Recently, European Union released a community law stating that companies who call consumers home telling they won a prize (always not true), have to keep their promises now and really offer what they are saying. Moreover, if consumers buy a product in conditions stated as “under pressure”, they have now one year to make their claims and get a refund.
Even difficult to implement, is a step further on fair practices and to end aggressive push strategies by these companies, usually, cosmetics, insurance and healthy products.
Once in a email to a marketing guru, I asked him what he thinks about hard sales practices, and the answer was simple: Mass market is still not over. Furthermore, recently I read an article from another well known strategist that hard sales concept shouldn’t exist, instead people should name it “bad sales”.
True, these companies could earn fast money, could achieve monthly sales targets by pressure, insistence, scrutinizing people, and in the end, kill their brand.
If you want to go through this path, you should consider the following: whether you are a huge corporation with a monopoly over the market and you can relatively play with your brand equity; or if you not that “big”, you better think what is going to be your next business when you totally annihilated your current brand.
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2 Comments
Many sales on the Internet work that way:
The crooks advertise a product and propose a FREE sample, no strings attached. Only you pay for S & H with your credit card as required. (It is not really to recover the shipment cost but to know your card number). Then you try the sample; If you are not satisfied you just don’t buy and forget about it since you are not committed
to take any further action. Error… a few days later you receive the real thing and your account is charged big time. You dipute the charge, which is immediately reversed. Then be careful; the card service generally sides with the crooks whose business is more juicy than yours and
for some bad reason like: you didn’t return the
product or you didn’t let the crooks know you didn’t want it etc…. then, the charge is back on your account plus a late charge, plus a second
charge for the next month refill . Time has elapsed during the hassle.
Using your card number without your permission is nothing less than “identity theft”.
But nobody cares, even the Police will tell you that there are so many similar cases, that they won’t move a finger.
You would like to put a bullet in the crooks’ head
but don’t dream they operate from the other side
of the country.
Hi John,
Thanks for your comment! Well, that’s not hard sales, that is even worst – sales scams which should be hardly punished! but as you say it is difficult to control. I receive a bunch of spam in my email with all these companies trying to snag something, but I never trust who I don’t quite ’see’. Internet proportionate this scams, but at the same time you have access to a wide source of information through every kinds of websites like blogs. So the good thing in this case is to get informed and avoid these companies. The second thing that I mention on the post is that even with the police not being able to do a great deal regarding this, at least governments are becoming more aware and measures are being implemented. Who knows would be better in the future..