ArticleIssue #178 | The Best Marketing System You’ve Never Thought About
Somewhere in the last hour, a few million people read a short block of copy that felt written specifically for them, deepened their attachment to an affinity group they claimed voluntarily, and left more likely to come back tomorrow. The organization behind that copy knows almost nothing about any of them. No CDP. No identity graph. No first-party data strategy. Hell, the organization barely has a product.
That system is astrology.
And – before you roll your eyes – I’m not asking you to subscribe to your horoscope (I certainly don’t), but rather to acknowledge that it is a wonderfully effective marketing system. Just look at the scoreboard: Astrology is a multi-billion-dollar global category built entirely on narrative. Co-Star, an app that delivers algorithmically-generated horoscopes with an attitude problem, acquired ~30M users with essentially no paid media. The entire astrology industry today is valued at ~$12.8B – and expected to grow to ~$28B by 2035.
More impressive than the growth is the durability: the daily horoscope has survived every platform shift of the past century (newspapers, magazines, portals, apps, push notifications), simply because the delivery format was never the product. Retention for the system itself is functionally infinite; nobody unsubscribes from their zodiac sign. And the whole apparatus delivers what all that fancy personalization tech you see sponsoring webinars or standing in shiny trade show booths is supposed to deliver, at near-$0 marginal cost.
The depressing part (at least, for us paid media people): astrology has no acquisition budget, because its customers run acquisition themselves. “What’s your sign?” is a more effective onboarding funnel than just about anything you’ll find in any other industry. Believers defend the category against critics with more energy than any community manager or Google Rep could ever muster. When customers are the marketing engine, CAC approaches zero.
Obviously, this is an extreme case. $0 CAC is not a realistic equilibrium for 99.9% of brands. But underneath the mysticism and (quite frankly) nonsense are real marketing mechanisms which are fully separable from the bunk & available for you to use in whatever campaign you want.
So that’s what today’s issue is all about: dissecting the marketing science that underpins astrology into its constituent parts, then showing you exactly how you could apply those same principles to your campaigns.
Let’s get to it.
Play #1: Engineer perceived personalization instead of buying actual personalization
If we go way back to 1948, psychologist Bertram Forer gave students a “personalized” personality assessment. Every student received identical text, with statements like “you have a tendency to be critical of yourself” and “at times you are extroverted and sociable, while at other times you are wary and reserved.” Students rated the accuracy of their supposedly individual profile at 4.26 out of 5.
That finding became the Forer effect (a/k/a the Barnum effect). It is the central pillar of the entire astrology apparatus. Horoscopes don’t feel personal because there’s some unseen cosmic force that connects events in your life to when you were born; they feel personal because the copy is engineered so that you do the work of self-application. The statements are specific enough to feel like insight and open enough that any reader can map their own situation onto them.
Just look at some examples from today (I wrote this on the 21st of July): today is characterized by the Moon’s shift into the intense and transformative sign of Scorpio, asking everyone to slow down and confront emotional realities. With Pluto and Jupiter in exact opposition, long-standing beliefs or projects may have demanded attention regardless of your plans.
Here’s the “astrological outlook”:
- You are advised to avoid power struggles with partners or close friends. Despite any tension, something special or financially attractive may benefit your family, like buying a home good or receiving a gift
- Financial speculation may be particularly rewarding. You could experience surprise social invitations or a sudden urge to book a vacation or attend a sports event. Relations with kids are spontaneous and fun.
- This is a financially fortuitous day where you unexpectedly make more money or you become a bit richer. It is a great time to pursue a job offer or ask for a raise, though you should remain patient with kids and romantic partners.
- You may encounter an emotional power struggle or give in to impulsive behavior. Fortunately, something unexpected likely will work in your favor, which may even spark a little bit of jealousy from others.
- Unexpected opportunities to travel will drop into your lap. A sudden chance to explore fields like publishing, medicine, law, or higher education might also appear, requiring you to act fast.
