Using Fear to Sell Products

Companies have been using marketing based around customer fears forever. Fear marketing takes place by companies in all areas of business from soap companies to clothing brands to animal adoption/rescue groups like the ASPCA. By utilizing marketing campaigns that touch on individual’s fears, brands can often better convince consumers to buy their products or use their services. 

For example, if you go on Victoria Secret’s website at any given time you may see a banner saying “ONE DAY ONLY SALE!” or “SALE ENDS AT MIDNIGHT”. Here, the brand is creating a sense of urgency with the customer and attempting to convince them that they need to purchase a product right now otherwise they will miss out and not have this chance again. The customer may feel more obligated to spend money to receive the ‘deal’ even if another promotion begins right as this ends. It happens elsewhere from online retail as well. 

An advertisement from Just Soap company portrays a mother holding or about to handle her baby. Her hand is covered in cockroaches and the print advertisement reads, “If you aren’t totally clean, you are filthy”. Here, Just Soap is attempting to sell their product on the premise that if you are not using their soap, then you’re hands must be contaminated with germs and thus not clean enough to touch your child. It also can go off the fear of not wanting to get your new born baby sick with your dirty hands and to clean them, you must have Just Soap. This is a much more direct example of fear marketing than the Victoria’s Secret sale promotion approach we looked at before. 

A third form of fear marketing is not necessarily with a consumer product, but rather from the ASPCA, who works with rescuing animals and getting them adopted from shelters. They often use advertisements showing off very sad or sick looking animals asking for help and donations. ASPCA is attempting to guilt the viewers into donating or adopting one of the animals on the premise that they need help or are in grave danger. If they showed images of happy dogs running in the park, I doubt they would generate the same level of support from the general community. Personally, I feel so guilty when I see these commercials that I immediately change the channel as to not subject myself to seeing those depictions of animals. While that marketing does not necessarily speak to me directly, I certainly recognize the power in its success so far. 

Utilizing Raffles to Increase Sales

I am a huge proponent of consumer generated online marketplaces. As a life long collector of comics, footwear, vintage memorabilia, and all things dope, online marketplaces are the premier destination to curate collections. I am referring primarily to what I have experience with, which includes eBay, Facebook buying/selling groups, and designated forums. Here, sellers can post their items for sale on the marketplace to an audience of potentially interested customers. The entire transaction exists online and after a sale, the seller merely ships the item or arranges an in person meet up with the purchaser. Often, the seller lists the item for a set price and may accept reasonable offers.

However, an alternative selling style in these scenarios is a raffle. Here, the seller will sell a set amount of raffle spots for a specific ticket price. For example, if I were to normally sell a product priced at $400 I could alternatively sell 20 raffle spots at $20 each. This not only allows you to collect the full amount that you were looking to get for your product (preventing customers from making “low-ball” offers), but also gives the opportunity for a customer to get a high-valued product for a fraction of its price. This form of selling often comes under fire for being unfair or rigged in the winner selection process, although the most successful raffles that I have been associated with utilize a third party selector to choose the winner and avoid this issue. Raffles also can be seen as a form of gambling, which it essentially is, although there are always fixed odds. If the raffle you are partaking in has 15 spots, you know for a fact that you have a 6.6% chance of winning per ticket you purchase.

I find this to be a great style in selling higher priced and collectible items, but can be translated over big-ticket items featured at retail stores as well. With raffles, the customer can get wrapped into the allure of “winning” a product for a fraction of its cost without ever actually receiving any product. You can conceivably earn revenue from an entire audience of customers and never actually give them any products. One might raise the question “if customer’s keep losing, won’t they become upset with the store and stop purchasing there?”. This is a valid question, and I would rebuttal it by saying that not every product is meant to be raffled in a store. I envision a scenario where I can walk into Best Buy and buy products as I normally would. Then as I walk to the back to look at the unbelievable 60”+ 4K HDTVs there is a sign that they are holding a raffle for one of these beauties with 40 spots priced at $25. Here, Best Buy can earn revenue and gain inexpensive customer information on people who may not even purchased a product to begin with. This creates a low acquisition cost for customer information, which can many times be a leading line item for a company’s assets. In addition, this raffle idea would increase the total price per transaction for the participating customers and can help employees on the sales floor meet higher goals. As a consumer, it adds a level of excitement to shopping, the same thrill you get with gambling and betting, and can result in customers returning to the store more often than they historically had been before.

This model is not designed for selling every product in your store. It is, however, a strong marketing opportunity for a store that does not require much capital and can generate a heightened level of brand equity and value to the customer. While this post may not be about as taboo of a subject matter of the rest, this could be a new facet of retail selling that exists primarily on the secondary selling market. Bridging the gap between secondary marketplaces and the primary supply chain is not only exciting, but a potentially very profitable avenue to explore.  

