Mind Over Money: 10 Retailer Tricks to Watch Out For
We all love to feel like we're getting a good deal, and don't retailers know it!
Has anyone else noticed how 'black friday' and 'boxing day' sales seem to start earlier and last longer every year? It's getting to the point now where, blurring from one retail event into the next, they stretch a full two months or more from early November to mid-January. Almost brings to mind that joke about the company whose so-called ‘sales’ seem to last all year round, don't you think?
Well, at Share Skipton we think an informed shopper is a responsible shopper. There's nothing wrong with retailers honestly selling their products, but we take issue with some of the underhanded tactics employed to get people buying what they don't need, especially considering where most of it ends up - we spoke in our sustainable Christmas article about how 80% of today's black friday purchases become tomorrow's waste, never used more than once.
So, like the 9.95 that looks so much more appealing than paying a whole £10, here's an I spy of sales and marketing tricks to help you stay a step ahead:
We'll start simple with one we all know and love: the 99p trick. In fact, we're so used to this one by now, we automatically associate prices ending in .99 with positive thoughts of discounts and value, meaning retailers can evoke those feelings just by slapping a .99 on there.
In the 9.95 example above, there are a surprising number of other things going on:
The number became shorter by losing a 0 - this effect is even more pronounced where pennies are de-emphasised or not involved at all.
Your eye is automatically drawn to the number on the left, because that's where the biggest and most significant number is; the hope is you'll read it as closer to a £1 saving than 1p.
Because so many people are wise to the 99p trick and know to read £9.99 as £10, sellers move on to .98, .97 or a similarly tiny difference to buy back their advantage.
Lastly, omitting the £ sign (or again, making it very small) weakens your association of the number with money, in a similar way to how people will gladly spend more using credit cards than with physical cash.
Next we should talk about black friday and other named events. Social animals that we are, we’ll take any excuse for a celebration, so if we’re given a 'reason' for a sale it makes it look more legitimate …no matter how laughable some of these supposed 'events' seem to be: how many 'summer sales' have you seen where the products being sold have absolutely nothing to do with summer? Or times when the industry invented their own flimsy excuses just to generate some hype?
We can get especially emotionally attached when nostalgia and societal expectations come into play, which is why we become such easy targets around Christmas and holidays. Once dates with historical significance are commercialised and co-opted, retailers have a whole catalogue of 'tradition' to tap into as well.
Like they say, ‘haste makes waste’. When sellers eliminate thinking time from decisions, they intentionally lead shoppers to act more by emotion than reason. Impulse buys of conveniently-placed gum or a magazine at the checkout might not be so bad, but encouraging the same hasty behaviour for larger purchases has sadly become accepted industry practice: us Brits lose £416 across the year to unplanned retail spending, and that’s just on average! You can probably guess where the majority of that unwanted stuff ends up too.
Top of the list to be wary of are time-limited offers, which take our Fear of Missing Out (referred to as ‘FOMO’ in industry jargon) and crank up the urgency.
Next time you see a countdown timer, take a moment to think how honest the advertiser’s being with you: is there a legitimate reason for the deadline, or are they blatantly trying to whip up some hysteria with a ‘flash sale’ or named event, whose time limit will have either been picked arbitrarily by someone or finely tuned by professional, profit-maximising teams. It’s rare you won’t find other, better-suited options by considering what you really need. Plus, away from the pressure to buy, you’re more likely to recognise it as extra clutter you wouldn’t use. Buyer’s remorse, be gone!
Creating a sense of exclusivity and the illusion of scarcity are other ways products can be made to seem more valuable. Although an extreme case, the history of the diamond industry is a well-known example: despite even high-quality diamonds being relatively common compared to other jewellery-grade gems, their perceived rarity was inflated by stockpiling and limiting their supply in order to manipulate buyers; combined with clever, persistent marketing, prices soared higher than any real worth. The monopoly and price fixing were only brought to an end through a combination of legal action and healthy competition breaking through, but the effects are still felt today.
Bringing it back to the present, try to look past ‘limited edition’ and ‘luxury brand’ tags to assess the product’s true value: is it likely to do what you need better than the rest? And if ‘limited stock’ items are all they’re cracked up to be, surely there’ll be another shipment or similar products; delaying gives you a chance to explore your options and avoid wasting money.
There’s also a social aspect of having something that other people don’t, but putting too much significance on brands can quickly turn sour: beyond over-reliance and limiting your own options, brand bullying in schools can be a real problem for kids. Try to avoid buying things just for the logo or because the company tells you it’s special. Besides, if you want something truly unique to you, custom designs and personalised modifications can’t be beaten.
Greenwashing is the practice of companies passing themselves off as environmentally friendly while making little to no effort to improve anything – one of many possible false or misleading claims. With ever more consumers expecting businesses to reduce their environmental impacts, there have been a number of high-profile cases where companies intentionally tried to fool their customers and cheat regulations, while others might enrol in offsetting schemes that actually don’t address the problem: sponsoring one sapling for every mature tree felled for example is not like for like; outsourcing to recycling or carbon offsetting services can be hit and miss if not properly vetted, and is not a long-term substitute for becoming more sustainable themselves.