You can run Forer’s test on yourself right now. Read those 5 statements, then score how accurate each one is to you on a scale of 1 (not at all accurate) to 5 (definitely accurate).
Most of these – for most people – score in the 4 to 5 region. “You may give into impulsive behavior” or “have the sudden urge to book a vacation” or “avoid power struggles with partners or close friends” or get “a sudden chance to explore fields like publishing, medicine, law, or higher ed might also appear, requiring you to act fast.” could plausibly apply to 75%-100% of the population on any given day. You got an ad to enroll in a class? Check. You ate that donut despite really wanting to look good for your beach trip next month? Check. You suddenly thought you were dying of some rare disease after going down a WebMD rabbit hole? Check. You were annoyed with a friend/significant other over something silly? Check. You thought about booking another vacation before fall hits? Check.
Now, contrast that against the modern personalization industrial complex: identity resolution, dynamic content/creative, audience-of-one delusions, $10M CDP implementations (I couldn’t believe the price tag, either), all trying to close the gap between message and individuality with data. Astrology closes the same gap with craft. It leaves deliberate space in the message for the reader to finish it.
There’s a reason I’ve written (repeatedly) that the vast majority of brands would be better served by focusing on segmentation than personalization: the data shows that actual, data-driven personalization frequently underperforms perceived personalization. You’ve probably seen this in your own accounts – when an ad names your city, your recent search or the product you left in your cart last week, the audience member doesn’t think, “Brand X understands me.” S/he thinks, “These guys are kinda creepy.”
Surveillance-derived relevance produces recognition without warmth. Craft-derived relevance does the opposite, because the reader concludes the message understands them after finding themselves in it, and most people don’t critically assess their own conclusions. The horoscope reader does the targeting, the matching and the persuading, then credits the horoscope for all of it…and tells their friends about it.
To be clear, I’m not saying to “write vague copy.” Vague copy is the marketing equivalent of a room temperature latte: the one thing every person who drinks coffee agrees is terrible. I’m saying that the copy you write should be built on the foundational principle that the felt experience of “this is about me” is produced in your audience’s head (not via some AI system using data you’ve stashed away in a data lake back in 2023) AND that you can write copy to trigger it.
If you look through your ad accounts, your best-performing angles probably already do it (to some degree). “You’ve rebuilt this spreadsheet 4x times” beats “our software saves time” – simply because it’s more specific about a situation the reader recognizes as their own (even if the number of times is wrong). The same exact pattern as the horoscope appears here – the audience member supplies the targeting (“yeah, I use spreadsheets all the time”), the matching (“I still can’t get that one model to do what it’s supposed to do!”) and the persuading (“it would be great if it just worked!”) – then gives the ad credit for all 3 (“I found brand X on IG after they served me an ad that exactly described what I was feeling with that [client] spreadsheet!”)
Apply This To Your Account:
Audit your creative for self-insertion room. Where the copy describes your product/service, the reader observes. Where the copy describes the reader’s situation with recognizable-but-open specificity, the reader participates. Participation tends to convert at a far better rate.
Play #2: Build segments your audience can claim, not buckets you assign.
Astrology’s segmentation model is 12 groups, delineated by birth date, with zero predictive validity. By any analytical standard, it is useless. But somehow, it’s the most successful segmentation scheme in commercial history. People wear their segment on jewelry. They tattoo it on their bodies. They open conversations with it and filter dating prospects through it. They will tell you, unprompted and with pride, exactly which bucket they belong to.
Compare that to your last persona/audience insight exercise – “Millennial Molly, 28–34, HHI $85K, values convenience and authenticity.” Nobody on earth identifies as Millennial Molly. Marketer-assigned segments are descriptions. Astrological segments are identities.
The distinction has a testable structure. Assigned segments are private (the customer never sees them), extractive (built for your targeting convenience), and flat (they describe without flattering). Claimed segments are public, flattering, and tribal. They hand the member a vocabulary for who they are and (just as important) who they are not. Scorpios define themselves partly against Geminis (yes, I just learned that to write this issue. These are the sacrifices I make to produce this each week). In-group requires out-group.
