Don’t Be an April Fool
Don’t get fooled on the first of April or any other day of the year, especially when it comes to falling prey to exaggerated, misleading, or outright deceptive claims of product vendors and infomercial stars.
Infamous infomercial star Kevin Trudeau was in the news again today.
You’d think by now, with all the press coverage concerning this guy for so many years, his being thrown in prison in the early 1990’s, and all the trouble with the FTC, people would get the memo and just avoid whatever he’s selling. But they don’t. As P. T. Barnum is famous for saying, “They’re a sucker born every day.” And as Kevin has proven, there’s little the government has really been able to do to stop him and all those like him. Think about it, if you sell enough of something, then even massive fines can be allocated on the balance sheet as a cost of doing business.
Q: So what can you do to not be that next sucker?
A: Inform yourself.
Unfortunately, a lot of product vendors and infomercial stars intimately understand that most buying decisions for what they are selling are more emotional than rational, more impulsive rather than thoughtfully considered. They’re there to tell you a “story,” perhaps better said as to sell you a story, a story that is most compelling to believe. The offer is appealing. The call to action, to order, is urgent. Why, this amazing new widget/book/gadget/program is guaranteed to make your life easier, make you look better/healthier, save you money – or all of the above, or your money back! And it’s going to do it for only $19.95 (which I refer to as “one video credit,” the seemingly universal price point for the vast majority of DRTV products).
It’s a simple psychology: “Wow, this thing is less than $20. I pay that much just to go to the movies and get a box of popcorn and a coke. And that can end up being the waste of two hours of time. So what? Not such a big risk. Sure the thing might not work when I get it, but for less than $20, the possibility of its story being true seems worth a roll of the dice. Besides, it’s guaranteed to work or I get my money back! I’m going to call right now, because if I do, they’re going to throw in lots more great stuff I didn’t even realize I needed!”
And this is how billions of dollars change hands every year from consumers to direct marketers.
Now, to be fair, there are many, many wonderful inventions and ideas out there being offered via direct marketing that are really telling the truth, and really do have exceptional value to offer. Although you might understandably wonder, “Well, if they’re really good, why aren’t these things being sold through traditional retailers like Wal-Mart and Target?” (Actually, many of them are).
The answer to that question of why so many direct marketed products aren’t with major retailers really has more to do with understanding the true nature of retailing, and has nothing to do, per se, with the validity of many of these amazing new products. Without going into a deep tangent here, just grasp the point that retailers, small or large, exist more to satisfy existing market demand than they do to help create it. Retailers have some finite amount of shelf space in their stores and only want to offer those products that sell. That’s how they make money – in volume mostly.
So along comes a brand new widget from a genius inventor. Said inventor goes to the buyers at Wal-Mart or Target and says, “Please sell my product in your stores.” The buyers then ask about existing market demand, deep discounts, inventory management, returns, how much the inventor is spending on marketing to send customers into their stores to buy the product, and a few dozen more uncomfortable questions, that Mr. Inventor can’t answer and probably didn’t even realize he needed to think about. Result: retailer doesn’t see this new product as something that’s going to justify their shelf space, or that anyone is going to be demanding it. Mr. Inventor needs an alternative “sales and distribution” channel. He opts to go direct.
Mr. Inventor then takes a little bit of money, buys some cheap TV time late at night and on the weekends, and over time gets enough insomniacs and couch potatoes to buy his product, which he has made in China, and stocks a lot of it in his garage. If those early adopters like it and tell their friends, then suddenly there’s this little wave of demand. If that wave gets large enough, Mr. Inventor suddenly has a lot better story to go back and tell the major retailers than he did the first time, and “voila” we start seeing the amazing new gizmo at Walgreens or Bed, Bath, & Beyond and elsewhere. But for the time that Mr. Inventor was trying to find a customer base via direct marketing, he was right in there shoulder to shoulder with everyone else doing their best to hawk their wares.
So the real burden on the consumer is to learn how to tell the difference between hard-working and honorable Mr. Inventor and the Kevin Trudeaus out there. Here are some simple tips and guidelines:
Does the product being advertised solve a real problem? More importantly, is it a problem you yourself have?
