Selling by Deception Is Harder Than You Think

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Selling encyclopedias door to door is a bit of an overstatement since I didn't sell a single one. Selling by deception is harder than it looks. It feels bad to trick people in buying a product you don't believe in and they don't want. Phil wasn't trying to build shoes like his old track coach, he just wanted to sell them. He headed to Japan with that one brief encyclopedia of Phil's stop in Hawaii along the way.

Great branding is about identity — and it’s about matchmaking too. No one knows this better than the legendary co-founder of Nike, Phil Knight. When he and his partner, Hall of Fame track coach Bill Bowerman, started the sneaker company, they never tried to force-feed customers a product just to drive up the bottom line. They focused on one thing: making an excellent product for people who believed in the edgy Nike ethos. Because they knew, when there’s a mismatch between product and market, the bottom usually drops out. Instead, they told the world who the are, and then did everything they could to find their ideal customers. And made history. Cameo appearance: Eddy Lu (GOAT).

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