Astrology then bolted on one more mechanism that turns segmentation into distribution: interaction between segments – compatibility charts, sign-versus-sign memes, “never date a Leo (or Scorpio, or Taurus)” stuff. That makes Astrology more than a scheme with 12 identities; it’s a combinatorial social game with 144 relationship permutations, every one of them a conversation starter. And that segment-based interaction is what transforms astrology from a descriptive system to a growth system. It’s a key driver why the scheme generates its own content, spreading through social media + group chats while your wildly-overpriced persona/audience insights deck sits ignored somewhere in Google Drive.
To their credit, some brands stumble into this every once in a while. Peloton did with their “Tribes”. The CrossFit affiliate identity. “Apple person” vs. “Android person” has become a self-description. Morning-routine versus night-owl framings are relatively common across DTC wellness. “Pilates Girlie” vs. “Yogi” vs. “Gym Goer” are common in fitness.
The common thread is that none of these were deliberate engineering; they were happy accidents that happened to work, so they persisted. And a big part of the reason why is the nature of the challenge: actually building these segments has precisely zero to do with demographic research or audience insights or persona-building and everything to do with naming – creating segment identities your customers would volunteer for, then building creative angles per identity. That’s a fundamentally different thing to do, and one that rarely (if ever) is even considered/intelligible to the people who do persona/audience insights work.
Apply This To Your Account:
For one product line, replace your demographic segmentation with 3 to 5 claimable identities – names a customer would actually use to describe themselves. Then, run creative variants that speak to each identity’s self-concept rather than its purchase behavior. Watch which identity your best customers claim.
Play #3: Buy credibility with calibrated flaws
Go back to Forer’s statement set from Play #1. None were pure flattery. Each one included gentle criticisms/indictments: “you tend to be critical of yourself”, “you have a strong need for others to like you”, “some of your aspirations are unrealistic.” Modern horoscopes do the exact same thing (just taking some examples from today’s): “Resist the urge to lose your cool” “Your generosity can be exploited.” “You are advised to avoid power struggles with partners or close friends.”
That mild negative IS the credibility mechanism.
People pattern-match flattery to manipulation, and manipulation triggers System 2 to come online. That slows everything down – suddenly you’re scrutinizing each word, realizing that every horoscope could apply to you and questioning the validity of the entire enterprise – all because it was too nice to you.
But, if you package flattery with an acceptably-bitter criticism (i.e. you can be stubborn, you might have a temper, you can be too generous), then your brain interprets the entire thing as a diagnosis, which can be trusted. The really interesting thing is this same principle applies to taste & efficacy.
The reason Buckley’s Mixture tastes terrible isn’t because the ingredients necessarily taste bad (there are plenty of ways to mask/address the unpleasantness that would not impact efficacy); it’s because the taste is the evidence. Buckley’s has had a century to fix it and, since Novartis (later GSK + now Haleon) acquired the brand, a corporate parent with the formulation science to do so trivially. But it declined to do so, then built the entire advertising strategy around the refusal. “It tastes awful. And it works.” is a syllogism: the first clause is the proof of the second.
Strip the awfulness and the efficacy claim becomes unfalsifiable, which is to say worthless. The bitterness is the proof point. They did move laterally with the “Honey” variant (“it tastes less awful. And it works.”) – but kept the original and positioned the new one as a concession. Dan Ariely found (in his 2008 paper The Behavioral Impact of a Higher Price) that the same phenomenon appears with cost: if you increase the price of a painkiller, it increases the efficacy of it. Adding a cost (whether it’s bad taste or a higher price point) has a direct relationship to perceived efficacy.
If you need more proof, look at some of the great case studies of advertising:
- Avis: “We’re No. 2. We try harder.”
- Volkswagen: “Lemon.”
- Buckley’s: “It tastes awful. And it works.”
