The Marketer Who Tricked Himself

How the metrics you're optimizing for are hiding the real damage you're doing to customer trust SEO Description:

In the summer of 2010, a user experience researcher named Harry Brignull was sitting in his flat in London, looking at a website that had made him angry. He could not remember exactly which site it was anymore. What he remembered was the pattern: a screen that asked him to do one thing but was designed, clearly, to make him do another. The button he wanted was small and gray. The button the company wanted was large and orange. This was deception, and it had no name.

So he gave it one. He bought the domain darkpatterns.org and started cataloging them. Confirmshaming. Roach motel. Hidden costs. Misdirection. Sneak into basket. He posted examples, invited submissions, built a taxonomy. The site went live quietly and grew slowly, mostly among UX professionals who knew exactly what he was talking about because they had been asked to build versions of those same patterns themselves.

Brignull was a practitioner who had noticed something peculiar: the same tricks kept appearing across different sites and industries, in different countries. They followed a playbook. And fifteen years later, we are still playing from it.

Every marketer who uses a dark pattern believes they are making a rational trade — a small erosion of user trust in exchange for a measurable lift in conversions. The math feels right because the conversions are visible and the trust is not. You can see the signup spike on Monday. You cannot see the customer who stops buying in December because she finally noticed you were hiding the unsubscribe button.

Consider what happened at a large e-commerce platform in Australia. The company, which asked to remain anonymous in a case study from ExtraStrength, had been using a classic dark pattern for years: displaying one price at the top of the product page and revealing additional fees only at checkout. This is called drip pricing, and it works beautifully in the short term. The customer has already picked the product. The customer has entered their credit card. The customer is three clicks deep and the fee is fifteen dollars. Most of them just pay.

The company decided, for reasons that are not entirely clear, to run an experiment. They removed the hidden fees. They put the full price on the product page, no surprises. And they waited.

Conversion rates dropped initially. That was expected. But repeat purchases rose 20 percent. Not over a quarter. Not over a year. They rose, and they stayed up, and the company discovered something it had not accounted for: the customers who had not felt tricked came back. The ones who had felt tricked, the ones who had paid the hidden fee and resented it, did not complain or ask for a refund. They just stopped buying. The company had been measuring the wrong thing.


Lior Strahilevitz is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who has spent years studying the line between persuasion and deception in digital design. He has a way of stating the problem that makes it sound almost simple. Dark pattern, he told me (and he is careful to put the term in air quotes), is not a legal term with a clear boundary. It is a label for a spectrum. On one end you have designs that are merely annoying, the digital equivalent of a pushy car salesman. On the other end you have designs that cross into deception and coercion. And the part that matters for marketers is that the spectrum does not divide cleanly along intent. You can be trying to persuade and still end up deceiving. The Federal Trade Commission, in its 2022 report> “Bringing Dark Patterns to Light,” made exactly this point. The legal question is whether a reasonable person would be misled by what they saw, not whether the company meant to deceive.

This is where the marketing frame cracks open, because marketers are not accustomed to being evaluated this way. They are used to being evaluated on outcomes: did the campaign lift conversion, did the email drive opens, did the landing page reduce bounce rate. But the dark pattern framework asks a different question. It asks whether the design is harder to decline than to accept. It asks whether the information the user needs is visible or buried. It asks what a user who is distracted and scrolling quickly, tired after a long day, would reasonably understand from this screen.

Those are questions that cut to the heart of a much older tension in marketing. You can date the tension to the moment someone first tried to sell a product by saying something about it that was technically true but designed to create a false impression. The fixer who quotes a low price over the phone and then adds a shop fee when the customer arrives. The credit card offer that says 0 percent APR in 72-point type and puts the terms in a paragraph no one will read. These are not new. What is new is the scale. A drip pricing pattern on an e-commerce site can run ten thousand times a day, every day, silently, across every visitor. The old car salesman had to look the customer in the eye. The digital version never does.

There is a study from the OECD, published in 2022, that estimated 76 percent of e-commerce sites use some form of manipulative practice. Not all of them are illegal. Most of them are not. The OECD was careful to distinguish between patterns that are merely aggressive and those that cross into deception. But the number itself is startling. Three out of four major shopping sites have decided, at some level of the organization, to make it harder for you to know what you are paying and easier for you to pay it.

And the math that drives those decisions is almost always the same. A product manager runs an A/B test. Version A has the subscription terms in clear language at the top of the form. Version B buries them in a collapsible section under the button. Version B converts 12 percent better. The product manager ships Version B. The decision makes sense in isolation. It makes sense in the quarterly review. It makes sense on the dashboard.

What does not show up on the dashboard is the customer who, six months later, discovers the automatic renewal and spends forty minutes navigating a cancellation flow that asks three times whether she is sure. She does not post about it. She does not write to the CEO. She just decides, quietly, that she will never trust that company again. That decision does not appear in any A/B test. It appears, if it appears at all, as a downward tick in a retention cohort twelve months out, by which point someone else is running the dashboard.

The best name for this dynamic comes from the book Strategy Engine, which calls dark patterns negative-sum strategies. You get a short-term gain. The customer takes a long-term loss. And over time, the sum turns negative for everyone, including you, because churn rises, trust depreciates, and the compliance landscape shifts beneath your feet. India’s consumer protection authority classified thirteen dark patterns as unfair trade practices in 2023, with penalties reaching 10 percent of company revenue. The FTC won a $2.5 billion settlement from Amazon in 2025 over its Prime enrollment and cancellation practices. These are no longer speculative risks.

I keep coming back to Harry Brignull’s original catalog from 2010. He collected the patterns like a lepidopterist pinning butterflies, each one with a name and a description and an example. He was a taxonomist, not a reformer. But the act of naming changes things. Once you call something a roach motel pattern, it becomes harder to pretend it is just good UX. Once you call something confirmshaming, it becomes harder to pretend the guilt-tripping language is accidental. The naming forced a conversation that the industry had not been willing to have.

And yet, fifteen years later, the patterns are everywhere. Brignull’s catalog has grown from a handful of types to a taxonomy that researchers have expanded into dozens of subcategories. The Amazon settlement was for 2.5 billion dollars. And still, when you open a random shopping app and try to cancel a subscription, the button is small and gray and the button the company wants you to click is large and orange.

There is a reason for that persistence, and it is not malice. It is a measurement problem. The things you lose when you use a dark pattern — trust, goodwill, repeat business, advocacy — are hard to measure. The things you gain — higher conversion rates, more signups, retained recurring revenue — are easy to measure. Easy wins over hard every time, in every organization, unless someone deliberately designs the organization to weigh the invisible loss against the visible gain.

The e-commerce company in Australia figured this out when they looked at repeat purchases instead of first purchases. The B2B SaaS company in the Strategy Engine case study figured it out when they saw a competitor charging 20 percent more and still winning, because the competitor offered one-click cancellation and clear month-to-month terms. These companies did not stop using dark patterns because they had moral revelations. They stopped because they found a better number to track.

That is the hidden cost of the hidden button. You are optimizing a metric that points in the wrong direction. You are winning the visible battle and losing the invisible war. The customer who stays because they are trapped is a liability. The customer who stays because they want to is the only asset that compounds.

Brignull, in that flat in London fifteen years ago, was angry about a button on a website. But his real discovery, the thing he may not have fully understood at the time, was that the problem was the system the company had built — the system where the button made sense. The conversion rate said yes. The quarterly review said yes. Everything visible said yes. And the only voice saying no was the customer who left without telling anyone why.