In a world of academia where the chartered institute of Marketing, CIM” defines marketing as the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. Also, CIM adds up that successful marketing depends upon addressing many key issues. These include: What is a company going to produce? How much is it going to charge? How is it going to deliver its products or services to the customers? And how is it going to tell its customers about its products and services?

Traditionally, these considerations were known as the “Four Ps,” but as marketing has become a very sophisticated discipline, a fifth “P” was added – People and recently the six and seven ones “Process and physical evidence.”

Most companies are wasting their time, effort, sources, and resources in building a product, repackage it and decorate to find the valleys that competitors have overlooked. There is a heated debate about companies that use manipulation or tricks to attract their customers. All companies that use “the seven Ps” in marketing tend naturally to manipulate people to buy their products.

All their focus is on the features of the products and their characteristics. They mostly forget to start with WHY, namely the purpose of the product. As Simon Sinek, the author of Start with Why puts it, people know what they do and how they do it. But few can articulate why they do what they do. This is one of the most significant problems in today’s business world where companies talk about everything except what they stand for in the whole world.

Many businesses have equated marketing with neurolinguistics programming and many market tricks. The tools are many but unraveling the puzzle is quite simple. Manipulation is not merely the absence of good communication. It grows out of specific misconceptions and communication dysfunctions. Once you develop the ability to detect manipulation, you will dramatically improve your effectiveness at judging and discovering companies that use manipulation. To identify manipulation in any business regardless of the size and the industry, look for one or more of its major hallmarks through answering the following questions.

• Do they produce products and deliver services that satisfy people’s true needs or desires?
• Are the long-term interests of the society their purpose or profits?
• Do they care and put their staff first? Are their staff being treated well or uncared for?
• Do you feel that you are a valued human being while using their products or services or just a consumer who consumes and pays more?

The answers to these questions determine whether a company is using manipulation to sway their customers into buying their products and using their services. If you doubt the answers to these questions for any company, then it exists to make a profit only and profits are the center of their universe, not yourself. Furthermore, the work environment in such companies tends to be unfulfilling for their people as their jobs are meaningless.

Meaning in jobs comes only by doing something for the greater good, thus contributing to the fulfillment of other people. Such businesses tend to produce products that are unneeded, a prototype of others and they deplete natural resources in their pursuit to compete and generate more cash. They confuse people to choose whatever perfectly suits them.