All the sales are on right now: online and offline. Xavier Uncle the modern sage had some invaluable advice for us: Amazon and Flipkart mega sales are on. For maximum savings, uninstall both apps. This is excellent advice of course but not practical since we do need to buy things. What we also need is to not get swayed by clever marketing. Here’s how you can spot and steer clear of clever marketing ploys and save a bunch of money:
They create a false sense of urgency. They call it a ‘Flash Sale’. They warn you that there is just today left for you to get all these wonderful discounts. From tomorrow prices will go up again! So shop today – even for things you may only need some time in the dim and distant future or may not ever need.
When you see something like ‘only one left in your size’ or ‘selling out fast’ on the product page two things happen: you feel that lots of people have bought this, so it must be good. Secondly, you don’t want to lose out on something that you like. So you may be inveigled into buying something today that you may have bought later - or not at all.
This is just a straightforward way to get us to buy more. They say they’ll give us a discount, but only if we buy two. So we end up buying two when we need only one. I am a complete sucker for this – because FOMO! And also greed.
Amazon does this so well – and by well I mean cunningly. They will tell us that some items are ‘frequently bought together’. If you're thinking of buying say, JBL earphones, they’ll tell you people bought Sony earphones along with them. I don’t believe them! Who does that! To be more believable they’ll tell you ‘customers also viewed’ so that we explore more, get more enticed and of course… buy more.
They create apps that are marvellously user-friendly. They streamline payments, helpfully save our payment info, even let us pay on delivery and just make it so easy and convenient for us to shop ---- that we do. A lot.
Some are genuine recommendations but often they’ll add an endorsement by some random ‘association’ or ‘doctor’ or other ‘expert’. We’re not really going to check if 9 out of 10 dentists recommend X toothpaste, but it does create a feeling of trustworthiness; it does influence our choices.
A perfect example is the small, medium, large sizing of popcorn at the multiplex. Small is too small and there is so little price difference between medium and large that you opt for the biggest size – because you feel you're getting more bang for your buck.
You pay to solve a problem you didn’t know existed – but now they’ve told us the problem has to be solved. For instance, your foot shape requires a special shoe – which is more expensive. Listerine famously told us that mouth odor is a terrible thing – even told people about its fancy name, halitosis – that requires people to use their product.
I always wonder why most of the stuff they sell via online stores is always at some discount – year-round? What does it even mean when they say 10% of 70% discount? It is a fact that they raise the so-called MRP on the product page just so they can show a bigger discount. And when they offer special ‘combo’ deals on, say groceries, this isn't much of a discount. Just visit separate product pages to see individual prices. You're likely to find that there is barely any difference when you add it all up. Again, they are just ‘encouraging' us to buy more.
New and improved? Really? Would that be new and improved packaging – or new and improved marketing and branding, while the product remained pretty much the same? Check the ingredients or product specs /description to see if anything is new or improved. Otherwise just put it down to clever marketing and move on – save yourself a bunch of money.
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