The Beautiful Game: Football, Marketing and the Art of Manipulation
December's quick read is about The Beautiful Game - the game of marketing that is, and how much marketing and manipulation have in common, along with some insight into what you can do to improve messaging with your own marketing.
When thinking about how to market their products or services, business owners tend to focus more on what they do rather than waiting to find out what their prospective customers or clients actually need, and it is surprisingly common behaviour.
However, it's not what comes naturally to us. Children are masters of manipulation, and from a very early age, figure out how to wind people around their little fingers to get what they want, yet as we get older, and particularly when we start our own businesses, we tend to forget what our younger selves knew so innately and go off on a tangent doing the complete opposite.
There's a thin line between persuasion and manipulation, but to be a good marketer, you have to understand that certain aspects of manipulation can be seen as a good thing, and remembering that it's all a beautiful game will make it all the easier for you accept that some form of manipulation is inevitable.
"You are a manipulator"
"I like to think of myself more as an outcome engineer."
