Member-only story
It’s Important We Resist The Tricksters And Their Cheap Tricks
We need to defend ourselves against the dark arts — for everybody’s sake.
“Prices from” is a marketing tactic that I’ve always despised. It also irritates me beyond measure because it works. Every time. “Fly to your favourite destination for pennies: prices from £10.” I mean, how could you not click?
It’s a tactic that generates the all-important tension that all marketing requires. We were doing fine, we had no need to fly anywhere until someone put that sign in front of us. Now we have a decision to make. Does it make sense not to buy at that price? And so we click. And once we’ve clicked and selected the destination, we are in a completely different state. We are flying. We are travelling. It’s just payment that’s required now to release the accumulated tension. Needless to say, the price is never even close to the one that created the tension in the first place.
Sadly, it happens outside of marketing too. Or perhaps it doesn’t, and what is really happening is that everything is marketing and thus susceptible to such tactics. I come across myriad articles that promise to solve impossible problems easily. I read them and am none the wiser for doing so. Sometimes the topic is elegantly circumvented; others it is vaguely addressed. Yet, it…