Melbourne Herald Sun, 20th March 2010
They always call when you're about to eat dinner or your favourite TV show is starting. Now I'm not a nasty person and I don't like being rude to someone who's only doing their job, so sometimes I make the error of answering a question.
"How much are you paying on your telephone bill Mr Beatty?" And then: "We can give the exact same service for $50 cheaper plus a free Nokia XYZ phone - would you like your phone bill to be $50 cheaper?"
Well who's going to say no to that? Next thing you know you are repeating the legal agreement for recording purposes and you have made the switch. Next morning you wake up and recall - what the hell have I done?
If the deal goes through, in a month or two you will compare your new bill with some old ones and find there's no difference - it may be even worse.
Did you just get a bit confused? Well that was quite deliberate - I have only recently discovered that there is a genuine science at work here: confusion marketing. That's now a real phrase in the dictionary. I'm sure they teach courses on it at Harvard.
The point is to get the consumer so confused by varying rates, plans, offers and deals that it becomes near-impossible to make a true comparison between companies.
Banks and credit card companies love the deals. They trumpet their low-rate terms, credit at only two percent interest! Now that will make a difference to your monthly bills. You transfer the debts over. And it's amazing how quickly six months pass, after which the interest jumps to 22 percent.
Electricity and gas companies have now been chopped up into providers and retailers, who all have teams of sales people selling contracts. Wonderful, competition. At one stage I had a sales call almost once a week, each with an irresistible offer that slashed my power bills.
Once or twice, I confess, I did chop and change. But you know what? My power bills kept growing and are higher than ever before.
A new version has appeared in recent years on the Internet. This happened recently to my wife. She found a book on a topic that interested her and bought it on-line. Now all these offers have pages and pages of sales pitch, testimonials, and how great your life will be once you have that book.
What she didn't notice, buried in the spiel, was a line that says: "And you'll become a member of our Philosophy Discussion Group, receiving pages of fascinating information every week." Which went on, "Membership is only $29 a month, automatically deducted from your credit card account, unless you decline the offer within 10 days."
So there's the confusion hook. By ordering the book, she also gave them the right to deduct money for ever. Fortunately she spotted it a few days later and stopped it. Not easy to do, as nowhere on the site was there an "I quit" button.
Of course the masters of confusion marketing are politicians. The easiest way to kill your opponent's policy is not through sophisticated argument. It's by making the issue so muddy and confused that the voters throw their hands up and decide it's all too hard.
It's very difficult to counter-attack. All you can do is get very simplistic yourself and hope you can hit your opponent with a better slogan than the one he is using. Does this all sound very familiar to you?
ray@ebeatty.com
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