Each one leverages a small, controlled negative to purchase outsized credibility. Bernbach understood that a message that only self-promotes is viewed skeptically by the target audience, where a message that self-indicts (especially if the indictment is already well-known) earns the right to be heard on everything else it claims.
The conceded flaw (the mild negative, the bitter taste, the higher cost) has a second function that gets less attention and is arguably worth more: qualification. A stated limitation repels precisely the buyers who would have churned, refunded, or 1*’d you, while hardening the conviction of everyone who reads the flaw and thinks, “That doesn’t apply to me” or “I don’t care about that” or – in the ideal case “that just makes me want it more.” It runs the sales-qualification conversation at scale, for free. So honest-limitation creative doesn’t just convert at a higher rate; it converts better customers.
Unfortunately, modern performance creative has almost entirely abandoned this.
If you don’t believe me, go pull up CreativeOS or the Meta Ads Library. You’ll find a litany of unbroken superlatives, walls of glowing, sweeter-than-sugar reviews and precisely 0 conceded weaknesses. That’s a feature, not a flaw, of the current marketing structure: every approval chain optimizes locally. Legal removes the risk. Brand teams remove the edge. The agency removes the discomfort. The product teams demand unceasing celebration of the features. So, what survives the review gauntlet is lukewarm coffee – copy no one objects to and no customer wants.
That makes calibrated candor an arbitrage, a differentiation lever your competitors are organizationally incapable of pulling no matter how obvious the mechanism becomes. Some advantages are protected by patents. This one is protected by a combination of lawyers, org charts + egos, which (ironically) might be more potent than anything else.
Apply This To Your Account:
In your next creative meeting, mandate one honest-limitation angle per concept. “Not the cheapest.” “Overkill if you only need X.” “Takes 2 weeks to feel the difference.” Then watch what conceding a flaw does to believability + to conversion rates on every claim that follows it.
Play #4: Sell the ritual, not the information
Ask what a daily horoscope actually delivers, informationally, and the answer is nothing. Interchangeable, unfalsifiable, forgotten by lunch. Yet the format has survived 100 years of media disruption. It remains one of the most reliably consumed content units in existence.
The reason? The ritual – not the information – is the product. Set cadence, fixed format, 30s consumption, a stable slot in the reader’s day. The horoscope isn’t competing on insight. It’s competing on habit, and habit, once installed, is the cheapest retention mechanism ever devised.
Co-Star didn’t invent it; they just technified it. One push notification per day (“Your day at a glance”) with a cryptic message (and a helpful link to view the rest of your horoscope) IS the content, and millions of people every day participate in the ritual.
This is the primary failure point of modern content marketing: most brands run content entirely backwards. They optimize each unit (email, SMS, blog post, social post, whatever) for standalone quality and ignore the consumption ritual entirely. In practice, that looks like sporadic sends, format changes, inconsistent structures, random (or worse, “tested”) delivery times, etc. Then, those same brands wonder why every campaign starts from zero and retention requires perpetual re-acquisition. The causality here runs one direction: the ritual installs the habit, and the habit is what retention actually is. Consistency is the only input you control, which is probably why it’s the one most teams treat as negotiable. Meanwhile, the entities that own rituals – from Wordle at breakfast to the newsletter you’re reading right now – enjoy stellar retention numbers, far beyond what content quality alone should support. (Yes, I know exactly what I’m doing here. That’s the point.)
Astrology also runs the ritual play at a second timescale: Mercury retrograde. 3-4 times a year, the entire industry (and far too many people in our office) synchronizes around a manufactured “event” with a start date, an end date, prescribed behaviors, and a built-in excuse structure. Then, for ~3 weeks, it dominates group chats, content calendars, and small talk. Structurally, it’s Prime Day: an invented moment generating demand and conversation on schedule and utterly impossible for competitors to copy without looking derivative.
