A couple of years ago I read the homepages of forty marketing agencies in one sitting. I was trying to figure out how to describe my own firm, which is the kind of task that sounds like an afternoon and takes a week. Thirty-seven of the forty called themselves results-driven. Twenty-eight promised data-driven strategies inside their first hundred words, which is the same claim wearing glasses. I wrote about that reading here, back when it was still just a bruise.
Nobody copied anybody, is the thing. I would bet money on it. Thirty-seven separate founders sat down, asked themselves what made their agency different, reached deep into their own convictions, and pulled out the identical sentence. Each one believed they had written it.
That is the phenomenon this essay is about. Not the sameness itself. The fact that the sameness feels, from the inside, like originality.
Marketing has exactly one foundational question and we almost never ask it. We ask what buyers want. We build personas about what they want, run surveys about what they want, mine reviews for the words they use to describe what they want. Useful, all of it, and all of it downstream of the question that matters: where did the wanting come from?
The standard answer, the one baked into every marketing course and brief template, is that desire originates inside the buyer. She has needs. The needs produce wants. Marketing’s job is to discover the wants and present the product as their satisfaction. The buyer is a well, and research is the bucket.
René Girard spent fifty years demonstrating that this picture is wrong. Not incomplete. Wrong, the way a map is wrong when the river runs on the other side of the mountain.
Girard’s claim is that desire is not original. Past the survival floor, food when starving, warmth when freezing, we do not generate our wants from within. We catch them. We see someone else wanting something, or having it, or being changed by it, and their desire transfers to us. He called the someone a model. Sometimes it’s a competitor. Sometimes a peer, a celebrity, a version of ourselves we are trying to become. The model wants, so we want. And the transfer hides itself so completely that the borrowed desire arrives feeling native. Yours. Authentic. I’ve told the story of finding Girard, and what he did to my ability to write from persona documents, in The Hidden Layer.
Thirty-seven founders each privately consulting their own convictions, all drinking from the same invisible watershed. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the mechanism working exactly as designed.
So here is the term I have been circling for three years, in this journal, in the research, in a book that is about to leave my hands:
Mimetic marketing is the practice of marketing to desire’s actual sources instead of its surface declarations. It starts from Girard’s insight that wanting is borrowed, asks who the buyer’s models are and what struggle the buyer is having with them, and writes to that structure rather than to the persona.
Read a persona document and you will find a woman named Sarah, 35, suburban, drives a Honda, wants to feel confident. The persona records what Sarah would say at a dinner party if a stranger asked polite questions. Mimetic marketing wants the other material. Who Sarah watches. Who she compares herself to at 5 a.m. when the comparison is involuntary. What she would buy if nobody could see her buy it, and what she buys mostly so the right people notice. Which model she is imitating and, just as important, which model she is trying to stop imitating, because the buyer who wants to escape an influence is as predictable as the buyer who obeys one, and infinitely more grateful to whoever sees the escape attempt and honors it.
None of that is in the survey data. The buyer cannot tell you, not because she is hiding it but because the mechanism hides it from her too. Girard again: the transfer erases its own tracks.
Two clarifications, because the words are close enough to cause accidents.
Mimetic marketing is not memetics. Memes, in the Dawkins sense, are ideas that replicate: units of culture spreading brain to brain, and there is genuinely interesting work on why some ad concepts propagate and some die. That discipline studies the spread of content. Mimetic theory studies the spread of desire. A meme is a thing people share. A mimetic desire is a thing people become. If you have run into “marketing memetics” and wondered whether it is this, it is not this. Different Greek root, different theory, different use.
And mimetic marketing is not a manipulation kit. This matters enough that I want to be plain about it. Luke Burgis, who has done more than anyone alive to bring Girard to general readers, first in Wanting and again in his new book The One and the Ninety-Nine, published a warning I think about a lot: mimetic desire operates in the dark, and people who can see in the dark can take advantage. He is right. The same knowledge that lets you speak to a buyer’s real desire would let you engineer rivalry, inflame status anxiety, and point the whole apparatus at people who never asked for it. I have watched marketers do a crude version of this without ever reading a page of theory. Scarcity theater. Manufactured envy. The influencer economy is mimetic exploitation with a media kit.
