It's pretty much a fair statement about people in general to say that if you tell them you intend to manipulate them it will make them angry. People don't want to be manipulated or controlled by others. Wars have been fought over it for thousands of years. That very thing is part of why the colonies separated from England. We hate being manipulated by others and will fight to the death to stop it from being done against our will.
Which is why businesses and especially advertising agencies don't tell us they are doing it. And if we accuse them of such a thing they will deny it or change the subject. Oooh look a puppy!. Then like the simple idiots that they take us for, we jump at the new shiny thing and then often thank them for the distraction by giving them more of our hard earned dollars.
It isn't really any one business's fault though. Any company not operating that way pretty much gets steamrolled by the companies that do. Why do we let it happen? It is more or less basic psychology.
While thinking about this I was reminded of the Adam Sandler movie Don't Mess With The Zohan. In that movie Adam Sandler plays an Isreali who retires from being a counter-terrorist in Israel and moves to New York. As he is attempting to get himself set up, a friend offers him a job in a going out of business store. No lie. The gimmick of the store is that the prices are so great because the store is going out of business. Permanently. All the time.
But, the prices aren't all that great and the store never does really go out of business. People keep coming back and spending money there because of the fear of loss. If they don't get "it" now whatever it is, they might not be able to get it later. The threat is always there and the fear of loss causes people to buy things they don't need at prices that are higher than they should be, often at prices higher than they can afford.
A lot of people out there get caught in the "bogo" or buy one get one free trap. They probably don't even need one of the thing that they are buying, but they buy two of them anyways just to get something for "free" . If you are buying two of the same thing you are getting the two for half price at best. Quite often the retailers jack up the price of an item just before doing a bogo sale, to ensure even higher profits.
Common sense would tell you that if you wouldn't buy the item if it wasn't on a special sale, you obviously don't need it and shouldn't buy it at all. And each time you do, you are in fact wasting money, not saving.
To show just how deep this fear of loss goes a study was done with two different brands of chocolate. Brand A was an upscale chocolate often sold for $2 or more per single chocolate. Brand B was a cheaper brand that often sold for $2 per bag of chocolates. A sale was held where brand A was sold for 15 cents each and brand B was sold for 1 cent each. Some people bought a few of brand B, but mostly, brand A sold like hotcakes. This isn't all that surprising considering how good of a deal it was. Brand A was more than ten times cheaper than its normal sale price, compared to the three to four times cheaper that brand B was being sold at. Fear of loss drove people to Brand A.
Then they reduced the cost of both even further, by a single cent. Brand A 14 cents each. Brand B free. Suddenly brand A got dropped like it was chopped liver. The higher quality chocolate that was massively outselling the lower suddenly had its sales go to zero. People chose the free inferior product over the higher quality product being sold at a ridiculously low price. Why?
The human mind automatically decides that free is better than not free. Logic doesn't enter into the equation. It gets overridden by the fear of loss. For just a little bit of money we can get a great value and a wonderful product, but we don't care. We are unwilling to lose out on the value of getting something for nothing.
Psychology like this drives sales in our world. Logically whoever provides a superior product at a reasonable price should thrive while others perish. But people aren't logical and buy things based more on fear of loss and perceived value than on actual value. Can you really blame companies for taking advantage of that fact, since if they don't they won't be able to afford to stay in business?
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