Beyond the marketing paradigm

In this episode, we explore the marketing paradigm—a dominant yet often invisible framework that shapes how we motivate behaviour across culture, communication, and social change.

While this paradigm can be highly effective in the short term, it often relies on extrinsic drivers such as reward, fear, and persuasion. Over time, this approach can erode deeper sources of meaning, contributing to what is increasingly described as a metacrisis—a breakdown across social, environmental, and cultural systems rooted in a loss of intrinsic value.

This episode examines how the marketing paradigm has come to influence not only how we communicate, but how we understand people themselves. It argues that many of our current approaches to change may be reinforcing the very conditions they seek to address.

The task, then, is not simply to improve our messaging, but to rethink the underlying paradigm of motivation itself—to move beyond short-term behavioural tactics and toward a framework that restores alignment with intrinsic value and long-term flourishing.