Business consultant George Torok talks about a phone call - one of many similar ones - during his first days as a new entrepreneur. It’s a story that must be very familiar to many business people and consumers alike, and if you’re lucky enough never to have been bothered by this kind of thing in real life, chances are you come across the technique every time you logon to the Internet.
Somebody asked for him by his company name and told him he’d won a prize. Actually, two prizes, and what’s more, he could choose them from a long list that included a personal computer, a trip to Club Med, a diamond pendant, a video camera and an “entertainment centre” (in plain language, a TV) that he could readily dispose of for a cool $8,000 in cash.
Well, what more could any guy want, but of course, Mr Torok was astute enough to politely enquire if there was anything he was expected to do in return for such extreme generosity. Not very much, he was told, just to purchase a little bit of advertising. And needless to add, our star salesperson was far less articulate in explaining the nature and benefits of the product she was selling than she had been in describing the wonderful features of the generous prizes.
Is there anything unethical about this kind of marketing practice? Technically speaking, maybe not: did the canvasser actually say that there were no strings attached when she first offered the prizes? At any rate, the “victim” in such situations gets off relatively lightly, since the deception lasts, at most, a few minutes!
But, of course, a person can be misled in all sorts of ingenious ways - ways that allow the perpetrator to plead that technically his hands have remained clean. And often the consequences are more serious and longer lasting.
Sometimes, one can mislead or deceive by simply remaining silent. In one of my articles on our site I wrote about a young entrepreneur who managed to swing a lucrative business deal while giving the other side the impression that she was representing her former employer. “They never directly asked me,” she confessed, “so I let them believe what they wanted to believe.”
In a very interesting - but to my way of thinking, disturbing - article on Fortune Small Business, Seth Godin, long regarded as a seminal thinker on the philosophy of modern marketing, relates another revealing incident involving the use of the silent technique. This one has a particularly ironic aspect.
In the 1980’s a few enterprising opportunists bought some name-brand stereo speakers and packed them into a truck. They parked the truck behind a dorm at Harvard and started whispering, “Psst…Hey! You wanna buy some speakers?” Passersby assumed that the speakers were stolen, and therefore this had to be a great bargain. The stock was sold out in no time. Little did the students realize that they were paying the same price that they would pay at the local store, but of course, these back-street entrepreneurs didn’t have to pay a dime in advertising, rent or the like…
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Well, if you never thought appearing to be dishonest can be to your advantage, you have to think again!
But seriously…yes we are talking about something serious here. Godin’s central thesis is that if you want to attract customers in an increasingly competitive world, you have to be prepared to tell lies, as long as your lies are essentially the truth.
An incredible feat of verbal gymnastics? Well, marketers are performing such feats every single day, he says. What the guys who sold the speakers did is essentially no different from the people who sell an obstensibly more sophisticated version of a gadget for $100 when the model that sells for $10 performs its function just as well. But since people believe that the more expensive version does a better job, so it does. And that’s the truth!
Fine. If that’s what makes the wheels of commerce turn round, OK. But it worries me all the same.
What do you think?
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