Insidious Sales Tactics . . .

Comments

• Gator Posts: 1,319

  June 2016

  CypherFOX said:

  Greetings,

  McGyver said:

  I never buy anything I don't need... In real life I won't buy four large tubes of elephant moisturizer to get a 60% discount on Cheeze Whiz, so I won't buy a Space Station to get a discounted hair.  When I see "Buy this at full price to get this cheaper" I usually don't think of it as a sale...  I think of it as "pay more for something you want and get something you are not really interested in, for slightly less".  

  The sales tactic obviously works though or else they would not persist with it.

  Because 'want' is not binary.  Everything in the store exists on a spectrum of interest which varies for each person, and there's a threshold over which they're willing to buy items.  Reducing the cost of something that is high-interest by buying something that is further out on the interest scale than you'd USUALLY buy confers some of the high-interest item's 'personal value' to the item further out on the interest scale.

  Sure, if you never buy smexywear, or environments set in the 1920's infuriate you, then the conferred value isn't going to be enough to overcome that.  But almost nothing in the store is all-or-nothing, want/never want, and discounts can tweak where items lie on that spectrum.

  --  Morgan

   

  Yep.  Most recently, the Rune 7 Pro set was a perfect example of that for me.

  I wanted her, and two other items the most.  The rest of the items I had varying degrees of interest in.  On the introductory sale the day before, I had some bows but liked the bow set.  With the bow set, Rune 7, and the few Rune set items I wanted in my cart, I was only saving 5 bucks or less vs. the bow set plus the Rune Pro set.