To their credit, some brands still understand this. Macy’s started the Thanksgiving Day Parade as the unofficial opening of the holiday shopping season. Starbucks did the same with the PSL + Fall (though they keep launching it earlier, which is exactly how you ruin a good thing). Spotify Wrapped turned a database query into an annual cultural event with staggering distributional power. But most brands have stopped inventing occasions and started renting everyone else’s: Target Circle Week, Apple Replay, Walmart Deals, the Cyber Monday pile-on. The brands that manufacture moments own the timing of their customers’ attention; everyone else just throws money at the problem.
Apply This To Your Account:
Pick one owned channel, then impose ritual discipline. Same time, same format, same consumption length, a recognizable structural signature. Then hold it long enough for habit formation to take hold. Install reminders + expectation setting (“you’ll get this newsletter once a week, every Sunday, at 9 am”). The returns to consistency arrive on a lag, which is precisely why the short-term, day-to-day obsessed operators never collect them. And if you’re ambitious: invent 1 calendar moment your category doesn’t have yet, name it, and run something around it. Stop being Walmart or Target, start being Spotify or Macy’s.
Play #5: Stop making every claim falsifiable
The genius of astrology is that your horoscope can never be wrong in a way that is actually punished by the customer. “An opportunity will test your patience today” has no failure state. There’s no refund event, no churn trigger, no measurable miss. Astrology engineered failure events out of its business model entirely. It’s honestly brilliant. If you don’t believe me, stop reading this, pull up your horoscope for today (here ya go – I’ll save you a search: Free Horoscopes), and see if you can falsify it. You can’t. There’s nothing “testable” in any of it – “your monthly creative peak is here” “enjoy time with family or friends” “take a chance today” “don’t be afraid to break your routine just a bit” – if I think about it, I’ve (conceivably) done every one of those today.
Performance marketing does the opposite.
We make falsifiable functional promises (3x ROAS, 40% faster, results in 30 days) the central element of our messaging – then live inside the disputes those promises generate. Every falsifiable claim manufactures a potential failure event. Every failure event is a churn trigger and a commoditization vector, because a competitor can beat “40% faster” with “45% faster” or with “same speed, 25% less”
The lesson is not “make unfalsifiable claims about product performance.” (that would be fraud with extra steps; I’m not a lawyer, this isn’t legal advice, YMMV). The lesson is that brands over-index on falsifiable functional claims and chronically under-invest in identity claims: claims about who the customer is and what buying says about them.
- “For people who read the footnotes.”
- “You didn’t come this far to buy the cheap one.”
- “Stop going through life; start living”
- “For people who know tomorrow will be their best day yet”
Identity claims can’t be disproven by a bad week, can’t be undercut on price, and self-reinforce with every exposure – because customers defend claims about themselves far more fiercely than claims about what your product can (or can’t) do. In fact, customers tend to pile on when claims a product/service made are (or appear to be) proven false, because they feel tricked or deceived – and it’s easier to blame the brand than it is to critically assess their own role in the situation. But when claims they have self-subscribed to are attacked, the opposite happens: people defend those claims like Spartans defended the hot gates at Thermopylae.
You’re probably wondering – as I did – why did performance culture drift into this imbalance? The answer? Measurement.
Functional claims produce attributable events: a click, a conversion, a lead in the CRM or a sale in Shopify. Identity claims – in most situations – throw off dividends that attribution can’t see. Branded search that “came from nowhere.” Retention + LTV curves that keep creeping upward month after month, quarter after quarter. Customer lifetime values that are “just better than they should be.” Price insensitivity nobody can assign to anything (so everyone takes credit for it).
The end result is that the claim type that produces compounding returns gets systematically defunded in favor of the claim type that reports well. Marketers have gotten into the bad habit of investing in what measures vs. what works. Then – making matters worse – we let the measurement tools tell us what worked. Astrology, which never had an attribution tool to answer to, invested in the claims that actually build attachment, because that’s the only thing they care about.
Note: this is not a reversal of Play #3. The calibrated flaw has to be falsifiable, because that’s the entire source of its power. A concession that can be checked is a cost the claimant visibly pays, which is the entire mechanism behind costly signaling. You can’t have a cost-free costly signal.
