Marketing isn’t the art of how to manipulate your audience. It’s the art of understanding how to help your audience in the best way possible.
Defining Marketing vs Manipulation
To marketers and advertisers, the differences between marketing and manipulation are clear — one is good, and the other is bad. To our audiences, predatory marketing has made any attempt at marketing come across as manipulative or even ‘scammy.’ We’ve all seen ads recently that basically just lie just to increase conversions. So, to clear up the differences, here are their definitions:
Marketing
Marketing is the promotion of products or services.
Manipulation
Manipulation is the skilful and intentional use of tactics to influence someone’s decisions to further one’s interests.
Okay. Sounds the same, right? After all, you have to influence and maybe even change people’s decisions to get them to buy products or services.
That’s a conclusion that makes sense after reading those definitions. It’s also wrong. Let me explain. Let’s go back to basics.
Promoting Products and Services
You don’t need to influence anything at all for someone to buy products or services. It doesn’t matter where they are in the funnel, either.
Ask yourself a question: why do products and services exist?
Products and services exist to fulfil a need. They exist to help someone do something. Therefore, they have a target audience who has something they need help with.
I could end this article here. Promoting products and services to an audience that would benefit from them clearly isn’t manipulation because you aren’t influencing anything, just informing them that 1) they have a problem and 2) you can help them with that problem. An optimistic person might even go so far as to say that ads are barely marketing at all and are actually just an extension of the product and/or service.
There’s a clear choice that must be made there, though. If you have to inform your audience they have a problem, do you be 100% honest about it or do you exaggerate? Do they even actually have a problem if they have to be convinced of its existence?
That’s where the lines between marketing and manipulation blur.
Building Trust instead of Exploiting Fear
To me, the difference between marketing and manipulation isn’t in their definitions. It’s in what their methods should consist of. Because, sure, you can definitely use manipulation in marketing. It’s effective and it works very well, at least in the short-term.
Marketing and advertising should be all about building trust. Building trust is a lengthy process but one that yields compounding results. It’s what drives word-of-mouth referrals, good brand loyalty, and high LTVs.
Compare that to manipulation. There are two ways to manipulate someone: exploit their fears or exploit their desires. There is no better way to manipulate someone than by exploiting their fear. The fear of the loss of something they have is much more tangible than the desire to obtain or attain something that they don’t have. That’s not always bad — from 2009 in the UK, manipulation was legally required to be used on cigarette packets to dissuade people from smoking. It worked. This form of print marketing resulted in younger generations largely avoiding cigarettes altogether. However, you are not a governmental body, and you’re probably marketing to get someone to buy a product or service, not stop something they’re already doing.
Even then, if the government kept trying to exploit fear to dissuade people from continuing their habits, there’d be a massive loss in trust and believability and a growing amount of people would no longer care.
By building trust by being honest and actively trying to help your target audience, you’ll develop a long-lasting relationship with your customers and clients that makes them want to buy from you again. Repeat purchases are always the cheapest sales with the highest ROI, and so optimising for anything else is usually terrible for business.
To Summarise: Transparency is the Key to Honest Marketing
Manipulation is distinct from marketing because it lacks honesty. It’s deceitful by nature.
What does that mean for your business?
Failure, to put it bluntly.
So be honest. Be helpful. Be transparent.
In today’s digital age where information — and therefore reviews — are easily found, trying to lie and act in bad faith doesn’t work. Aim to help people, be transparent when you make a mistake (which will just make you more relatable to your audience and make your brand seem more down-to-earth), and your results will compound.
If you’d like to keep up to date with my articles have some more free marketing insights delivered straight to your inbox, sign up to my newsletter — it’ll only take a second.
Tyler L. Sinclair
Leave a Reply