Marketing Techniques in Escorting Prove Helpful to All

“What in the world is this guy talking about now”, you may ask yourself. Well I will tell you: the marketing campaign techniques that escorts use can be applied to all facets of traditional business marketing. While trying to brainstorm topics for this week’s blog post, I tried to come up with all of the taboo industries existent in America. While doing this, I realized that escorts, or a less invasive term for prostitutes, must do marketing campaigns to stand out against the rest of the competition. In a non-regulated industry like this, I originally assumed that some of the techniques would be radical and vastly different than approaches a regular business may use. The reality is that many of the core concepts and approaches translate over very easily to more traditional businesses. 

After doing some basic researching online, I came across a website that was dedicated to giving tips and advice to women who were interested in being an escort or how to further their existent escorting service (http://www.howtobecomeanescort.net). Not to make a joke here, but you can consider this a service industry for the sake of marketing strategy. The escorts are not necessarily selling a product, but rather supplying an experience that services the desires and imaginations of their client. Once that notion is understood, the escort can start to better market the experience that they supply. This is very similar to the professional sports ticket sales, which thrives under the premise of selling a fan experience as a whole, opposed to just purely a ticket to a sporting event. What I discovered while reading posts on the escort website was that the success of the escort is more closely related to her marketing and customer relation performance opposed to her looks and attraction level. Naturally, I can imagine that looks play a role to some extent, although it does reiterate the notion that the better marketed company can out compete their competitors even if they have a slightly inferior product or service. With all of this said, let us look at some of the main points and approaches that I gathered to be the most important for escort marketing.

1. Advertise with the Best

Here, the author discussed her opinions on the best places to advertise your services. She includes a subscription based online directory, escort agency phone books, as well as a few other agency websites. She also touches on the importance of maximizing SEO for individual’s websites. These ideas of basic advertising are no different than say the construction industry, an area where I currently work. If I need to find a subcontractor who works with glass and glazing, I will look in the Construction Blue Book, which is not a free network to be part of. The concept of maximizing SEO and search results is also an area that is majorly focused on in every other business with an online aspect. 

2. Keep Regular Clients

This section is fairly straightforward. The importance of repeat customers is imperative in any business venture. In a quote from the article, the author states, “Keeping regular clients is one of the most important things you can do as an escort. When I was making $30000 a month as an escort before I retired, $25000 of that was from regular clients and $5000 was from random clients calling and booking an hour here or there.” What we can gather from this is that roughly 80% of this escort’s monthly revenue was generated via repeat customers. For a lot of companies, obtaining 40% (1/2 of what the escort experienced) revenue from repeat customers would be a large feat. Knowing your amount of repeat customers is vital in your marketing approach. For example, this escort would be wise to focus on customer relations and maintaining continued relationships rather than focusing on customer acquisition. The lesson in this section is that your primary efforts should be a result of current customer base. Essentially, those who better understand their customers will better understand how to market towards them. Keeping existent customers happy can often be more valuable than solely focusing on new customer acquisition. Improving customer relationships can actually lead to better acquisition results since you have a subset of die-hard and passionate customers who will act as company ambassadors. 

3. Stay Active and Consistent 

The last two sections on the website looked at both Internet marketing and becoming active in the local escorting community. These are in my opinion the most vital for branding a service-based company. The author writes about the importance of maintaining a consistent level of activity of various social media platforms. By existing across the spectrum of social media offerings, your brand can continue to gain recognition even when the customer was not previously thinking of you. If you make an effort to regularly post relevant content of these platforms, you increase the mental real estate you have in their mind. This translates well to non-social media platforms as well. Utilizing a monthly or bi-weekly email newsletter allows you to show off what’s new with your company and an easy opportunity to slip a promotional code or discount opportunity for your products. For the escorts, this could be in the sense of maintaining contact with customers who are likely to become regulars. Initiating contact with them can play a big role in whether they start to contact you exclusively, or will take his money to a variety of sources. Staying active in your local community is important for both maintaining relationships and also as a way to help your own business. For example, it is in the best interest of a skateboarding shop to be sponsoring local skaters or hosting skateboard events for the neighborhood and local area. By investing your own time is the community that you cater towards, you project a more favorable and relatable image to your customers. For escorts, the website author spoke about how she would partake in legalizing prostitution campaigns, and being vocal about sexual health and protection. These not only improve her image, but also acts in her personal interest by better educating her customers about safety and potentially legalizing her occupation. 

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