Some Clever Marketing Tricks

In traditional economics marketing was simple a means of informing potential customers about your product. An advert would state what the product does, what it can be used for and how much it costs. It might also say why it’s better than it competitors, but nowadays it has taken on a whole new entity. It has become a means of manipulating customers rather than informing them.

If you’re a private company you are going to use every trick in the book to try and boost your profits. Here are a couple of them.   

Conditioning

Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, found that if you feed a dog and ring a bell at the same time, the dog will begin to expect to be feed every time the bell is rang regardless of whether the food is there or not. Not only will the dog expect to be feed but it will also start salivate. Crucially, salivation is not a cognitive thought, but it is an involuntary response that has been hard coded into the dog. The process of gaining an involuntary response through repeated stimulus is known as ‘Conditioning’, and it doesn’t just apply to dogs.

If I’m a trying to sell something wouldn’t it be great to cause an involuntary response of people to buy my product. All I need to do pair the product or brand I’m selling with an involuntary feeling or response. For example if I was thirsty, what brand or product might you associated with the word ‘thirst’?

Why is Sprite saying “Obey your thirst!” in their advert? It is not informing you about how it tastes, what the price is or how it is better than its competitors. They are trying to condition you so that when you are thirsty you will think of Sprite.

If you regularly watch advertising on the telly you will bombarded by these messages. It’s quite possible that many of your purchasing decisions are not based on rational thought but involuntary responses to marketing stimuli.

Anchoring

Human beings have evolved several odd traits that were required to stay alive hundreds of thousands of years ago, but today they can cause suboptimal decision making. One of these traits is Anchoring.

In order to make quick decisions man needed to use reference points. “Is this a good cave to live in?”, “is she a good mate (in the reproductive sense)?” To answer these sorts of questions humans need reference points. They need to compare to previous caves to know if the current one is a good one (and the same is true with girlfriends).

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But when it comes to making purchasing decisions, clever marketing companies can use anchoring to their advantage. Consider this advert for a subscription to the Economist.

1. Internet only subscription $59
2. Print-only subscription $125
3. Print and internet subscription $125

You might think ‘why would anyone want to buy 'Print only subscription' and that ‘the Economist must have either made a mistake or be a bit stupid?’ But actually they are using anchoring to their advantage. By placing the ‘Print only subscriptions’ at the same price as 'Print and Internet' they have forced you to anchor to number 2 and therefore make number 3 appear an excellent deal.

In the above example 84% of sales went to number 3, 0% to number 2 and 16% to number one, but when number 2 was removed sales to number 3 fell to just 32%. Buy using the decoy anchor the economist were able to increase their revenue.

Here’s another example:

1)      When Ghandi died, was he younger or older than 140?

2)      How old do you think Ghandi was when he died?   

With this line of questioning the average response to question 2 was 67 but if I change question one to: ‘When Ghandi died, was he younger or older than 9?’ the average response to question 2 was 50.

Question 1 was another decoy anchor, it was designed so that your brain took that age as the bench mark and the adjusted it.  

However once you are aware of these sales tactics you are less likely to fall for them and more likely to appreciate them. Next time your in Tunisia and a man selling a water pipe says “500 Dinar, no?... Okay for you 100” you can compliment him on his good anchoring.