The Insecurity Economy

How Modern Enterprises Monetize Anxiety, and Why Confidence Is Becoming More Profitable

Abstract

Lifestyle, fashion and beauty brands sell identity and use belonging and status to spur consumption decisions by employing marketing tactics such as artificial scarcity and social proof. This comparative case study focuses on six brands: Shein, Brandy Melville, Telfar, Savage X Fenty, Victoria's Secret and Lululemon. Through a self-conducted original tactic audit measuring the brands according to a shared list of psychological marketing tactics, we observe three pairs of cases (coercive, empowerment, and legacy) as brands reverse marketing decisions following pressure from social backlash. Shein employed 18 out of the 20 patterns, more than any of its competitors. Telfar's decision to remove limiting scarcity marketing helped to increase its revenue tenfold. Victoria's Secret's poor viewership numbers (down from 9.7 million in 2013 to 3.3 million in 2018) and increasing backlash to its exclusionary scarcity marketing led to a more inclusive runway show in 2025. This motivates the paper's focus on the Insecurity Economy versus the Confidence Economy. The paper concludes that firms abandon coercive practices only when exclusion becomes too costly, and return to them when the pressure eases. Consumer education and sustained regulation are better at translating knowledge about manipulative marketing into action than corporate responsibility. This finding suggests that breaking the spell of artificial scarcity is not only an ethical choice but perhaps a highly lucrative one, and should be of more interest to marketers and regulators as fad-driven marketing increasingly targets youth.