As a consumer, some warning signs are brands that only imply eco-friendliness (imagery of green leaves or trees without any substantiating statements or certification marks), use of non-renewable materials in the products themselves (not just the packaging), and token gestures (e.g. releasing a single eco-friendly product line but the bulk of their activities remain environmentally damaging).
Businesses which source materials responsibly, build to last and have reliable after-sales support are what we like to see, repairs and replacement parts helping to prolong the useful lifetime of goods. A quick web search on a company can turn up a lot.
Controlling information and manipulating customers’ abilities to make fair comparisons are ways retailers can influence shopping behaviours too, and there are psychologically-backed explanations to the various techniques:
We tend to trust customer reviews more than the sellers themselves for a number of reasons (collectively referred to as ‘social proof’). Yet fake reviews can be difficult to differentiate from real ones, especially when aggregated into an overall star rating. An investigation commissioned by the UK Department for Business and Trade in 2023 found that 11-15% of online product reviews were totally fabricated, influencing decisions around high-priced items and electronics most of all.
Avoid falling for fakes by looking for specific details and personal experiences; be aware that confirmation bias could be causing you to disregard valid criticisms, so give the negative points as much merit as the positives; take cherry-picked testimonials and paid celebrity/influencer endorsements with a pinch of salt.
Anchoring makes use of the ‘primacy effect’ and is where an initial ‘reference’ price is displayed for comparison, making the ‘discounted’ one look more favourable. You might think “fair enough” if the initial price is what it usually sells for, but there are reports of unscrupulous companies whose ‘undiscounted’ prices are creatively made up to appear more heavily discounted than they really are.
You can report misleading online marketing tactics at https://ripoff-tipoff.campaign.gov.uk, but until the regulators put them to rights, one of the best things you can do is shop around to get a feel for the average market price, then take your time and think about what you’re willing to pay.
Three-tier pricing models, seen often as basic, mid-range and premium editions from the same range, take advantage of most people’s eagerness to rule out the extremes of cost versus functionality: the middle option is then presented as ‘best value’ or ‘most popular’.
A variant, called decoy pricing or ‘asymmetric dominance’, is where the middle option gets weighted towards one of the other two, nudging your preference in that direction. For example, you might be torn between a £70 ‘basic’ appliance and a £100 ‘premium’ one, but by (over)pricing the mid-range one at £95, the seemingly small step up to ‘premium’ makes £100 look more of a bargain.
Again, it’s question of taking a step back, looking at what price you can afford, and maybe sleeping on it to avoid any spur-of-the-moment decisions.
The framing effect is all about presenting information in different ways to elicit different reactions. Phrases like ‘Buy one get one free’ and ‘Three for the price of two’ are old favourites used to draw your attention away from the actual price, while wording like ‘Only a fiver’ trivialises the money it’s costing you. Emphasis on favourable percentages is another common trick: you’ll see ‘up to 20% off’ but never ‘still 80% or more of the original cost’.
If you find a merchant is framing product information to their own benefit, feel free to reframe it right back for yourself. Writing a budgeted shopping list in advance can help you combat distracting offers in supermarkets and shopping centres, while paying with cash has proven useful to people who don’t trust themselves with credit cards. For single purchases, writing down the bare figure to look at later can help you separate it from outside interference.
Personalisation can be a double-edged sword: yes you’ll see fewer irrelevant adverts, but those you see will be closer to the mark and all the more tempting. For internet-based shops, dynamic webpages that learn your habits and react accordingly are becoming particularly adept at opening people’s wallets, and when not actively selling you things can chip away over time to influence your wants.
Limiting what information you give online and disabling personalised marketing notifications can help you to shop according to your own preferences rather than someone else’s. You might also find that unsubscribing from daily deal e-mails or using an ad’ blocker are helpful.
See how many of these tricks you can spot out in the wild – we certainly learnt a thing or two while researching for this article. And again, no-one’s going to be contacting Trading Standards over a 99p sticker, but you can report decidedly dodgy online dealings via Gov.uk’s ‘Rip-off Tip-off’ page: https://ripoff-tipoff.campaign.gov.uk.
Although we’ve talked mainly about shops and online retailers, a lot of these ideas apply across the board. So by all means support the companies and individuals selling things you really need, but be wary of those trying to convince you of what you want.
Share Skipton is a registered charity aiming to tackle waste and the effects of financial inequality in the area. If you’d like to help, stop by our Support Us page for volunteering opportunities and donation options. Other local money-saving and sustainability articles are accessible from the News page, or scroll down to find our newsletter sign-up and social media links. Thanks for reading to the end!
External references and further reading
Impulse Buying Facts and Stats for 2024 (moneyzine.com) , Diamond Rarity, Quality, and Cost (gemsociety.org) , Teachers Warn of Brand Bullying (standard.co.uk) , 10 Companies Called Out For Greenwashing (earth.org) , Understanding Price Anchoring: The Power of Perception in Retail (vetrinagroup.com) , CMA versus Misleading Claims and Pressure Selling Tactics (gov.uk) , The Decoy Effect (wikipedia.org) , Fake Online Reviews Research (gov.uk) , Competition & Markets Authority latest (gov.uk)
