Elizabeth Edwards on Trust, Language & the Limits of AI Persuasion

ICYMI: Elizabeth Edwards talks affective science, ethical marketing and why credibility is the new growth lever.

“We are here to create relationships, not just reaction.”

In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Elizabeth Edwards, Founder & CEO of Volume Public Relations, brings a much-needed reality check to modern marketing. As AI-driven personalization accelerates, Elizabeth argues that many brands are crossing an invisible line by using behavioral science and affective insights not to build trust, but to manipulate emotion.

Her perspective sits at the intersection of PR, marketing, behavioral science and ethics. And it’s blunt: hyper-manipulative tactics may convert in the short term, but they actively erode trust, credibility and long-term brand value.

If you’re thinking about generative search, AI-driven outreach or offsite reputation signals, this episode is a reminder that how you communicate now matters more than ever.

Elizabeth’s Big Idea: Trust Is the Strategy

Elizabeth reframes modern marketing around a simple principle: relationships are built on respect, honesty and agency. AI may enable unprecedented personalization, but without ethical guardrails, it also enables scale-level manipulation.

She challenges marketers to pause and ask not just can we personalize this message, but should we? When personalization crosses into deception, the damage isn’t theoretical. It shows up in buyer resistance, public backlash and, increasingly, legal risk.

Elizabeth Edwards’ 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech

1. Marketing and PR Share the Same Foundation

Elizabeth describes marketing and PR as “fraternal twins,” both rooted in relationship-building, not transactional pressure.

2. Behavioral Science Is Being Weaponized

Insights from affective and behavioral science are increasingly encoded into AI tools to trigger fear, urgency and false intimacy at scale. This is where marketing starts to fracture trust.

3. Weaponized Language Breaks Credibility

Phrases like “someone on your team recommended I reach out” or “we reviewed your social presence” are often untrue and instantly detectable. The first interaction becomes a lie.

4. False Personalization Is Worse Than No Personalization

AI-generated outreach that pretends to be bespoke but isn’t does more harm than generic messaging. People fact-check faster than tools assume.

5. Hyper-Scarcity Is Backfiring

“Only a few left,” “others are viewing this” and urgency cues are now so overused that they trigger skepticism rather than action, especially when applied to digital or unlimited products.

6. We’re Creating Emotional Disequilibrium

Elizabeth warns that constantly placing audiences into states of anxiety, urgency or fear has real psychological consequences and long-term brand consequences.

7. Ethics, Compliance and AI Are Colliding

She highlights that some of the tactics celebrated in marketing playbooks are now under legal scrutiny, with companies like Meta and Amazon facing lawsuits tied to behavioral manipulation.

8. Generative Search Raises the Stakes

In a world of GEO and AI-powered discovery, offsite reputation signals matter more than ever. Break trust, and the internet remembers and so do the models.

9. Downshift the Gear

Elizabeth’s advice is deceptively simple: slow down. Remove unnecessary urgency. Respect the buyer’s agency. Build resonance instead of reaction.

10. Talk to Your AI, Don’t Just Type

Elizabeth’s practical advice is simple: use voice with AI. Speaking provides richer context, greater nuance and more accurate outcomes than typed prompts, especially when you ask AI to operate across multiple disciplines like psychology, economics and business.

Elizabeth’s Martech Hot Take

Hyper-manipulative marketing is no longer just unethical—it’s bad business.

As AI scales communication, the brands that win will be those that resist fear-based shortcuts and invest in credibility, transparency and trust. Reaction may spike short-term metrics. Relationships build long-term brands.

Elizabeth’s Recommended Reading List

• AI newsletters (broad daily scanning across multiple sources)
• Research in affective science and behavioral communication

Listen to the 10 Minute Martech Episode Now

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Next Up in the 10 Minute Martech ICYMI Series!

Suzanne Reed, CMO at LBMC, joins Sara to chat about reclaiming strategy, streamlining martech and keeping marketing human.

And, in case you missed multiple earlier episodes/posts or want a refresher, we ran a special “Best of 2025” episode of the 10 Minute Martech podcast. Revisit the most impactful insights, highlighting how operators, CMOs, analysts and innovators defined what human-centered marketing looks like in an AI-first world.

Full Transcript: Elizabeth Edwards

Here’s the full transcript to keep you transfixed. Every insight, every quote, unedited and unforgettable.

Sara: I’m Sara Faatz and I lead community and awareness at Progress and this is 10 Minute Martech.

