Consumers are easily manipulated because:

• they are bad at math;
• they shop with their heart rather than their head.

This means you might be wasting your money (that is not so easy to earn) because you are being manipulated.

Do you think this is fair? Would you like to be sure you are spending your money because you want, not because someone wants you to? Do you want to save?

Then let’s learn which tricks sellers may be using to manipulate your shopping behavior.

Shopping momentum

Shopping momentum occurs when a buyer literally “can’t stop”‘: the first purchase produces a psychological impulse that makes him / her buy more.

How this works: Shopping has two phases: deliberation and implementation. The actual buying moves us from deliberation to implementation phase: we continue buying without returning to the deliberation stage.

How not to be tricked: break the shopping momentum. A good way to do that is to pay by cash and use several envelopes / pockets where you take the money from:

• counting cash makes you think: you thus return to the deliberation stage;
• paying from different envelopes forces you to return to the deliberation stage to think if the purchase was a good idea.

Confused consumers

A sales technique called “disrupt-then-reframe” can trick consumers into buying.

How this works: the seller first presents a confusing sales pitch to a customer and then restates the pitch in a more familiar way. Meaning, they first utilize technical jargon, complex terminology or large product assortments and thus “attract the consumer’s attention” who becomes eager to ‘understand’ the pitch.

How not to be tricked: in this case, knowledge is your best weapons. Just remain cool-headed and realize you are being cheated.

Double discounts

Ironically, shoppers are more attracted to the double discount, even though it involves less savings. An average American is not very good at maths, which is why a sale offering “20 % off the original price plus an additional 25 % off the already-reduced sale price” is effective.

How this works: the maths behind this is both complex to explain and spot. Say, one store offers 45% discount, while another one offers 25% + 25% discount for the same product. Which one do you feel is better? The second one? Wrong! In reality, the second offer is about a ~43 percent discount, because the second discount is taken on the reduced amount after the first discount.

How not to be tricked: well, use a calculator! Counting your money is the best way to save it. So counting ho much you are actually saving will help you understand who is honest and who tries to trick you.

Post images by jpockele, Cosmic Kitty, Jesse757, artykle.com

Are you an impulse buyer? A passionate shopper? How much are you influenced by advertising campaigns?

Are you always sure you really need what you are purchasing? Do you believe your desire to have something makes you dependent on your never ending consumer appetite?

If “Yes” is your answer to at least one of the above questions, you should like this anti-consumerism video collection I am listing below. (Note: all of those videos are homemade, I intentionally didn’t include any ‘professional’ videos here)

Consumerism & You: a modern guide to self destruction

A four-minute video with a single message “You have been consumed“: the video is very well edited and strikes a good sound track:

Fight Everything

That’s a short animation claiming that:

• “Consumerism is a lie to sell you an illusion of happiness and security”;
• “We .. spend our lives in debt, to buy things we don’t even need”;
• “The continuous product message is woven into the very fabric of our lives”…

Please buy more stuff

This is a video clip to the song “We want your soul“. The introductory message to the video claims that until recently, all we needed was things necessary for the living but what we have now is the never-ending desire to buy and consume:

“Now that we have more than we could ever need, we are left to search for something else to stimulate the struggle. So we spend our time hunting for things we don’t really need, and we call it shopping.”

Do I need it

The video features a cute song that asks questions “Do I need it? Or just want it? Who convinced me that I need it and why do I want it?”

It makes a valid point that by “buying less stuff and living more simply”, we are saving our planet:

Psychology of Consumer Behaviour

Why do we buy? Do we buy because we need or because we want? Of course, we are well aware of what the narrator is talking about but she explains things in a plain, easy to digest way and she does sound convincing:

“We live in the world of constant sensation: color, sound, and others… “

Post image by dno1967