Start with why

The Price You Pay for the Money You Make
I cannot dispute that manipulations work. Every one of them can indeed help
influence behavior and every one of them can help a company become quite
successful. But there are trade-offs. Not a single one of them breeds loyalty.
Over the course of time, they cost more and more. The gains are only short-term.
And they increase the level of stress for both the buyer and the seller. If you
have exceptionally deep pockets or are looking to achieve only a short-term gain
with no consideration for the long term, then these strategies and tactics are
perfect.
Beyond the business world, manipulations are the norm in politics today as
well. Just as manipulations can drive a sale but not create loyalty, so too can they
help a candidate get elected, but they don’t create a foundation for leadership.
Leadership requires people to stick with you through thick and thin. Leadership
is the ability to rally people not for a single event, but for years. In business,
leadership means that customers will continue to support your company even
when you slip up. If manipulation is the only strategy, what happens the next
time a purchase decision is required? What happens after the election is won?
There is a big difference between repeat business and loyalty. Repeat business
is when people do business with you multiple times. Loyalty is when people are
willing to turn down a better product or a better price to continue doing business
with you. Loyal customers often don’t even bother to research the competition or
entertain other options. Loyalty is not easily won. Repeat business, however, is.
All it takes is more manipulations.
Manipulative techniques have become such a mainstay in American business
today that it has become virtually impossible for some to kick the habit. Like any
addiction, the drive is not to get sober, but to find the next fix faster and more
frequently. And as good as the short-term highs may feel, they have a deleterious
impact on the long-term health of an organization. Addicted to the short-term
results, business today has largely become a series of quick fixes added on one
after another after another. The short-term tactics have become so sophisticated
that an entire economy has developed to service the manipulations, equipped
with statistics and quasi-science. Direct marketing companies, for example, offer
calculations about which words will get the best results on each piece of direct
mail they send out.
Those that offer mail-in rebates know the incentive works and they know that

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the higher the rebate, the more effective it is. They also know the cost that goes
along with those rebates. To make them profitable, manufacturers rely on the
breakage and slippage numbers staying above a certain threshold. Just like our
trusty drug addict, whose behavior is reinforced by how good the short-term
high feels, the temptation to make the qualifications of the rebate more obscure
or cumbersome so as to reduce the number of qualified applicants can be
overwhelming for some.
Samsung, the electronics giant, mastered the art of the kind of fine print that
makes rebates so profitable for companies. In the early 2000s, the company
offered rebates up to $150 on a variety of electronic products, stipulating in the
fine print that the rebate was limited to one per address—a requirement that
would have sounded reasonable enough to anyone at the time. Yet in practice, it
effectively disqualified all customers who lived in apartment buildings where
more than one resident had applied for the same rebate. More than 4,000
Samsung customers lured by the cash back received notices denying them
rebates on those grounds. The practice was brought to the attention of the New
York attorney general, and in 2004 Samsung was ordered to pay $200,000 in
rebate claims to apartment dwellers. This is an extreme case of a company that
got caught. But the rebate game of cutting out UPC symbols, filling out forms
and doing it all before the deadline is alive and well. How can a company claim
to be customer-focused when they are so comfortable measuring the number of
customers who will fail to realize any promise of savings?

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