”, “have a community”, “have a conversation”, “have a soul”. This excess eroded reputational value.
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In 2025, 71% of global consumers said they trust companies less than the previous year. A McKinsey survey of more than 25,000 consumers in 18 countries showed that social networks are the least reliable source when deciding to make a purchase.
In the universe of creators, this is even more evident. The market is growing, but confidence is not keeping up at the same pace. A 2025 study by BBB National Programs, with more than 3,700 consumers, showed that 58% have already purchased under the influence of creators, but only 5% say they completely trust this content.
Even more revealing: 79% say they trust more when the evaluation is authentic, even negative, and 80% point to the lack of genuineness and transparency as the main factor in failure. The consumer continues to be influenced, but now with more caution.
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Marketing that doesn’t look like marketing
Anti-marketing is not born from a hatred of communication. It is born from an exhaustion of empty promises. People do not reject persuasion because they have suddenly become purists. They reject it because they learned, by force, to recognize the codes of opportunism: purposeful occasion, manufactured empathy, authenticity with a brief. The public has become more sophisticated, more informed and much more trained in distrust.
Perhaps that’s why some of the most interesting brands of recent years are thriving not despite anti-marketing, but precisely through it. They didn’t stop doing marketing. They just started to do marketing that ironizes marketing itself, rejects traditional codes and comes closer to frankness, humor, contradiction and self-criticism.
Liquid Death took a banal category, water, and treated communication like mocking entertainment. Instead of seeming like a “wellness brand”, it preferred to seem almost like a joke about the industry itself. This anti-marketing gesture worked: the brand has already been valued at more than US$1.4 billion and has been showing double-digit growth in results.
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The problem is not that it is marketing. The problem is that it seems like just marketing.
“This is marketing” only became an offense because many companies left marketing too far from the truth of the business. When communication promises more than it delivers, it stops expanding value and starts exposing misalignment.
This is marketing. But it is marketing that respects the consumer, that understands that unilateral communication is over, that knows that, in a world of abundant information, the scarcity is of trust, not of promises.
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For brands, the truth is the most scarce and valuable asset on the market. The truth that is born in culture, passes through product, service, experience, leadership and only then reaches communication. Because a brand is built from the inside out.
