'Selling tricks' that you might've missed!

We all see a lot of marketing on a daily basis.  Print, Audio and Video adverts stare at you from everywhere and on top of that you have those annoying phone calls where a recorded voice tells you about the friends who are waiting to talk to you.  All of this is visible but there have been a few brilliant tricks Companies have used which I’m sure most of you wouldn’t have realized.  I’m no marketing student so maybe what looks like a genius trick to me, could be just another technique taught in B schools, so those who think that this is all very simple and regular, please excuse my ignorance.

Uncut Diamonds:  I came across this concept last year when I went for some jewelry shopping.  I’m actually very averse to diamonds as they rarely appreciate in value.  But this salesman shows us a necklace which is supposedly the rage, the latest fashion.  It looked like an antique piece, with glass twinkling from within a gold design.  He tells me these are ‘Uncut Diamonds’.  As the name suggests, they were diamonds alright but not cut to perfection as you would expect in jewelry.  As a result, they didn’t appear to be dazzling white but they did twinkle a little.  The price?  Well, don’t remember exactly but very very expensive.

Just look at the brilliant trick used by the Diamond industry in introducing this ‘latest fashion’.  They save lots of costs which would be usually paid to workmen in Surat or elsewhere in cutting and polishing the diamonds.  Additionally, they do not have to worry too much about the color or brightness as these aren’t clearly visible in Uncut diamonds.  So they could throw in a few low quality diamonds along with the high quality ones but still charge a heavy price for it.  And you add a whole new line of jewelry for the women out there who already have a lot of diamonds and are looking for something else.   

Farmville:  Almost everyone who has been on Facebook has, one time or the other been addicted to a game such as Farmville or Acquarium or Tap Zoo (on the iphone) or the sort.  If you’ve woke up in the morning and before drinking water yourself, logged on and fed your fishes, I suppose you’ve fallen to this trick.  What is it?  Well games like these ensure that you keep coming back to the site, over and over again.  This continuous and recurring traffic does wonders for the site’s hits and numbers which in turn boost their advertisement space prices.  In case of a regular game, you would finish a game and logout and then you may or may not return but these sort of games make you come back to the site regularly.

News in Slide Shows:  This trick is another way of maximizing advertisement space.  Ideally news items on websites were contained on a single page but there is only enough advertisement that you can have on 1 web page.  So now, the news is shown in a series of slides which means every news item gets 3 to 5 web pages to sell advertisement space. 

Shaving Gel bottles:  I realized this just today morning.  Actually, every time I press the lid on my shave gel bottle, almost always, a little extra shave gel comes out than what I need.  Obviously, I can’t put it back in the bottle so it goes down the drain.  But I’ve realized that it is in the interests of the shave gel companies to not fix this problem.  The more gel that comes out, the more they sell.  Imagine even if every shave gel user wastes few extra ounces of shave gel, collectively it translates into a huge volume.  I’m sure they have this figured out.

Have you noticed any such gimmicks not so visible to the common eye?

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