Corporate Manipulation is the game of the big companies striving to control more shares of their relevant market. Big industries like the tobacco, pharmaceutical or the mining industries use different manipulative techniques in order to make more profits than their rivals. The impact of such manipulative strategies has been sometimes so big that they have attracted the attention of law regulators and have provoked the passage of important anti-monopolistic laws.

There could be two types of corporate manipulation – manipulation intended for consumers and manipulation addressed for other rival companies. Big industries usually have little trouble manipulating their clients – oftentimes the companies are large enough to have control over a big share of the market and to have an important impact on people’s lives. Once consumers are dependent on the company, they find themselves following the business rules of this industry and it’s hard for them to break up with the company.

Corporate manipulation directed to other companies seems more difficult, because the companies usually have the same resources and the same access to information. Which makes manipulation less easy, but not impossible. One striking example was the case with Intel. Intel is a company that produces chips for personal computers. In the mid 90s, Intel had monopolistic control over its market but it was starting to get outdone by its main rival – AMD. Both of these companies were fighting for the attention of Dell – the most important computer manufacturer at that time. In order to secure itself deals with Dell, Intel paid $1 billion to Dell and became its main provider of computer chips even though the chips of AMD were better and cheaper. The company manipulated the choice of its partner and this later became a usual tactic for Intel – in the next years the company made such deals with many other manufacturers.

Corporate manipulation is the way of big companies to continue making millions of dollars when they see that their rivals are starting to gain more and more influence. With time, many such strategies for controlling the market have become illegal as legislators perceived the threat of them to the rules of free economy and free market competition. Most of the time, these processes have stayed unnoticed by the general audience as the press didn’t cover them, but the little media attention is a whole another topic about manipulation techniques.