I spent years believing that being reasonable was a virtue. I thought that if someone I cared about — a partner, a colleague, a close friend — kept pushing after I said no, the burden was on me to be clearer. I believed that if I could find the right metaphor, stay calm enough or strike the perfect emotional note, they would finally understand. I wanted them to see my no as human, valid and final. But they never did. They were not listening. They were waiting.
I eventually realized that when someone is singularly focused on their own outcome, your boundary is not a signal. It’s a hurdle. Every time I softened my stance to “keep the peace,” I reinforced a lie — that my limits were flexible. When I finally stopped playing along and made my “no” non-negotiable, the mask fell off. No one said, “I respect your boundary.” Instead, I got anger, withdrawal and the victim card. They did not want a relationship. They wanted access.
Now, when I look at the technology we use every day, I see that same predatory persistence. Boundary violations in tech are not accidents. They are the business model.
The data of silence
Relationships and partnerships are built on reciprocity. If you are talking to someone and they do not respond, you can feel it. It’s awkward. You start to wonder whether you have overstepped.
Now look at a modern onboarding sequence. You sign up for a service and are immediately hit with 12 emails you never asked for. You do not open any of them. You offer complete, icy silence. These companies brag about being data-driven. They know you are not engaging. They see the zeros on their dashboards.
In any real relationship, silence is a signal. It means stop. In martech, silence is treated as a temporary delay. The system assumes that if it keeps talking long enough, your attention will eventually return. What starts as onboarding quickly feels like pressure — automated, impersonal and detached from the very data these systems claim to respect.
Dig deeper: How to build trust and loyalty in retail with reception marketing
The persistence of the machine
Marketers often describe today’s consumers as disloyal or distracted. That framing misses the structural reality. People aren’t disengaging because they don’t care. They’re disengaging because they’re saturated — subscriptions, alerts, messages, economic pressure and cognitive load. Another relationship doesn’t feel enriching. It feels extractive.
You see this in the subtle re-prompting baked into everyday systems. You turn off location tracking or ad personalization on Google, only for a “product update” to gently resurface the same choice six months later. Nothing is technically violated, but the burden of maintaining the boundary quietly shifts back to you. The system treats your preference as temporary — a no that just hasn’t been turned into a yes yet.
I felt the teeth of this recently with E-ZPass. My credit card on file expired. The tolls continued and the data was clear. Payments weren’t clearing. There was no mystery to solve. New York’s system saw the pattern and treated it as routine maintenance. “Your balance is negative. Please pay.”
New Jersey’s system, by contrast, was designed for attrition. It treated each toll as a separate violation. Four tolls became four $50 penalties. Within months, it escalated to collections. Fixing it meant sacrificing an entire afternoon to reach a human who could apply judgment to a situation the system already understood.
The system wasn’t designed to listen. It was designed to outlast me. It relied on the assumption that I would eventually pay to end the friction.
This is where the conversation often gets oversimplified. Persistence itself isn’t the problem. Unchanneled persistence is. Building anything meaningful requires staying with hard problems. Progress demands effort. But persistence aimed at wearing someone down isn’t commitment. It’s coercion. When pressure replaces permission, trust erodes.
The contract of adhesion
When these systems cause harm, they hide behind policy. Today’s privacy policies and terms of service aren’t statements of care. They are gotcha documents. They exist to say, “You agreed,” not, “We understood.”
This is the contract of adhesion — a take-it-or-leave-it agreement written by one side and imposed on the other. You don’t meaningfully agree. You comply, or you’re excluded. If refusal isn’t real, consent isn’t real.
Marketing systems have internalized this logic:
- Ignore silence.
- Reinterpret no as “not yet.”
- Make the cost of leaving higher than the cost of staying.
Dig deeper: Privacy is the new currency in digital marketing
The ‘no means no’ martech manifesto
Trust isn’t built through persistence. It’s built through restraint. It’s built by honoring a limit even when it costs you a lead. These principles can help shift your company away from contracts of adhesion and toward systems that respect trust and customer agency.
- Treat no as a state, not a suggestion: No isn’t feedback to optimize against. It’s a condition. Store it. Respect it. If the user didn’t ask again, don’t ask again.
- Make boundaries boring: No clever copy. No “Are you sure?” No “Remind me later” buttons: one choice, one outcome, one time.
- Put persistence into the product, not the person: Persist in solving the user’s problems. Don’t persist in wearing them down. If it takes pressure, it isn’t permission.
- Flip your KPIs — reward exit, not entrapment: Measure clean exits. If you had to drag someone back with a win-back sequence, you didn’t win. You exhausted them.
- Silence is not a yes: Stop treating nonresponse as a challenge. If they didn’t answer, that is the answer.
- Say less. Mean it more: Trust is built through consistency. Say what you’ll do. Do it. Stop there.
The strategic trust audit
Run your automated systems through this humanity check before you hit deploy.
- The persistence check: If a user denies a request, such as location access or newsletter signups, how long do you wait before asking again? If the answer isn’t “until they change it in settings,” you’re violating a boundary.
- The friction test: Count the clicks it takes to sign up versus the clicks it takes to leave. If the off-ramp is longer than the on-ramp, you’re using a contract of adhesion.
- The silence audit: Look at your dormant users. Are you still sending “We miss you” emails? If they haven’t responded in 90 days, your system should move to respectful silence rather than increasing volume.
- The magic phrasing filter: Are you using clever or quirky copy to make opting out feel like a mistake, such as “No thanks, I prefer paying full price”? If so, that’s emotional blackmail, not marketing.
Everything that actually improves life — companies that last, products that matter, relationships that deepen — exists because someone stayed with a hard problem longer than others were willing to. Persistence is how trust is earned over time. It’s how commitments are honored when they become inconvenient. It’s how progress happens when early signals are messy or incomplete. For people, persistence builds skill, resilience and agency. For companies, it turns good intentions into reliable behavior. For society, it’s the difference between short-term compliance and long-term confidence.
But persistence only works when it’s aimed in the right direction. It should be directed toward listening better, not pushing harder. Toward improving relevance, not increasing volume. Toward fixing real problems, not extracting a little more attention. The moment persistence shifts from serving a person to wearing them down, it stops being effort and becomes coercion. That’s where systems break.
Dig deeper: Adopting consent-based analytics for long-term marketing success
What real persistence looks like
When persistence replaces permission, pressure substitutes for clarity. When endurance is mistaken for desire, trust erodes. People don’t feel valued. They feel managed. And once a system teaches people that their boundaries will be tested rather than respected, disengagement becomes a rational response.
The strongest systems aren’t the loudest or most relentless. They know when to stop. They respect limits the first time. They treat no as final, not provisional. When people know their boundaries will be honored, they don’t need to be chased. They return on their own. That’s what real persistence looks like.
Fuel up with free marketing insights.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.