As with sales, marketing is an area where NLP can be readily applied.

In particular, NLP can help the marketer determine effective strategies for building appropriate long term relationships with customers. To develop creative ideas the world famous Unsticker allows marketing teams to approach a situation from unexpected angles and reach fresh insights to transform their customer experience.

Well formed outcomes can be used to set the objectives of any marketing plan, campaign or strategy. Building a clear model of who the target audiences are, and what precisely they are to do as a result of the marketing activities undertaken, ensures that all activities are effectively focussed and measured. It is also worth being aware of how your own presuppositions can influence your thinking – and that of your customers.

Many organisations are moving towards ensuring that their marketing activities are media-neutral, increasing the effectiveness of any integrated campaign. Here, having a clear sense of what story you want to tell has particular value. With these stories, using the Milton Model helps you build stories that allow your customers to relate what you are communicating into their own subjective experience – and so personalise your product or service offering into their situation.

Mass customisation is becoming increasingly important for online media. The challenge has always been collecting customer data to enable personalisation, whereas a different approach is to convey information using a linguistic framework into which the customer puts their own subjective experience, needs, desires and so on. In much the same way that a politican delivers a speech that appeals to a wide range of interests, the Milton Model can be used to create the structure of language necessary to appeal to a diverse audience.

Of course, NLP’s language tools can be used to write compelling advertising or PR copy, but this can be read as overly contrived. In any case, NLP is built upon two-way communication, and so is a tool for building relationships rather than exerting influence. If you and your customers have roughly aligned goals, NLP will help both of you get what you want. If your goals are contrary to or even detrimental to your customers, NLP will not help you and may make things worse.

This really is ‘age old’ advice – if you want to help your customers get what they want then NLP will certainly help. If you want to control your customers then you need to rethink your goals and ethics before learning about NLP.