Digital seduction: When personalized marketing blurs into personal manipulation—A consumer behavior analysis

Abstract

This teaching case portrays the predatory exploitation of the psychological weaknesses in the digital marketing process in three jaw-dropping stories in the swirling half-trillion-dollar digital economy in India, in the age of algorithms that predict our desires even before we know we have them. The case follows the lives of Priya, a marketing professionals whose shopping frequency had risen to thrice a week and whose satisfaction had declined to 40-percent; and Rajesh, another data engineer whose study became his control system; and Anita, a social media influencer whose expenditure had tripled to 18,000 a month with no concept that she was a manipulator of her 400 followers. These narratives expose the vulnerability algorithm—exploiting time, emotional, social, cognitive, and financial insecurity and faking scarcity, artificial social proving, gamified decision-making, and mood-controlled advertising in the given scenario of 700 million internet users, frictionless UPI payments, and inbuilt social commerce. The case provides a challenge to the simple economic idea of consumer rationality, illustrating how platforms construct preferences rather than fulfilling them. It teaches the relationships between consumer psychology, behavioral economics, information technology, and business ethics to enable students to attain the principles of decoding the processes of manipulation and develop essential digital literacy. Students argue about burning issues, by means of discussion questions that are well designed: Where does the persuasion and manipulation begin and end? So what then shall we do in order to preserve human agency in the algorithmic worlds? The ultimate awakenings of the protagonists by means of digital detox, reverse-engineering of algorithms, and moral reckoning give hope and contribute timely information to IT, marketing, and ethics courses as future leaders redefine the boundary between profitable persuasion and unethical exploitation.