The practice I am describing runs the other way. Seeing the desire clearly so you can tell the truth to it. When you know a buyer’s declared want is a costume over a different want, you have two options. You can exploit the gap. Or you can be the first marketer in her feed who addresses the person under the costume, which converts better anyway, for the same reason being seen always beats being flattered. Honest marketing for how desire actually works. That’s the whole ethic, and I hold it as a hard line: the buyer should end up glad the ad found them.
Theory earns nothing until it moves a number, so, receipts.
A test-prep founder came to us with a sales page that spoke to the declared desire: better scores, a proven system. Reasonable page. It converted at six percent and made about thirteen thousand dollars a month. The research, and I mean weeks of reading real parents in real forums saying things no survey would ever surface, showed the actual purchase happening somewhere else entirely. The mother buying SAT prep is not buying points. She is buying her standing in a years-long, mostly silent tournament with other mothers, and buying insurance against a specific future conversation in which her kid’s outcome is the verdict on her parenting. The rewritten page spoke to the tournament and the verdict without ever naming them cruelly. Same traffic. Same price. Order rate went from six percent to ten. Revenue doubled to twenty-six thousand a month. The founder’s own words: it is inarguable.
The parents were not tricked. The parents were finally addressed.
That research process has a name at my firm, the Hidden Layer, and it grew from a private crisis I have written about elsewhere: I got tired of writing copy from assumptions and started reading primary sources compulsively, two hundred and more per market, until the buyer’s models and rivalries and unadmitted wants sat in front of me like a map with the river on the correct side. The methodology is the boring part. Reading until the structure shows. Anyone could do it. Nobody does, because it takes weeks, and the industry has agreed to pretend the persona is enough.
AI made execution free. Anyone can now generate competent copy in thirty seconds, and everyone does, and it all sounds the same, and the industry blames the machines. The machines are innocent. They are trained on our output, and our output was already convergent. The sameness predates the technology. Thirty-seven of forty were results-driven before the first token was ever sampled. AI didn’t create the echo. It industrialized it.
Which changes the economics of depth. When everyone can produce the average instantly, the average is worth nothing, and the only inputs with any remaining value are the ones that cannot be scraped: what your specific buyers borrowed their wanting from, and what they are struggling against. Execution was never the moat. Now it isn’t even a fence. Understanding is the last thing left that compounds.
I think this is why Girard’s ideas are having their moment. Burgis’s new book is everywhere this summer. The tech world has treated Girard as a house philosopher for a decade. Sooner or later the marketing world was going to notice that the theory explaining Silicon Valley’s rivalries also explains why every brand in every category is slowly becoming every other brand. I am writing this essay partly to plant a flag and mostly because I want the flag planted carefully, with the ethics attached, before someone plants it without them.
If you are a reader, start with Girard himself, or with Burgis’s Wanting if you want the humane on-ramp. I keep a running list of what shaped this thinking on the reading page of this site, and the journal’s marketing entries are mostly this theory colliding with actual campaigns: the scapegoat in your ad account, the anti-mimetic postcard, the Girardian scapegoat in branding, Zaltman’s deep metaphors, the story your buyer tells themselves at 5 a.m., Harold Bloom in a marketing meeting.
If you are a practitioner, start with one exercise. Take your best customer. Not the persona, the actual human. Write down who they were imitating when they found you. If you cannot answer, you have found the hole in your marketing, and no amount of copy on top of the hole will fill it.
And if you want the map done for you, my team builds them. We call it a Mimetic Intelligence Snapshot: your market’s models, its rivalries, the direction its desire is moving, built by a human from a few hundred primary sources, free, because it is the single most persuasive thing we could ever show you. It lives at mimeticintelligence.com. The book, What Your Buyers Actually Want, goes deeper and will be out this month; there is a notify list on this site.
The wanting is borrowed. It always was. Marketing that admits this stops shouting at the costume and starts speaking to the person, and the strange, hopeful thing I have learned in three years of doing it is that the person always answers.
I turn this kind of reading into a working document for one business at a time: who your buyers imitate, what they actually want, and the words they use when nobody is selling to them. The first pass is free. Mimetic Intelligence, one Snapshot per day, built by hand.