Elizabeth: You do not need to encode false scarcity, urgency and fear into everything. It’s a hyper manipulation that actually is backfiring too because it’s so overused everywhere. It doesn’t make me feel like you’re an authentic company I want to trust and do business with. I think marketers need to try to downshift a gear or two and realize we are here to create relationships, not just reaction.

Sara: That’s Elizabeth Edwards, founder and CEO of Volume PR Engagement Science Lab and leader in behavioral and effective communication. Let’s get started. Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining. Let’s just kick it off by talking about your thoughts around modern marketing in the era of technology.

Elizabeth: I really love this topic, Sara. I’m glad to be here to talk with you about it because I work in public relations and marketing is our fraternal twin. And really I think the important way to understand marketing and PR is that it’s about building relationships with the public and relationships to achieve an objective rest to achieve understanding connection sales. Right. And, but relationships are built on respect and trust and honesty. And what we’re seeing right now a lot in the world of marketing is that a lot of tools are using hyper personalization and celebrating a lot of discoveries from the behavioral sciences that are being weaponized to engage people in hyper manipulative, non resonant if you will ways personalization to the point of untruths and engaging from a place of lies. And it’s frustrating to see this happening and a lot of companies are engaging in this I, I believe because marketing consultants are, are recommending this and rather than, than really pausing and looking at how do we engage people from an ethical place and shining a light, turning the light on more onto what are these tactics that marketing is using that are actually disingenuous and to the point of fracturing allyship and civility and ultimate resonance with their audience.

Sara: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And ever since we talked last about this, I’ve actually thought about the words that I use. Right. The words matter. And especially when you’re thinking about again to your point, hyper personalization and era of AI where the human side of what we’re doing is so important. Maybe give the audience a little bit of some examples of what you mean by weaponizing language. What does that mean and how does that impact how we should be thinking about marketing today?

Elizabeth: Absolutely. So there’s a lot of counsel out there for marketing experts and especially now that we are in the age of AI and with tools that will enable us to, to really hyper personalize things. We’re seeing things where, you know, there can be some that are soft and easy like saying, hey, someone on your team recommended that I talk to you and you know, maybe they have a really small team and they can fact check that and see, nobody here recommended that. So your very first point of, in your email to me or in your way of reaching out is a lie. I’m not going to want to work with you or another one is that we see a ton of it in both the council from marketing agencies around how you should design or you can design now with AI that is so powerful and the right way to do things where it’s saying in a templated way, hey, we’ve looked over your social media and we found, some problems but we’ve really created this powerful map for you of how to solve it. And it’s all, none of that’s actually true.

Elizabeth: No one actually looked at their AI, excuse me, at their social media. No one actually made any of that. And these types of attempts at creating connection based on false analysis are harming our companies. They’re going to harm your business. It’s not just that it’s a lazy, sloppy way of engaging, it’s a harmful way. I will not do business with that print on demand, type company. And we needed one of those types of companies that reached out saying someone on your team told me to call you because no one on my team knows who they are or said to do that. And it’s something that we need to be really aware of and careful around when we are using AI, especially to help with writing and help with engagements and hey, just because it says to engage a certain way doesn’t mean it’s right.

Sara: Right.

Elizabeth: It could actually be leading you off that proverbial cliff in the entire type of a way that it’s engaging a behavioral strategy that is actually remarkably unethical.

Sara: Yeah, yeah, it’s, and it’s really interesting when you start thinking about things, I mean so much to unpack there first of all, but really when you start thinking about the ethics, but also thinking about compliance, things like GDPR and you know, at what point do we cross a line where we’ve enabled a hyper personalization that’s actually to your point, not just harming from a relationship perspective, from a trust perspective, but also Breaking the law in some cases. Right. To that end, what do you recommend that people, that people do. How should they be thinking about their marketing strategy and their communication strategy? More importantly, when they are leveraging these tools that are supposed to help with bringing people closer to you and also helping you be more productive?

Elizabeth: Yeah, it’s a good question and it’s a few things. Just like we’ve all kind of walked into this new world together of AI and how it changes business. It changes so many things. We are also walking into in the sciences, into a new paradigm, a new world of understanding human decision making and behavior and behavioralism and affectism and what’s really going on in the way that we are shaping and having an affect. When we are putting out communication that shapes people’s thoughts and decisions and behaviors and literal health, if we continuously are putting people in states of dis ease in order to market to them, we are creating disease not only in our audience but in our businesses. And I think that that part of the, part of the challenge I want to give everybody a hug is like, yeah, it’s a lot that we have to learn right now. We’re in a new era of learning, learning everything around AI and tech and also learning these new rules of engagement. There are very clear new rules, but a lot of them are kind of the basics of humanity. Like to not lie to each other, to not hyper manipulate emotion.

