17 marketing tricks from the big supermarket chains

Hello guys! My name is Pavel, and for many years I worked in the marketing departments of large companies, studied, applied and developed various tricks to encourage people to buy more than they really need. Tired of deceiving customers, I left the marketing profession and can now honestly talk about all the gimmicks used in big supermarket stores to get customers to spend more.

Especially for the awesome.club, I’m going to reveal some secrets I’ve learned over the years in the profession so that you won’t be influenced on your next trip to the market.

You can often see beautiful and friendly young women offering a tasting of some new type of sausage, dumplings or other food. This strategy is not to make the customer fall in love with the new product.

In fact, offering something for tasting is a tactic to make you feel obligated to buy it. For example, when you receive an unexpected gift from a friend, you feel the need to reciprocate.

Differentiated presentations of any product impact potential buyers in a much more assertive way than just displaying it on the shelf. This is because the number of consumers who are carried away by the emotional side is much greater than that of purely rational customers.

Yes, retailers love to write 99.99 on price tags instead of 100 so the product will subconsciously seem cheaper to us. Also, unrounded numbers give us more confidence to make the purchase. But there is also the magic of numbers that our brain likes the most. We know you’re used to the number 9 in pricing. But believe me, the 7, 5 and 4 also work well.

For example, to increase sales of a product, you can simply put a similar one with “ugly” numbers on the price tag (1, 2, 3, 6, 8). Our brain is more likely to choose the item whose label says “nice” numbers, even if it is slightly more expensive or cheaper than the competitor.

Have you noticed that in supermarkets there are often polished surfaces on which you can see your reflection out of the corner of your eye? This is not to make you wonder. Mirrors, which, for example, are often seen above shelves with fruits and vegetables, hang there for a reason. Yes, they help to see the product that is in the far corner, as well as visually expand the space.

But most importantly, the mirrors on the sales floor slow him down. And if you stop to look at your reflection (after all, this usually happens unconsciously), then there is a high degree of probability of paying attention to the goods located next to the mirror and, most likely, a desire to buy them.

If the packaging of your favorite ketchup or mayonnaise suddenly becomes a little bigger and it says “20% more” prominently, that doesn’t mean it’s a generous increase in the amount of the product. Sometimes the footnote to this sentence (in small print on the back of the package) explains that you will get 20% more taste or pleasure, not the merchandise itself.

This astute move by marketers, for example, can serve as a reasonable argument (as you might think at first) for a slight increase in the price of an item without actually increasing the cost of producing it. After all, consumers rarely read all the information on the back of the label and almost never look at the paragraphs describing the product’s composition.

Often, on the packaging of the product and also in advertising, we can see messages that claim that it can solve almost all of our problems. For example, you are more likely to choose a cream that says on the package that it slows down aging, and not one that simply moisturizes or soothes the skin (although the composition and price are no different).

As paradoxical as it may seem, the feeling of pain causes a much greater incentive to make a purchase than pleasure alone. That is, an item that says it will help solve our problems or avoid them will always be in high demand. After all, the main thing for our brain is the right words on the label, and not the composition of the product.

In life, we can make friends with people because of affinity, or also when we have a common enemy. Sales work the same way. Marketers are always trying to find the common enemy between their products and consumers, to influence you to buy the “best” item, which would be theirs.

For example, many manufacturers know what kind of candy you crave when you’re on a diet, so they invest in low-calorie foods to get you there. However, foods still contain a lot of sugar. In this case, the common enemy between you and marketers is excess calories. Therefore, a low-calorie product can easily defeat a high-calorie product.

There are certain types of words that are essential to attract the customer’s attention to goods and make them buy more. Often, marketers place huge advertisements in stores hanging from the ceiling or pasted on the shelves saying in bold letters: “everything for 6 reais”.

The fact is that this play on words, along with the value of the product, subconsciously minimizes its price. That is, to our brain it seems that between the item for “6 reais” and the one that costs “only 6 reais”, the second offer is more advantageous.

A saying that exemplifies this point well: “Free cheese, only in a mousetrap”. Any product on which it is written that when you buy it you get something for free always implies that the “gift” is already included in the final price. For example, 5 packs of gum in a pack with a flirty inscription announcing you get one free don’t always cost less than 5 packs purchased separately.

Often, offers for the same product are located at different ends of the sales floor, so you cannot compare the cost and the non-existent benefit.

Marketers are not just involved in creating impactful slogans and advertising campaigns. They also develop the composition of the product. For example, they know that the texture will influence you not to eat just half of a package. Likewise, creamy food creates the illusion of low calorie content, because it practically melts in your mouth, which means that the brain perceives it as a light snack, and you don’t even feel like you’ve eaten too much.

Butter, chocolate and various types of sauces increase our desire to consume a certain item, influencing us to buy it. Therefore, foods with similar components generally seem tastier and more attractive to us, even when we just look at the packaging with its photo with the additional adornments. Therefore, it is essential to build a good image of the product to influence consumers to buy it.

Banana suppliers know which color of the fruit affects consumer choice in deciding whether it is fresh or older. For this, they even created an exclusive name for the color, “buttercup”, due to the similarity of the shade with the banana considered “fresh”.

In order to make vegetables and fruits look fresh on the store shelves, in Denmark it was thought to install small sprayers that automatically spray small amounts of water over the products. These tiny droplets look like dew, and our brain perceives this as a sign that the goods are fresh. Currently, many stores use conventional sprayers for this function.

Today there are so many options in stores that manufacturers compete not only by changing their volume, quantity or composition, but also by packaging. For example, to distinguish an ordinary water bottle from dozens of similar ones, they come up with innovative packaging, so that you, or rather your children, pay attention to it and want to buy it.

Changing the design of product packaging often leads to an increase in their cost, although the composition and quality remain the same. However, you pay a little more, just because you like the new design visually.

A large part of the manufacturers’ advertising budget goes into buying the best display spots in stores so that you look at certain products first and want to buy them. Those displayed on an exclusive counter for the brand sell 20% more than those located on the shelves.

Sometimes, to influence your choice, supermarkets clutter the shelves with other brands so that you don’t feel attracted to them and buy the goods from the company that has an exclusive sales counter.

When you go to the store to buy a very popular product, it is usually located near the edge of the shelves, and this is done for a special reason. The items that attract the consumer to the store are used to draw attention to others that are not well known to the customer. For example, when you are looking for your favorite shampoo on a shelf with a thousand options.

Generally, the most attractive products don’t stay in the same place for long, while normal merchandise stays in the same place for weeks. That is why store employees are always closely monitoring that there are no empties on the shelves. Therefore, these special items are constantly moving around the market and are religiously replenished so that you get confused by the huge variety of them and stay in the establishment as long as possible.

When placing goods on the shelves, the principle of making logical combinations is used. For example, tea, coffee and confectionery; sausages,…