‘Marketing is the fuel to the fire of consumerism’: Former Amazon veteran Maren Costa

It's 2025 and consumerism has become an intrinsic part of modern life—an ever-present force nudging us to tap, click, and swipe toward immediate gratification. Yet behind this seamless convenience lies a cost that extends far beyond what we pay at checkout. It's a transaction that can trade privacy, surrender personal data, chip away at value systems, and gradually compromise individual agency.

Few people understand this paradox more intimately than Maren Costa. For much of her 15-year tenure at Amazon, she thrived in a culture celebrated for innovation and customer obsession. As the company's first principal UX designer, she helped build the very architecture of digital consumerism that millions now navigate daily—the interfaces that make purchasing frictionless, the systems designed to anticipate desires before they form. Yet as Amazon's scale and speed of operations accelerated, Costa began to question the environmental implications of the systems she helped build and the psychological tools deployed to drive consumption.

"There were several moments that shifted my thinking profoundly," Costa reflects, speaking exclusively to us ahead of her upcoming keynote speech at Campaign's annual 360 conference in May 2025. "Having children reframed my perspective, but what truly jolted me awake was a recruiting event where someone asked about Amazon's sustainability policies. I was stumped for an answer, and I thought, how do I not have an answer to that?"

This moment of professional dissonance catalysed a journey of discovery that would alter her trajectory. Delving into research, Costa uncovered an uncomfortable truth: "I found out that Amazon was failing on every corporate rating scale for sustainability."

The revelation was particularly jarring given the narrative Costa had internalised. "The lie we used to tell ourselves was that ecommerce would be greener than traditional retail because supposedly they're going to optimise shipping schedules. Now you get everything in two hours. So, instead of going to the store for 40 items, you get one item today and another one tomorrow and another one the next day, all in a plus colour. It's completely inefficient."

At first, she attempted to address the concerns within Amazon through established channels, quickly realising these endeavours were futile. "At that time, Amazon had an internal sanctioned employee group called Sustainability Ambassadors. It was just a way to appease employees, to feel like 'we care, we're doing the work.' I felt so mad and dumb,” she says.

This awakening propelled Costa to co-found Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) with colleague Emily Cunningham, gathering like-minded colleagues to advocate for meaningful corporate action. "It's just going to be up to every person to decide how much they're willing to risk," she says of the process. "A lot of that comes with privilege. A lot of these people have that privilege. I had that privilege. I could get fired and still put food on my table the next day. A warehouse worker maybe could not."

The group gained remarkable traction, eventually securing support from more than 8,700 Amazon employees. Their efforts culminated in a protest in September 2019, when more than 1,500 employees walked out in protest of Amazon's climate policies. The corporate response was swift but layered. Publicly, Amazon announced ambitious climate initiatives; privately, the atmosphere chilled, says Costa, "Amazon definitely tried to fire a handful of people, and thereby silence everyone. They did a good job, but they have not shut down the employee movement at all. Every time there's a news story, it's always like 'Amazon says this, but the employees say this.'"

By April 2020, following her vocal support for warehouse workers protesting Covid safety conditions, Costa was terminated alongside Cunningham. The dismissal, which she viewed as retaliatory, triggered a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board that eventually prompted Amazon to settle. Nine US senators wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos questioning the firing. More significantly, it transformed Costa from internal advocate to public activist.

After a reflective period, Costa made a calculated decision to join Microsoft in 2021. "I went to Microsoft for two reasons: I was going to take my big fat tech salary, take half of it, pay two organisers... and then build another tech network." Her strategy reflected an understanding of leverage points: "Tech workers are closest to the seat of power in this world. That was probably my biggest muscle—to do that."

However, the Microsoft experience proved equally disillusioning, albeit in subtler ways. "They have this perfect little savvy touch of making people come in with an 'open door policy'... People confuse audience with influence. They think, 'Oh, I got an audience with the king, and I got to tell him, and he seemed like he was really listening.' Then they do some little thing, write something like 'we listened to our employees and we're going to tweak this little thing.' But how much of a difference will that actually make? None."

This pattern of corporate deflection revealed a deeper structural obstacle. "These systems will not change—the people in power will not give up power without a fight. The thing that no one ever has ever said is 'I have a little bit too much power, let me give you some of mine.' It's never happened. It's going to be a fight. And if we do it together, we will all suffer less if we do it sooner, we will all suffer less,” she says.

Costa left Microsoft in 2022, redirecting her energy toward full-time activism through organisations like the Sunrise Project and Work for Climate. "I went from fifteen brutal years at Amazon, and then getting fired, which was the best thing that's ever happened to me—but it wasn't not stressful," Costa reflects. "And then going right into Microsoft and doing that again, and then leaving Microsoft and literally starting my campaign the next day."

Exposing the hidden price tag

Costa's experiences at the heart of big tech's consumer-driven engines have shaped her perspective on consumerism. These insights gained wider prominence with the 2024 release of the Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy, which examines the hidden costs of modern materialism. The film, in which Costa features prominently, explores how digital interfaces and marketing techniques are deliberately engineered to cultivate compulsive purchasing behaviours.

