I was doing bookkeeping.
Not glamorous. Not intentional. Just a Sunday afternoon, a cup of coffee going cold, and a spreadsheet that was starting to make me feel a little sick.
A subscription renewal had popped up. A photography business community I'd been part of for years. And as I went to decide whether to renew, I started actually looking at everything else on that list.
Courses. Memberships. More courses. A course about how to get more from your courses. A content strategy membership. A launch strategy course. A community for photographers who wanted to build their business. Another community for photographers who wanted to build their business differently.
Five years. More than ten thousand dollars.
My photography business was not where I wanted it to be profit-wise, and I had genuinely not connected those two facts until that moment.
I wasn't foolish. I wasn't careless. I was, it turns out, a very well-targeted customer. Someone had studied people like me carefully, and I had been the beneficiary of that study for years without knowing it.
That's not a comfortable realization. But it's a useful one.
And it's exactly why persuasion literacy exists.
So What Is Persuasion Literacy?
It's not cynicism. It's not conspiracy thinking. It's not deciding that all marketing is evil and everyone selling something is out to get you.
Persuasion literacy is simply the ability to recognize when and how influence is being applied to your decisions, so you can factor that in before you choose.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Researchers in consumer psychology have a name for it: persuasion knowledge. It covers what consumers understand about common marketing tactics and what they assume those tactics are designed to accomplish. The foundational model was developed by researchers Marian Friestad and Peter Wright back in 1994, and the core idea is pretty straightforward: people develop and use knowledge about persuasion tactics to cope with influence attempts.
In plain English: when you know what someone is doing, you can decide how much weight to give it.
The problem is that most of us were never taught this. We learned to read. We learned basic math. Some of us learned to drive. Nobody sat us down and said, "here's how a sales page works, here's what a countdown timer is actually doing, here's why that testimonial makes you feel the way it does."
So we figured it out the hard way. Or we didn't figure it out at all.
Why the Online Business World Makes This Especially Messy
Traditional advertising has always used persuasion. Billboards, TV commercials, print ads. We grew up with those. Most of us developed at least a low-level awareness that ads were trying to sell us something.
But the online business world, especially the coaching, course, and "build your business" space, added something that traditional advertising largely didn't have: it dressed persuasion up as mentorship.
The person selling you a course wasn't just an advertiser. They were a success story. A role model. Someone who had figured it out and wanted to help you do the same. The sales page wasn't an ad, it was a letter from a friend who really got you.
And the tactics underneath all of that were borrowed directly from the very same persuasion playbook that's been used for decades, applied with surgical precision to a specific audience: ambitious, growth-oriented people who were already primed to believe that investing in themselves was always the right call.
Investing in yourself sounds like wisdom. It is sometimes. It's also sometimes a sentence that's been carefully placed in your head to make "buy this" feel like a virtue instead of a transaction.
Persuasion literacy is what lets you tell the difference.
This Is Not About Becoming Impossible to Persuade
Here's what persuasion literacy is not.
It's not a reason to trust nobody. It's not armor against being moved by something genuinely good. It's not a way to become the person who sees every kind gesture as a manipulation tactic and every sale as a scam.
Some offers are excellent. Some communities are worth every dollar. Some courses changed people's lives and businesses and were priced fairly for the value they delivered.
Persuasion literacy doesn't tell you to say no. It tells you to pause long enough to figure out whether you actually want to say yes.
The goal, as the research puts it, is consumers' "resourceful efforts to maintain control over persuasion outcomes and achieve their own goals."
Your goals. Not the goals of the person writing the sales page.
What It Actually Looks Like in Practice
Persuasion literacy isn't about memorizing a list of psychological tactics (though that's useful). It's about developing a reflex.
The reflex sounds like this:
Something is making me feel like I need to decide right now. What is it, and is it real?
I feel strangely seen by this sales page. Why? What specifically is creating that feeling?
I feel like saying no to this would mean giving up on myself. Is that true, or is that a story this pitch put in my head?
I've already bought three things from this person. Does that make this a good decision, or does it just make it a familiar one?
Those pauses are persuasion literacy in action. They're not paranoid. They're not rude. They're just you, staying in the driver's seat of your own choices.
The Specific Things Worth Knowing About
Once you start looking, the patterns are everywhere. A few worth having names for:
Urgency and scarcity. Countdown timers, "only 3 spots left," "the price goes up at midnight." Sometimes these are real. Often they're not. The function is to make waiting feel dangerous, like hesitation has a cost. Persuasion literacy asks: is this deadline real, or is it here to speed me up?
Social proof. Testimonials, case studies, "thousands of students," income screenshots, before-and-afters. These work because humans are wired to look at what other people are doing for guidance. Persuasion literacy asks: are these results typical, or are they the highlight reel?
Identity-based selling. "This is for women who are done playing small." "This is for the person who knows they're meant for more." "If this resonates, it's for you." This isn't describing a product, it's describing a person you might want to be. Persuasion literacy asks: am I buying the offer, or am I buying the version of myself on the sales page?
Sunk cost. You've already spent money in this ecosystem. You've already invested time. Leaving now feels like admitting it was wasted. Persuasion literacy asks: am I staying because this is serving me, or because leaving feels like losing?
Authority by aesthetics. A beautiful website, a polished personal brand, a professional photo, a "as seen in" logo bar. None of these are evidence of results. They're evidence of a design budget. Persuasion literacy asks: what is the actual proof of what this person delivers?
Why This Blog Exists
BMB is not anti-marketing. It's not anti-persuasion. It's not anti-business.
There are blogs that teach people how to use these mechanisms to sell more. Some of them are excellent. The mechanics of persuasion are genuinely fascinating, and understanding them is useful whether you're selling or buying.
But the buyer's perspective is underrepresented. Most of what gets written about buyer psychology is written for sellers.
This blog is written for the buyer.
Specifically, for the smart, growth-oriented woman who has found herself on the other end of a very well-crafted sales page more times than she'd like to admit, and who is ready to understand what was actually happening in those moments.
Not to feel bad about it. Not to become suspicious of everyone. Just to be clearer. To make choices that actually belong to her.
That's persuasion literacy. And once you have it, you can't really unknow it, which is the whole point.
If you've landed on a sales page that has your finger hovering over the buy button but something feels slightly off, that's a good moment to slow down. Second Look exists for exactly that: it reads the page, names the tactics at work, and hands the choice back to you with more information than you had before.
Because the best decisions aren't the fast ones. They're the ones you actually made.
Slow down. Look twice. Then decide.
Receipts
- Friestad, M. & Wright, P. (1994). "The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How People Cope with Persuasion Attempts." Journal of Consumer Research, 21, 1–31.
- Isaac (2025). "Thirty years of persuasion knowledge research." Consumer Psychology Review, 8(1), 3–14. https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/arcp.1107
- Boush, D.M., Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (2009). Deception in the Marketplace: The Psychology of Deceptive Persuasion and Consumer Self-Protection. Routledge.