7 Marketing Tricks Companies Use to Get You to Buy the Products ...

You snooze – you lose! When a certain item is made available for a limited period of time or in limited quantities, you won’t think too much before buying simply because you feel like the clock is ticking. I’ve bothered my fiancé to take advantage of one “special offer” and get an exercise machine. Thank God he didn’t do it because we actually found the same machine in a store, for a regular price that was 50% lower than the telemarketing company’s “special price” !

Anchoring is a very old, reliable tactics that’s definitely going to get the product sold within a month or so. The trick is to overprice the item and then put it on sale, with the price still well over the one you’d normally pay. If you liked this item when it was $200, you’ll definitely rush to buy it once its price drops to $100, regardless of the fact that the item might not be worth that money. It’s a great deal…or, it certainly seems like it!

Yes, a percentage of profit the company has made selling those products does go to charity, but which percentage are we talking about here? Is it 10%? Fifty percent? A measly three percent? I definitely don’t approve of this trick, especially when “charity” or “philanthropy” is used to sell over priced merchandise of low quality. Skip the middle man and his crappy products, buy the product you want and donate money to charity directly!

Labels like this are supposed to make you opt for the new and probably a bit more expensive product that “does your body good”. If a certain company manages to produce cheese that taste the same and has 50% less fat, I have to ask myself which substitutes and artificial aromas have been used and how healthy is that anyways? Advertising a product that tastes authentic and is low in both fat and calories is one of the best strategies out there. I have a friend that insisted on eating “healthy wellness cookies” for dinner and refused to check the nutrition info on the back! Nothing I said could get her to believe that these cookies are so rich in calories that a half of the box should be an ideal, nutrient rich breakfast rather than a midnight snack.

Let’s do the math - $9.99 is closer to $10 than to $9. However, if you see a product on the rack, your brain will remember only the first digit. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that the numbers after the comma are always tiny comparing to the first one? Anyways, get 5 of those $X.99 products and you’ve managed to spend 5 bucks without even realizing what has just happened.

Am I blind or the food McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell advertise is not the same to the one they sell? You have huge pictures of those juicy, fat burgers staring at you, almost as if they were tempting you to have a bite and, when you finally decide to go and get one, it turns out to be a tiny, messy, burned blob, garnished with something that probably used to be a salad… a week ago.

Special coupons, cash cards, prizes… you name it! All you have to do is buy a pack of detergent, bottle of soda pop or a chocolate bar and look inside or under the cap. My sister, for example, drank Coca Cola every day just so she could collect enough regular and winning caps to exchange for a set of Coca Cola plush toys. She needed 1 winning cap and 4 regular ones to get one palm sized toy and there were 5 toys in the set which comes out to 25 bottles minimum!

Sale! Saldi! Prosfora! Shop until you drop! But only if and when you actually need the product or when something good that you have actually used before is on a sale so big, early shopping seems like a good investment. How do you feel knowing that we are all just little peons in a huge marketing game?

Top Photo Credit: insideview