I heard a great interview with Simon Sinek a few days ago on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. Among other great insights from Simon, something really stood out: a discussion over the difference between manipulation and inspiration in business.
What's Manipulation?
Marketers have historically leaned on manipulation tactics, meaning they present consumers with something to provoke a response. Things like lower prices, free prizes, giveaways, coupons, contests, promotions, and even fear fall into this category. These tactics may drive repeat business but at the end of the day it requires new manipulation tactics to keep success going.The people may be responding, but their response is only as good as your last manipulation tactic. If you can manipulate your customers your competitors can too.
What's Inspiration?
On the other hand, inspiration builds loyalty. When a consumer is inspired by your brand or product they are loyal to it for reasons beyond price, convenience, or any of the above manipulation tactics. The loyal customer buys into your existence and would miss you if you were gone. In fact, a loyal, inspired customer will pay more and be inconvienced because of loyalty even when presented with cheaper, faster, more incentivized alternatives.
Why Inspiration Is The Only Choice
Social media tools and strategy, when used the right way, are excellent loyalty building tools but they require being intentional to inspire rather than manipulate. Loyalty starts slow but as it builds it requires less effort to gain traction and keep momentum growing. Conversely, manipulation can generate quick results but always needs a lot of energy to get back to where you were. It's like the inspiration approach is the eqivalent to running downhill and the manipulation approach is running uphill. You can still cover five miles either way, but the time and energy you spent doing so is vastly different.