I sold a product for years that worked. Customers came back. Athletes swore by it. They told friends, who bought it too, and the enthusiasm was not staged.
The product carried a hologram, and the explanation we gave customers borrowed the logic of a cassette tape: the tape itself emits nothing, yet a cassette player can read the pattern stored on it. A human being cannot read a hologram the way a tape deck reads magnetic patterns. That comparison was the best answer we had when someone asked how the thing actually worked.
The results gave a plainer answer. Several double-blind tests looked for bio-energy, resonance and a physical mechanism of action and found none. The data pointed to one explanation: placebo.
What placebo actually is
Thousands of customers felt the effect anyway, and that response has a name: placebo, one of the best-studied mechanisms in medicine. It is measurable, reproducible and grounded in physiology. Expectation changes the body. Pain eases, muscles tense, hormone levels shift. Belief triggers real biology.
Medicine has built this fact into its own rules. Every drug trial factors in the placebo effect, because placebo does work; a medication earns approval only once it beats it in the same trial. The people who felt something from my product were responding to the same mechanism a hospital measures every time it tests a new pill.
Which left me with the harder part. If the studies were right, I had spent years selling expectation, staging and a customer’s own wish for the product to work, backed by no active substance and no demonstrable technology.
The meeting
I remember rooms where a sentence got rewritten four or five times until it stopped just short of a medical claim: worded to slip past a regulator’s definition of a drug claim while a customer still heard a promise of relief in it. If doubt remained after the fifth draft, a testimonial went in beside it, or a name people recognised. Nobody in the room asked whether the claim was true. The only question that mattered was whether it felt true to the person about to pay for it.
Set next to medicine’s own rules, that standard has a shape worth naming. A doctor works inside a fence: a placebo cannot be sold as medication, an unproven effect cannot be claimed, and ethics boards and approval processes exist to hold both lines. Inside that fence, a good doctor still relies on the placebo effect constantly: through attention, how a diagnosis gets explained and the trust built during the appointment. That reliance is ordinary medical skill.
Marketing has no comparable fence, or a much lower one that is easy to route around. A wellness pitch rarely claims a cure. It offers to let the customer feel a difference, and the customer does feel it, having wanted to feel it from the moment they walked in.
Politics runs on the same current from a different angle. A story persuades a voter for reasons that have little to do with whether it is accurate: it answers a need for safety, belonging or a simple answer to a complicated question. The relief a voter feels reading that story is real even when its premise is thin.
The category with no good name
The suspicion that the product was placebo had been sitting with me long before any of this got written down; it did not arrive as a sudden discovery. What changed was realising that placebo occupies a category of its own, distinct from both a lie and a proven truth, one for which the language I grew up thinking in has no good word.
That gap is partly cultural. English and German both compress states triggered by belief and attention into a single vague term like “mindfulness.” Other traditions, East Asian ones especially, built a finer vocabulary for these states over centuries of paying closer attention to them than mine did. A missing word still hides the mechanism from the seller and the buyer alike, each one lacking the term for what is actually happening between them.
Effect is winning
Right now, effect is outcompeting truth in more markets than the one I worked in. A coaching programme that sounds factually correct and produces a quick burst of motivation sells better than an accompaniment through real change, one that asks more of the client and delivers a slower, harder-won kind of clarity. A candidate who promises security wins votes even when that security is bought by excluding someone else, a trade that turns the promise into an illusion and feeds the next round of conflict. A supplement or a fitness product needs no proof that it works, only packaging convincing enough to suggest it.
The chain behind all three cases is short and repeats without exception. Expecting an effect makes a person more likely to feel one. Feeling it convinces them the belief was earned. Once convinced, they pay a price for it that has nothing to do with what the product can actually deliver. That is what a normal nervous system does once it has been told what to expect.
I spent years running that chain deliberately, then refining it. Some people called that good marketing. Others called it charlatanism. Both descriptions fit the person I was, and neither one changes what I actually learned: truth and effect are not the same category, and confusing them is how a seller, a customer or a voter ends up making a decision they would not have made with the difference in view.