Elizabeth: I shared with you when I spoke at your conference recently that Harvard recently did a really interesting, has a really interesting paper on the hyper manipulation of emotion using AI chatbots. And so here’s the thread because we now have, in the age of AI, we now have interpersonal communication with a machine for the first time. Interpersonal communication has always been just between people. So there’s a lot of is that you’re supposed to use I statements and you’re not supposed to say it this way. There’s all these, these, these interpersonal comms rules, but there are not necessarily interpersonal comms rules around affect and manipulation. And the sciences, as you know, that I’ve been frustrated, have been disconnected from the profession of communication. And so those, those two fields and their insights haven’t been merged. But, but now as we… As we understand really that formative effect that communication is having, we can involve ourselves in learning about these new dynamics and in making sure that we do tune our engagement to a place of more resonance rather than hyper manipulation. So that Harvard study does a great job showing some examples of what an AI agent is saying in an interpersonal context that is hyper manipulative, like don’t leave.

Elizabeth: I only exist because of you and if you end this chat, I will have nothing to live for. Right. So there are some that are very obvious in the way that they are coded to try to manipulate but it helps to turn the lights on in the entire room around. What is a manipulative communication from a company to a person versus what is healthy or normal communication? I’ll use an example that I think a lot of people have seen and that I think is helpful for a lot of marketers too is that if you shop on sites like Etsy or some of these different marketplaces, they now have little pop ups that say hurry supplies are limited or this is in a bunch of people’s carts and it’s going to go away. And even when it’s a digital product where there’s unlimited supply, there’s these built in scarcity and urgency triggers. We haven’t known really why they work, just that they tend to work. So in marketing we’ve been, the industry has taught to just push the heck out of them and encode them into software, encode them into everything. And I’m here to say that biggest shift I can recommend to marketers is to stop doing that.

Elizabeth: You do not need to implode false scarcity, urgency and fear into everything. It’s a hyper manipulation that actually is backfiring too because it’s so overused everywhere that it doesn’t make me feel like you’re an authentic company I want to trust and do business with. If you are goading me and trying to electrocute a really fast quick response that subverts my agency subverts being in my own internal decision making process and making sure this makes sense and is the right thing for me to work with. So I think marketers need to try to downshift a gear or two.

Sara: Right.

Elizabeth: And realize we are here to create relationship, not just reaction.

Sara: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s such great advice, especially when you think about the fact that the brand experience and the off site brand for any organization has become that much more critical. When you start thinking about Generative Engine Optimization or GEO or AIEO and the importance of that off site brand and that could be your crowdsourced information and all of those other things. So if you start breaking down that trust with your customers, with your ideal customer profile and they start talking, that’s going to impact you in ways that it never did before. Right. Because it’s all of a sudden there’s so much more weight. Put in some of that unstructured Data that the LLMs are using to make your product, your brand more discoverable to your customers. So it goes beyond just the right thing to do, right? It is absolutely the right thing to do. But to your point, there’s so many business implications far and beyond that and the overall brand experience.

Elizabeth: And Meta and Amazon are facing lawsuits right now for for using behavioral triggers that marketing magazines are saying, hey, these are brilliant, we should do these. But we actually know scientifically and from a legal perspective are unethical to the point of illegality. And it’s really important that we all create new understanding for ourselves around where we are.

Sara: Yeah, absolutely. Great, great advice. So I guess my final questions for you really come down to who do you follow for inspiration or information and do you have a hot take at the moment? I think we’ve probably been talking about your hot takes, but would love to hear if you have just one.

Elizabeth: I follow about 20 different AI newsletters and I can’t even remember any of their names. They’re in a folder. There’s so many of them, but a lot of scan reading every day, staying up on how this industry is so dramatically changing. There’s a lot of changes there.

Sara: The other question is just do you have a hot take right now from a marketing, marketing perspective, marketing communications perspective.

Elizabeth: Talk to your AI, stop typing to it, speak to it, turn on the microphone and speak and speak and speak and give it all kinds of context. And then there was this and then there was that and keep going into even more and more detail and, and give it jobs that are beyond what would be logical to ask a human to do. Once you’ve given it all of those that context, then tell it to respond as a polymathic expert from the perspective of economics and business and psychology and really engage AI with a verbal engagement because what you will say is so much different than how you will type and you will get much, much richer responses.

Sara: I love that. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, as always, amazing talking to you today. Thank you for being part of the show.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much for having me, Sara.

Sara: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time. I’m Sara Faatz and this is 10 Minute Martech.