The identity claim does the opposite job. It isn’t evaluated for accuracy; it’s evaluated for fit. Nobody fact-checks “you didn’t come this far to buy the cheap one” (because…how would you? What’s “far”? What’s “cheap”?) The audience members either recognize themselves in it or they don’t. Falsifiability is the mechanism in one case and irrelevant in the other, which is why the 2 coexist, not compete.
The end result is that the strongest brands run a 3-layer claim stack: (1) falsifiable functional claims to win the evaluation, (2) a calibrated concession to earn the right to be believed, and (3) unfalsifiable identity claims to make the relationship durable. Most performance marketing accounts only run the first one, then wonder (or send more emails) to address the problems caused by the lack of #2 and #3.
Apply This To Your Account:
Map your active messaging into functional versus identity claims. If identity claims are under ~25% of the mix, you’ve built a message architecture that’s fully exposed to competitive commoditization. You should treat that as the structural vulnerability + start introducing more (2) and (3) claims into your messaging.
Play #6: Grant permission instead of demanding decisions
Look closely at how horoscopes handle the call to action. “Today is a good day to have that difficult conversation.” “The moment favors bold financial moves.” Structurally, these are CTAs, but they don’t demand a decision. They grant permission for something the reader already wanted to do, with cosmic energy attached (after all, who are you to argue with what the universe (powered by AI) demands?) If it goes well, the stars were right. If it goes badly, the stars were wrong. Either way, the psychological cost of acting got externalized.
That’s the deepest conversion mechanic in the whole system. Most purchase hesitation isn’t informational; the prospect already wants the thing. It’s psychological: the anticipated self-blame of a bad decision, a cost marketers chronically underprice. A purchase that requires full personal ownership of the outcome isn’t competing with your competitor’s offer. It’s competing with not deciding at all, which is free, safe, and blameless. That’s the real conversion killer at the bottom of most funnels. No amount of information fixes it because it was never an information problem.
Standard CTAs (“Buy now,” “Get started”) demand that the prospect own the decision fully. Permission-based framing transfers that ownership. “You’ve earned this.” “Consider this your sign.” “Everyone else already switched.” Social proof, authority, urgency: the classic levers all reduce, mechanically, to the same function. They give the buyer someone or something else to share the decision with.
This is why “treat yourself” built an entire DTC category, why gifting frames outperform self-purchase frames for indulgent products, and why the highest-converting abandoned-cart emails read like absolution rather than pressure. It’s why “as seen in” logos work despite everyone knowing they’re pay-to-play, and why a salesperson’s “honestly, most of my clients start with the smaller package” closes deals significantly higher than the entry-level offer. Each one hands the buyer a co-signer. The prospect isn’t waiting for more information. They’re waiting for permission and someone else to share the blame. So, give it to them – whether that’s their tribe or the stars is irrelevant – and watch your CVR (and usually AOV) rise.
Apply This To Your Account:
Rewrite your bottom-funnel CTAs and retention copy as permission structures rather than decision demands. The question to ask is simple: does this force the reader to own the choice alone, or does it give them cover to do what they already want? You want more of the latter.
The Synthesis
Strip out the star charts and what remains is this: felt personalization through reader participation instead of data. Segments people claim as identity instead of buckets assigned by marketers/analytics/demographics. Credibility purchased with calibrated flaws. Retention built on ritual and manufactured occasions rather than content quality. A claim architecture that proves, concedes, then says who you are. Calls to action that grant permission instead of demanding decisions.
Every one of those mechanisms is available to any brand, right now. None require believing a single word about Mercury or any other cosmic hokum. That’s the actual lesson in this billion-dollar bullshit industry:
Human nature is the constant. Everything else is a channel. So, appeal to human nature. Obsess about Bernbach’s unchanging man. Stop trying to win over System 2 when it’s so much easier to hack System 1.
And – most importantly – go enjoy your Sunday!
Cheers,
Sam