The documentary's exploration of consumerism's dark patterns has resonated widely, particularly its examination of how marketing techniques harness neurological reward systems. Featuring other industry insiders such as former Adidas brand president Eric Liedtke, Unilever’s former CEO Paul Polman, iFixit’s Kyle Wiens, waste investigator Jim Puckett, and sustainability advocate Anna Sacks, the film dissects the forces driving relentless consumption. For Costa, whose expertise in UX design gave her unique insight into these mechanisms, the film offered a platform to articulate concerns she had harboured throughout her corporate career.

Costa found herself in a uniquely conflicted position—crafting the very interfaces that made consumption effortless whilst growing increasingly aware of their environmental impact. "I would say we can't do this, this is a dark pattern, this is evil, this is wrong," she recalls of her time at Amazon. "But you just can't change it. One person saying 'I'm going to stand on principle' doesn't work. You have to be strategic about it."

This tension between professional expertise and ethical concern provides a lens through which Costa now critiques modern marketing practices. "Marketing is the fuel to the fire of consumerism," she states bluntly. "I get that companies need to sell things—but there's a line between meeting needs and manufacturing desire for stuff that's harmful or unnecessary. Marketers should be asking themselves if they're helping people make better choices or just pushing more consumption."

Costa's critique of consumerism extends beyond environmental impact to examine its psychological toll. "I don't think we're making that choice any more than people chose to smoke cigarettes when they didn't really know how bad they were and there was a cool factor," she observes. "The rule of the system is to make as much money as you can for the lowest cost so that you can keep prices low so that you can keep people buying more. It's Marketing 101."

This confrontation extends to how marketing tactics leverage the vast troves of consumer data harvested through digital interactions. "We pay attention," Costa explains. "We are paying. They are buying, although they aren't buying because they're getting it for free. It's stacked against us; it's not a fair free market. There's tonnes of value being exchanged, but the profit is not being shared."

The marketer's crossroads

When confronted with arguments about capitalism and consumer choice being immutable realities, Costa's response is unequivocal: "If this was really a capitalist market, then we would all be getting paid for our data that we are giving for free and that they are mining for free and that has made them hundreds of billions of dollars. We're allowing ourselves to be told that we're different when we're not. We should stop looking left and right and start looking up and down."

This systematic manipulation of desire, Costa argues, has consequences that marketers must confront. "We're tripping over dollars to pick up pennies. If we don't flip the system, nothing else matters." For companies that claim they're simply responding to consumer demand, her challenge is direct: "If Amazon had to actually pay for their externalised costs, I don't think they would have a viable business model. And so who's picking up the tab? We are. The planet is. Who's benefiting? Jeff Bezos and the biggest stockholders."

At the same time, she recognises the moral quandary many CMOs face. "The irony is that many people in the industry care about these issues personally, but professionally they feel trapped. My advice is to use your position to challenge the brief and question the strategy. Silence is easy, but complicity is costly."

"What's my advice to CMOs?" she considers when asked. "You're standing at a crossroads. You can cling to outdated models and short-term profits, or you can lead the way toward something more sustainable. The world is changing whether you like it or not. The choice is whether you want to be a driver of that change or someone left behind wondering where things went wrong."

She also challenges marketers to interrogate their role in perpetuating consumerism's excesses: "How do you shake people out of that desire for convenience? How do you motivate brands and consumers to stop and say 'Actually this is getting to the point where it's detrimental to me'? It's instant gratification, but at what cost?"

The 99% versus the 1%

As we conclude our conversation, Costa offers a penetrating observation for those who wish to play within the existing system: "People can play the game, but 20 years from now, will they be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water? Will that be worth it? Will they be like, 'Yeah, I made it, but I can't open my windows'? It's just a choice we have to make."

Today, Costa coordinates a global coalition of nonprofits addressing the intersection of technology, consumption, and climate. "We're bringing people together from all over the globe—South Africa, Asia, Africa, South America, Europe, and of course, the United States—all the nonprofits that are working on climate and the intersection of climate and big tech. We can strategise and sort of deduplicate efforts and figure out what's working and what's not."

Her sense of urgency is palpable: "Make your choice. You want to just ride high and die in flames? Or do you want to stand on the right side of history and maybe hope that future generations can have a liveable future as well? It's just a fundamental choice for all of us to make. We are at that, literally, at that crossroads. We need systems that value equality, sustainability, and people over profit. Right now, the systems are set up to produce profit over anything else. All of the systems need to be reset to value human life, human well-being, the planet, all the other species' life, and the planet's well-being.

“We will take leaders. You have your Martin Luther King, your Mahatma Gandhi. But it's never just the one person—they couldn't have gotten to that place if they weren't working with people and building. I'm dedicating my life to trying to get as many people into this fight as I can, because collective action is our biggest lever."

For more of Maren Costa's insights, hear her keynote speech at Campaign360 in Singapore at Marina Bay Sands from May 27 to 28, 2025.