The Basics of Neuro - Linguistic Programming and How to Use it in a Marketing Strategy

Neuro-linguistic pro­gram­ming (NLP) can be defined as a sys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion regard­ing real­tional behav­ior pat­terns and the sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ences asso­ci­ated with them.
There are meth­ods used by ther­a­pists based on NLP which seek to enlighten peo­ple in com­mu­ni­ca­tion and self-presence while attempt­ing to change pat­terns of men­tal and emo­tional behavior.
NLP is widely regarded as a sub­jec­tive sys­tem and lacks solid, sub­stan­tial evi­dence to speak to it's reli­a­bil­ity and cred­i­bil­ity.
How­ever, there is enough sug­ges­tive the­ory to enter­tain the sys­tem with some mea­sure of prac­ti­cal­ity.
You'll have to judge whether NLP tech­niques are valid and right for your mar­ket­ing strategy.
Dif­fer­ent sources on the subject of NLP will describe these tech­niques in much larger detail but I'll inten­tion­ally keep it short and simple.
Rap­port / Reflection: In it's most sim­plest form is mim­ic­k­ing or copy­ing the phys­i­cal and vocal inflec­tions of some­one or some group (or the per­cep­tion of some­one or some group) in order to put your­self on the same level as that per­son or group so as to be accepted by and iden­ti­fied with.
Some may describe this as, 'blend­ing in'.
When the Pres­i­dent of the United States goes to speak to work­ers on a dock he takes off his suit coat, rolls his cuff's a bit, loses his neck tie, unbut­tons the col­lar but­ton on his shirt and makes more casual ges­tures and walk­ing strides.
This is because he wants the work­ers to iden­tify with him; when a lis­tener iden­ti­fies with a speaker he or she is much more inclined to receive, recall and sup­port the mes­sage that the speaker is delivering.
Anchor­ing: Think of anchor­ing like con­di­tion­ing or train­ing.
You have to teach your audi­ence what to respond to by asso­ci­at­ing action with rec­og­nized and dis­tin­guished cues.
A very pop­u­lar blog­ger can get his read­ers to share/syndicate his or her blog posts (the action) by sim­ply post­ing the blog (the cue) because the blog­ger is very pop­u­lar (the anchoring/conditioning/training).
The blog­ger estab­lishes him/herself as an expert author­ity and con­di­tions the audi­ence to rec­og­nize that the blog posts are author­i­ta­tive.
When the blog­ger makes a new post, it trig­gers the audi­ence to read/share it because the audi­ence per­ceives it to be authoritative.
Swish: This tech­nique allows for fast, re-directed think­ing and in NLP is used to divert focus from unwanted thoughts/behavior to more desired thoughts/behavior by attempt­ing to dis­rupt the pat­tern of behav­ior that leads to the unwanted thoughts or behav­ior.
The Swish starts by visu­al­iz­ing the trig­ger that starts the pat­tern of unwanted behav­ior and then switched sev­eral times with visu­al­iza­tions of more desired thoughts or behavior.
Refram­ing: Not unlike Anchor­ing, refram­ing deals with stim­uli and asso­ci­ated action.
In con­trast to anchor­ing how­ever, refram­ing attempts to alter the action asso­ci­ated to the stim­uli by chang­ing the per­cep­tion of the stim­uli.
By chang­ing the way some­one thinks about or sees some­thing you can poten­tially alter the way they react to it.
I know that cig­a­rettes are bad for me but when I see happy peo­ple hav­ing a good time with friends while hav­ing a cig­a­rette in their hand, I may per­ceive that cig­a­rettes aren't as bad as I once thought because happy and good thoughts have been asso­ci­ated with cig­a­rettes.
Cig­a­rettes may not be the great­est exam­ple because so much neg­a­tiv­ity sur­rounds them that I don't think any amount of refram­ing could offset.
Proven or not, these tech­niques are already in play in many dif­fer­ent busi­nesses for many dif­fer­ent uses, regard­less if you label them NLP or not.
I feel that a suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing strat­egy can greatly ben­e­fit from the strate­gist being well versed in con­tem­po­rary under­stand­ings of the human mind.
If one can bet­ter under­stand how we think then he/she can bet­ter serve us on a deeper more sat­is­fy­ing level.