If you want to hold on to more of your money then you might want to know about a little marketing technique that takes advantage of your good nature. It all has to do with reciprocation and making you feel required to buy.
How do you approach the sample table at the grocery store? Do you gleefully grab some samples and then walk away? Chances are very good that if you do try a sample of an item you’ll wind up buying the product. Why? Because the item was so good? Not necessarily. It goes a little deeper than that.
Most of us were taught from a very young age that if someone does something nice for us we should reciprocate with something nice back. This is a great philosophy, but one that marketers have discovered works well to get you to buy. So, if they offer you a sample of something, you unconsciously may feel the need to do something nice back and buy the product.
Do you ever feel guilty taking a sample and then walking away? If so, you know first hand how this form of reciprocal marketing works.
Free trials can be another form of marketing that takes advantage of reciprocation. Again, you have gotten something for free, so you feel obligated to reciprocate and give something back, in the form of purchasing the product or continuing the subscription. Free trials also work when you forget that you are charged automatically, but that is another story.
The point is that the next time that you are offered an item or service for free, really examine whether or not the seller could be using reciprocal marketing. If you chose to purchase something really ask yourself if it is something that you have to have or if you feel guilty for getting something for nothing or worried about offending the person who gave it to you.