Marketing Tricks: How Many Times Have You Fallen Victim?



Fat free food

Whereas business owners call them marketing strategies, none business owners regard them as marketing tricks. Regardless of what you like to call them, businesses cannot survive without marketing tricks. Marketing tricks are the flywheel that keeps businesses engine running. We tend not to be concerned about them because of our perception that we are familiar with them and can avoid them.

However, a careful look at the marketing tricks used by businesses will reveal that many of us have fallen victims of them in the past and can still fall victim of the malpractice in future. Let us consider two of these popular tricks used in supermarkets.

The first marketing trick used by retailers is relating to the slogan “75% reduced fat”. Items labelled 75% reduced fat are often displayed on supermarket shelves. Some of us who are conscious of our health tend to go for them to avoid consuming excess fat. Excess fat in the body is considered to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease including atherosclerosis and high blood pressure. But how many times have we paused for a moment when we find the so-called 75% reduced fat items on the supermarket shelve to ask ourselves “ what do they mean by 75 % reduced fat?

You will be surprised to discover that the term 75% reduced fat is misleading. People buy food labelled 75% reduced fat thinking that they are purchasing low fat food. This is not true. By 75% reduced fat, food manufacturers do not mean that the food is 75 % fat free in the real sense. Instead, they tend to use the term 75% reduced fat to convey the idea that the food concerned has only 25 % of its fat content compared to its equivalent standard. For 75% fat reduced cheese, consuming 25% of the fat can still mean lot to the consumer.

The second marketing trick used by some supermarkets involves placing the wrong items in the wrong places. Many of us make our buying decisions on the basis of price. We go for items whose prices are low but avoid those items whose prices are high. Retailers are aware of this behaviour and tend to exploit it regularly. They can put inexpensive items on the shelves where labels for expensive items are being displayed, and vice versa.

Often we tend not to discover this price abnormally during shopping and at checkout. This can be due to the false confidence that we have chosen the right items. Our inability to establish that we have chosen the wrong items from the shelves can also arise from the desire to avoid causing unnecessary delay in the check-out queue.

The gist of the matter is marketing tricks are subtle. Any one of us can fall victim. However, by questioning what we find on food labels and cross-checking our till receipts at check-out and home, we can help minimise the risk.