Dissecting Deception
How Understanding the Formula Industry’s Exploitative Marketing Tactics Helps Shield Us From Their Effects
Forewarned is forearmed.
That old saying has never been more relevant than it is in the modern infant-feeding landscape, because today’s formula marketing is rarely just about selling a product. It’s about shaping culture. It’s about controlling language. It’s about deciding what can be said, what can be asked, what should feel normal, and - perhaps most importantly - what should suddenly feel uncomfortable.
Once you start to see these tactics, you can’t unsee them. And once you understand them, they begin to lose their power.
That’s why it’s worth slowing down and dissecting one particularly revealing advertisement from Bobbie - an ad that, at first glance, might look progressive, compassionate, or inclusive, but on closer inspection reveals something far more calculated.
The headline reads:
“How’s breast feeding going?”
The word breast is deliberately crossed out.
Beneath it, in bold, unmistakably assertive language, are two words:
“Don’t assume.”
Two words. That’s all it takes.
And yet those two words carry enormous psychological weight.
They’re not gentle. They’re not curious. They’re not inviting conversation. They’re corrective. Confrontational. Almost accusatory. They immediately put the viewer on the back foot, creating the subtle but unmistakable feeling that perhaps you’ve already done something wrong.
Suddenly, asking a mother a completely normal, caring, biologically appropriate question - “How’s breastfeeding going?” - feels risky. Insensitive. Potentially offensive. You find yourself second-guessing your own instincts, wondering whether you’ve crossed some invisible line.
And if that happened - if you felt even slightly unsettled, slightly corrected, slightly demonized for asking what would once have been considered a caring and supportive question - then the ad has already achieved its goal.
Because this isn’t really advertising.
It’s behavioral conditioning.
Why target the question itself?
Because questions create conversations. Conversations create support. And support protects breastfeeding.
Breastfeeding doesn’t succeed in isolation. It thrives when mothers are asked how things are going. When partners check in. When grandmothers share experience. When friends ask if latch is comfortable, if sleep is manageable, if milk transfer seems good, if help is needed. Those conversations matter. They often make the difference between a temporary hurdle and early supplementation.
And formula companies understand that.
If those conversations happen, breastfeeding rates rise.
If breastfeeding rates rise, formula sales fall.
So rather than attacking breastfeeding directly - which would be obvious, clumsy, and likely backfire - a far more sophisticated strategy is to attack the conversation around breastfeeding itself.
Make people afraid to ask.
Make healthcare providers over-correct.
Make family members hesitate.
Make friends stay quiet.
Make society whisper.
Because if discussion of breastfeeding can be shut down, support often disappears with it.
And when support disappears, milk supply often follows.
That’s what makes this ad so interesting. It doesn’t simply sell formula. It attempts to redefine what is socially acceptable to talk about.
Notice what replaces “How’s breastfeeding going?”
The approved alternative becomes:
“How’s feeding going?”
At first glance, it sounds harmless. Inclusive, even.
But linguistically, it does something extraordinarily powerful: it erases biological specificity.
It subtly suggests that breastfeeding, formula feeding, pumping, bottle feeding—it’s all simply “feeding.” All equivalent. All interchangeable. All equally natural. All equally challenging. All equally valid as biological strategies.
But we know that isn’t true.
Breastfeeding is the biological norm. Human milk is the species-specific food. Formula is an industrial substitute designed to fill a gap when human milk is unavailable or insufficient. Those are not identical realities, medically, biologically, economically, or developmentally.
And yet if language can erase that distinction, culture often follows.
That is the real power of ads like this.
And the aggression is telling.
Why so aggressive?
Because these companies have to be.
Think about what they’re competing against.
Not another brand.
Not another product.
Not another technology.
They’re competing against human milk—living, adaptive, immunologically active, species-specific nourishment produced by the mother at no financial cost.
That’s an almost impossible competitor.
So if you can’t compete biologically, you compete psychologically.
You compete culturally.
You compete socially.
You make breastfeeding feel awkward to discuss. Personal. Potentially offensive. Politically loaded. You make support feel intrusive. You make assumptions feel dangerous.
And suddenly formula doesn’t have to be biologically superior.
It just has to feel socially safer.
That’s not product innovation.
That’s cultural engineering.
And perhaps the most revealing part of this ad is its challenge: “Don’t assume.”
But it raises an important question:
Don’t assume… what exactly?
Is it unreasonable to assume a mother might breastfeed?
Of course not.
It’s biologically normal to assume a woman can breastfeed. It’s biologically normal to assume she may want to breastfeed. It’s biologically normal to assume a baby would benefit from human milk. It’s biologically normal to assume that a mother who has breastfed before may choose to do so again. It’s biologically normal to assume intended parents, adoptive parents, or surrogate families may seek screened donor milk.
And it’s worth remembering that true primary lactation failure appears to affect only a small minority of women—often estimated in the low single digits under optimal support conditions, depending on definitions and study populations.
In other words, breastfeeding is not the unusual assumption.
It’s the normal assumption.
What’s unusual is being told that acknowledging biological reality is somehow insensitive.
And that may be the most manipulative part of all.
The ad makes the caring person feel like the problem.
The grandmother.
The sister.
The doula.
The friend.
The colleague.
The person simply asking:
“How’s breastfeeding going?”
They’re subtly made to feel intrusive. Judgmental. Outdated. Even harmful.
Meanwhile, the real manipulation - the deliberate effort to silence conversations that protect breastfeeding - is happening in plain sight.
That’s classic inversion.
Make the helper feel guilty.
Make the caring question feel dangerous.
Make biology feel controversial.
And then step in with the “safe” alternative.
Once you understand this tactic, it starts to lose its power.
The next time you hear phrases like:
“Don’t assume.”
“Fed is best.”
“All feeding journeys are the same.”
“No questions asked.”
pause for a moment and ask a different question:
Who benefits if breastfeeding becomes harder to talk about?
Who benefits if friends stop asking?
If family stops checking in?
If healthcare providers become afraid to name breastfeeding directly?
If biology is erased and industrial feeding becomes just another neutral “choice”?
The answer is rarely mothers.
And it’s certainly not babies.
It’s the companies whose profits depend on silence.
And once you see that…
their language starts to lose its power.
Because deception, once dissected, becomes much harder to swallow.