…or When Having Autism Becomes Someone Else’s Marketing Strategy

I recently had two meetings with someone who claimed on LinkedIn to be a Lead Generator. That was the title on the tin. But within minutes, he drifted from lead generation to life coaching, performance psychology and business consulting. In essence, the actual service he was offering was ill-defined. Lead generation, it turns out, was just a Trojan horse for all manner of personal reinvention. And, apparently, I was his latest victim.

The conversation turned to my story. Because these days, everybody has to have a story, right? Gone are the days where you could just be good at your job and keep your personal life out of focus, even secret. Now it is all about narrative, identity, branding, backstory. If you don’t have a story, don’t worry, someone will help you find one. They will package it, optimise it and post it. Vulnerability, in particular, seems to sell rather well.

So, when asked what my vulnerability is, I gave my very practised sideways answer that I give all consultants who want to work with me:

“I’m somewhere between 1970s Woody Allen, 1990s Mr Bean and the Rain Man.”

I say this as a kind of test, a social diagnostic. It is my way of saying I am neurodivergent. I want to see what they do with that.

What they are supposed to do is laugh, a little confused, and move on. Some tell me that they can already see one of those three. Usually, Mr Bean or a Woody Allen. Sometimes this causes belly laughs because I am putting my finger on something they had sensed already: “I definitely see the Woody Allen”. When people say that, that they had already made that connection, I find it very funny.

But others, like this lead gen guy, fixate on this, particularly the Rain Man part. They want to capitalise on it, use it as an angle, a differentiator and a brand position.

“You could really build something around the autism”, he said. “Look at what you have achieved. We can run with that.”

The thing is: I do not mention Rain Man lightly. I say it because it is true. That portrayal, while cinematic and limited, wasn’t far off. I’m just a bit more higher functioning than the character in the movie. I basically have the same neurotype. My using this image is not a metaphor. It is my life.

And turning that into a marketing asset is, frankly, horrific to me.

This Is a Trend

Last year, I was interviewing marketing companies in Leeds, UK. You know the company type: purveyors of bubble gum, who use words like “journey” as a verb. They wanted to pitch the same thing. They wanted to use neurodivergence as the hook. They were not being particularly unkind or exploitative in the cartoon villain sense. But their angle was clear: the personality was the asset, the company, the product and the service came secondary.

I did understand the logic. I have worked in business long enough to see how stories move people, but I also know how alienating this is. I am not part of a TikTok ADHD fad (sidebar note: apparently, this has created a 20-year waiting list in Leeds alone for clinical assessments for ADHD). I am not a content pillar. This is not a funny or interesting quirk about me. I have only recently come to terms with it.

The interesting thing is not once did the lead generation guy or the marketing company consider the possibility that there might be other people within my company: other directors and staff. Because there are. Besides the discomfort of placing neurodivergence as the centrepiece of the ‘story’, how would this represent the company as a whole? How would it be relevant to the team I have in Guatemala or the staff I have in places like Algeria or Philippines?

Disclosure, Non-Disclosure and Not Knowing

I have been all kinds of neurodivergent professional:

·       The one who had no idea, who just thought work felt harder for me than anyone else in my team and did not understand why, like I felt I was missing a rulebook or entering a movie that started 25 minutes beforehand.

·       The one who knew but did not tell, who masked in meetings, mirrored others’ behaviours, learned the rhythms of eye contact and small talk, but overdid what I considered ‘normal’ behaviour to the extent of it looking like caricature. Everything was a performance.

·       The one who names it but does not necessarily (want to) disclose it. And when it is named, it is not done so as an excuse or a headline, but as an explanation, a quiet fact of life, just like being left-handed or nearsighted.

This is what both the marketing company and the lead generation person missed entirely: disclosure is not an invitation. It is not a brand story or PR opportunity. Disclosure was only an FYI: “Here is something you might need to know so we can work together better”. That is all. What you do with that information tells me more about you than it says about me.

The disclosure was intended to land quietly, albeit delivered in a funny way.  It was not intended to be made the centre of everything. It was not to be adapted for a story or content.

Causing Harm

Mr Lead Gen guy, who has no defined service or strategy to speak of, if I reference Rain Man with a half-smile, I was not giving him something to work with. I was actually asking him to leave it alone.

This was all a month ago, but to be honest, I felt – and still feel - harmed by him. This was Harm #1.

Harm #2 came as a postscript. After informing Mr. Lead Gen guy that I was not interested in going forward with his ‘service’ (a bundle of services?? I am still not sure), he spoke to a mutual acquaintance, apparently puzzled by my resistance to his autism-focused marketing strategy (I forgot to mention that it became a marketing strategy now). He framed it as me not wanting to “focus on that mental health problem.”

Let me be clear:

Autism is not a mental health problem!

It is a neurodevelopmental condition. It is a cognitive difference that affects perception, processing and interaction. A “mental health problem” affects sanity, stability and emotional wellness.

To mislabel it like that, in a professional context, after being explicitly told otherwise, is not just ignorance. It causes harm.

This man is a fraud.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, June 2025