Consumer behavior is the main factor influencing marketing strategy. The tactics are always the same; promise people you will satisfy their needs and if they discover that you only sold them empty words, continue the game and this time offer more glittering promises appealing to consumers’ irresistible desire to possess and own.
One could hardly imagine how people willingly fall in the same trap, not twice or thrice, but every time they go out shopping. Each time the consumers return home after an extended tour in the market they feel being the losing party.
Producers and sellers know how to improve their marketing strategies and they do this by understanding how consumers feel toward what is being displayed in their shops, how they think of their goods, how they reason and bargain and how in the end they tend to select between the different alternatives available to them.
They introduced what I call the “999” tactic, where a car costing SR50,000 is offered at SR49,999. The trick is to cushion the devastating effect of the 50,000 figure, offering instead a more acceptable figure that starts with “four” instead of “five”. It is all part of a capitalist game.
When the psychology of the consumer, which is a combination of family, cultural and media influences, changed and people started double checking the figures, sellers introduced the “buy two and get one free” trick. This tactic is intended to rid the shops of any unsold stocks to give way to new products. The practice has extended to cover foodstuff as well, especially canned and frozen food, meaning such products on display were either of poor quality or about to expire.
Again, consumers keep flocking to shops applying these tactics. Some may think that by getting a free product, they have indeed struck a good bargain while in fact all they did was pay a double price for a poor-quality product.
I do not blame traders for applying these kind of marketing tactics. In the end they seek to develop and improve marketing campaigns strategies that could be more effective in reaching the consumer. The fault lies with those consumers who are driven by an unrestrained desire to buy everything on display, resulting in a money drain.
