Module overview
Modern marketing platforms allow organisations to understand and reach audiences with extraordinary precision.
Marketers can use:
- Interests
- Behaviours
- Search intent
- Demographics
- Location
- Engagement
- Purchase signals
- Customer data
- Predictive models
- AI-driven optimisation
to decide who sees what, when and where.
Used responsibly, these capabilities can make marketing more relevant and useful.
They can help people find relevant information, reduce unnecessary friction, improve accessibility and connect customers with products and services that genuinely meet their needs.
But targeting becomes more complicated when the marketing relates to someone’s:
- Health
- Finances
- Housing
- Employment
- Legal rights
- Safety
- Emotional wellbeing
In these environments, the same data that helps us identify relevance can also reveal vulnerability.
The same technology that helps us personalise an experience can also be used to influence someone at the moment they are least equipped to make a considered decision.
This creates one of the most important questions in modern regulated-sector marketing:
Just because you can target someone, does that mean you should?
In this module, you’ll explore:
- Why vulnerability changes marketing responsibility
- How algorithms can unintentionally amplify harm
- Where personalisation becomes manipulation
- How transparency and trust can support long-term growth
- How to design audience strategies that achieve commercial objectives responsibly
Most importantly, you’ll learn how to evaluate targeting decisions before they become marketing risks.