Sneaky little Amazon
An email pops through from Amazon - would I be interested in Alice in Wonderland on DVD? Wait hasn't that only just hit the cinemas? Yes it has but that's not the one they're selling, nope it's the 1983 version, but I have to wonder how many thought "Oo the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp version" and clicked purchase without paying attention.
6 comments:
Those little gits seem to like misleading their customers…
Still, shortly after Pirates of the Caribbean became popular, my mum came home with a very similar-looking DVD entitled simply as Pirates of the Caribbean.
I quick inspection of the sleeve notes gives the original release date as 1962.
Yes, that's right, somebody has dug up some ancient lump of crud that was never popular in the first place but bears a vague resemblance to something that is popular now, adjusted the packaging slightly, and put it on the supermarket shelves. Niiiice…
Oh yes you should see the number of Sherlock Holmes DVDs that suddenly appeared on the shelves just before the latest was released.
The innocent explanation is that the latest release sparks an interest in that genre and thus may increase sales in related merchandise.
Sure. But do they try to package it to make it look the same as the new one? That's where the deception comes in. ;-)
But hey, how many supermarkets put their own-brand cornflakes right next to the Kellogs ones, in deceptively similar packaging? Huh? HUH???
To an extent that's a trading standards affair. If you picked up product A thinking it was product B due to the similar packaging there might be a case.
In terms of putting own-brand corn flakes next to brand corn flakes, that just makes marketing sense - I'm looking for corn flakes, there they all are, which one do I want to buy. Now if they're all using the same sort of packaging we're back to where I started.
It's the extent to which they purposely make the packaging similar, and how hard they try to hide the less profitable products. Usually the stuff they want you to buy is carefully placed at eye level, and the less profitable goods are a bit harder to see.
There's a quite worrying amount of psychology in shopping, you know. ;-)
(That's probably why everything is £1.99. Not £2, but £1.99, because it looks smaller…)
Yes that's managing expectations though. If the leading brand of corn flakes has a certain packet design and dominates the shelf space, to the consumer that design is the product.
If a competitor chooses a radically different design they're not going to sell because the consumer isn't going to 'see' it as the same type of product.
The .99p yes it looks lower apparently we have difficulty with numbers as numbers and just group them - that's over £5, that's £5, and that's under £5. The actual differences don't make much of an impact to that initial grouping.
Anyway a lot of psychology goes into everything that's designed to part people from their money. It's also fun (well I find it fun) to see when it goes wrong.
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