Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

Do magician’s ever get bored? After all, magicians are in the illusion business. They fool people for a living. Wouldn’t you think the thrill of deception would get kinda dull after a while?

As a marketer, I ask myself these questions all the time. I have observed that people (and I am a person) choose to be deceived when they want to buy or own something. They tell themselves stories to justify the products and services they purchase. Marketers make a living fanning the flame of this self deception.

People don’t necessarily love products and services. People love themselves (or at least they would like to love themselves). In my opinion, it matters less how a person feels about a product or service, and more how that product or service makes him feel about himself. People buy products or services (and join causes) because they like the way these things make them feel about themselves.

So now we see behind the curtain. The pretty girl isn’t really sawed in half. It is just an illusion.

If it’s true, as Seth Godin says in his book, “All Marketers are Liars,” that consumers tell themselves stories to justify their purchases, then why make my living as marketer? If I know the truth, why would I want to make my living as a magician?

I don’t really know. Why do we like to watch car accidents? Why do we stare into fireplaces and baby’s faces? There’s just something fascinating about human behavior, and marketing is a great petri dish.

The more I learn about marketing, the more I learn about people (and remember I am a person). The way (I) they think. What makes (me) them do the things (I) they do. And I’ve discovered that there are many common characteristics we all seem to share. Call these characteristics “human nature”. There’s some core force at work in all of our lives. Where does that come from?

And I’ve found that in marketing, and in life, that honesty is the best policy. In fact, the truth will set you free!

What’s really cool is that Jesus knew all about human nature and explains it in ways that will blow your mind. If you’ve never read the Bible, you ought to pick up a copy. Start with the Gospel of John. It has helped me discover a lot about myself and helped me learn to love other people, despite the fact that all I really care about is myself

As we sit in 2006 talking about customer centricity and word of mouth marketing and social networks…if we believe the current pundits, then we think that technology has changed the media landscape. We think that people are changing their behaviors now that they have access to the Web.

It seems to me that all our new technology has merely served to reveal what was happening all along. Sure we’re consuming more Web and less TV, but that doesn’t mean Word of Mouth Marketing is a new phenomenon. We are social animals. We influence each other through relationships. People like to talk to people. We always have. The first blogs were etched on cave walls.

Technology has merely helped us observe behavior that we couldn’t track before now. Kinda like when Galileo invented the telescope and said, “hey, I think that Copernicus guy was right!”