Do People Buy Your Discounting Strategy?

During good economic times when business is booming, you hardly see large hoardings, posters or banners atop stores shouting loudly about discounts being offered.  During recessionary or lean times, you will see a lot of announcements about huge Discount Sales in newspapers, malls, leaflets, advertorials, social and mass media like Internet and Television.

Festival discounts are a way to lure customers in to the store so that stocks piled up in anticipation of the huge seasonal demand is sold off and does not become a liability at the end of the season.

Clearance sale is an attempt to clear existing stock in sales as the store is being closed down, be it for renovation, change of management or complete exit from the business.

I sometimes find it funny when stores offering discount sale put up banners like “Fresh Stock Arrival”.  Now what on earth do you mean by infusion fresh stock for Discount sale?  Is the Discount sale so popular that people are demanding fresh stock?

• Do customers really get fooled by such strategies?
• Are customers really dumb so as to get convinced about discount sales?
• Is the vendor so generous so as to take a cut from his profits and help people to buy his goods at a discount?
• Does the vendor have so deep pockets (high financial capacity) and can afford to make financial loss in business through a Discount Sale strategy?
• Is the vendor able to increase his sales using discounting as a strategy?
• Do customer’s really make substantial savings or benefit from such discounting strategy?

The interesting thing is that people do get lured by such strategies and end up buying large quantities.  I have observed at first hand that women get tempted, much more than men, to be attracted to discounting sales.   While women get attracted to commodities such as garments, fashion accessories, shoes, men will get attracted to big ticket Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) like Washing Machines, Refrigerators, Televisions, Audio Systems, Communication Gadgets (mobiles, tablets, etc.), shoes and wrist watches.

Can business be done more honestly?  Is there an effective way of doing business where you sell and customers buy but not end up as looking as fools while the vendor laughs all the way to the Bank?

Best Wishes.

Sarfaraz Lakhani

Calibre Creators

www.calibrecreators.com