For example, a gadget that automatically opens jars for you might be an absolute godsend if you have arthritis or only one hand. But if you’re able-bodied, it might just be a $20 novelty that you use once, throw into a drawer and only think of three seconds after you open every new jar of pickles.
Consider the Source.
Not all DRTV products come from separate companies. Several firms represent entire lines of these products, and have done so for many years. They have reputations that can be investigated online and easily determined to be reputable or not. Some of these firms are listed with the Better Business Bureau. Take a minute to do a little detective work and see if these guys are well established.
Always understand ALL the costs before you order – especially “Shipping & Processing” charges.
S&P charges are one of the most lucrative revenue streams of all direct marketing. Does it really take another nine or ten dollars to ship you something that weighs less than two pounds, and takes weeks and weeks to get there? Of course not.
So suddenly that $19.95 product is really more like $30 when all is said and done. In fact, some vendors offer “free” resupply of products “for life” if only you’ll pay the S&P charges. That should tell you that the underlying cost of the product itself is a lot less than the S&P charges.
What’s worse, some vendors have been observed to charge separate S&P charges for each item shipped, so all those “extra goodies” they threw in for “free” really aren’t really free. So the charge that shows up on your credit card statement isn’t the $19.95, or even $29.95 you were expecting, but perhaps $40 or $60 or more. That’s when you realize you’ve been taken—regardless of whether the primary product was any good or not.
Always use a Credit Card, not a Debit Card if ordering online or via telephone.
This is because the nice people at Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and even Pay Pal, will give you a refund when you dispute a charge, and Mr. DRTV vendor can’t do very much about it. This is your only real “money-back guarantee.”
Check Retailers.
You might be surprised, but many of the most popular DRTV products can indeed be found at your local Walgreens, CVS Pharmacies, Wal-Mart, Target, Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and the like. Many of these stores actually have designated sections or displays specifically for “As Seen On TV” products. The one you’re interested in just might be sitting there waiting for you. And the best part of buying them retail is no shipping charges to pay, so it’s cheaper. You also get to have it right then, not weeks into the future waiting for it to arrive. What’s more, if you don’t like the product, you know you can return it under the store’s return policy and get your money back.
Read Reviews!
This is the information age. If you have an internet connection, you have more information available at the tips of your fingers that you could possibly imagine. Simply Google the name of the product you are potentially interested in, along with the word “reviews.” You’ll probably find a lot of them. But you need to be careful in doing so. If you find a lot of online “opinion” sites, then that’s what you’re going to get – a lot of people’s opinions, people who you don’t know, nor know whether their views are based upon personal tastes, biases, misuse of products, rumors someone else told them, people who just live to complain, or what.
Just take what you read in opinion sites with a grain of salt. You can expect to find glowing praise from shills for the vendor, as well as negative statements from people with an axe to grind for whatever reason. Look for the predominance of feedback. In essence, throw out the high and the low and see what you have left. If there isn’t much to consider (few data samples) keep that in mind, too, along with the realization that people who are happy with products usually don’t bother to go to opinion sites to share their thoughts as much as people who want to complain. Two complaints and nothing else might mean that hundreds of people were happy with a product while only two were not happy, specifically the two that bothered to complain.
See for yourself at ASOTVI.
ASOTVI was founded on the premise that the only sure way to inform consumers prior to them having take the risk of getting ripped off was for us to be the guinea pig on their behalf, and video our experiences in an objective way so that consumers could literally see for themselves through the magic of digital media technologies exactly what you get, how it works, and any issues to consider before ordering.
Naturally, that concept assumes that people know ASOTVI exists and what it offers, and the next time they see a compelling advertisement are able to resist the urge to make that impulse buy, and instead, first take the time to sit down at the computer, log onto www.asotv.info and see if the product has been reviewed yet, and if so, what we found out. Of course, we won’t always have every product listed, if for no other reason than due to the fact that new ones come out all the time. But we will always endeavor to have the most popular ones and those frequently queried.
Think about it, a minute or two invested online may not only save you $20 or more, but also save you the weeks of waiting in anticipation of something good arriving, only to be disappointed, and learning you’ve been ripped off. We all know what that feels like, and having the opportunity to avoid it, when appropriate to do so, is something very valuable indeed.
Conversely, what you may also discover at ASOTVI is that a product works just as advertised, and you can shop with confidence. That’s a good feeling, too.
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