Skip to main content

Sale, sale, sale, sale, sale...everyday is a sale

I am sure, you, like me, are a member of a few ecommerce sites. Most of whom have all your personal data (but you don't know it yet). Be that as it may, for the present, they have your mail id and phone number.

And if you are still among the hapless people who use the same email for registering with the ecomm sites and your work/regular email - your mailbox will be under sever duress by now.

Ditto with SMS. Almost all of human communication has moved away from SMS - leaving the SMS to the bots.

And what do we get in these SMSs and mails?

Sale. Sale. Sale. Everyday there is a sale.

Either there is sale of specs (the last time I bought a specs it was when my doctor recommended a change for me, not when there is a sale).

Or there is a sale of donuts (yes, make statins miles free with them please, that may tempt me a few decades later).

Or there is a half price sale of lingerie. Or apparel. Or electronics. Either it is Diwali. Or a Zillion Zollar Zale. Or the last 3 days of some sale.

Net net, every day there is some sale or other. Each of them wants to use my impulse to buy with a promise of low price like there is no tomorrow. And we all know that there will be always be another sale, like the proverbial next bus.

While these notifications spam my inbox and I see them only when I delete them, the question I have on this is; Are these periodic sales the only way to boost sales? That too on every site? Is there no other way at all? I mean, specs to donuts to potted plants to jewellery?

PS: When you walk around in Bangalore - at many places you will see a shack put up with the board - Bombay sale, Furniture sale, Books-by-the-kilo sale and by and large people ignore them. Undeniably they have a market, but, if one is an e-com site and everyone is offering periodic sale - they will reach the point of these shacks. Sure given the size of the market, people will bite, but, my question is - is there no better way?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call