One of the most fascinating marketing “tactics” I see online is what I would describe as “Claytons urgency” — the fictitious urgent deadline or limitation you create when you don’t really have such a need.
Do you remember those Claytons ads from the 1980s? Or is that just an Australian thing? Claytons was “the drink you have when you’re not having a drink.” Having just checked it out on Wikipedia, there is a definition for Claytons… yes, it was only an Australian/New Zealand marketing campaign.
(While you’re at it, check out Wikipedia’s list of Australian words. Then you’ll understand the title of this post!)
But I digress. Back to those marketing “tactics.”
Let me say upfront that I think this tactic has a purpose. Of course, urgency, limitation or exclusiveness has a legitimate role as a form of sales influence. A 1-day only sale, for instance, implies special offers available just for 1 day. If you went back to the store a week later and the same offers were available, the store’s next 1-day only sale would have less impact, as you wouldn’t believe the offer was only limited to 1 day, based on your experience of the previous event.
The same applied to urgency and limitation. They’re great ways to help create a buying frenzy. I have used those tactics successfully — and legitimately — in sales campaigns for clients.
What “fascinates” me is online is seeing this psychological tool of influence (read Cialdini if you need to for some fantastic references) abused by online marketers. This primarily happens in two ways:
1. Seeing the urgency tactic be abused with false “order by” deadlines
Here’s one common example: you land at a product sales page, and, for instance (seeing as it is), let’s say it’s Tuesday, 22nd August 2006.
Reading down the sales letter, you see the following: “The price is $XXX but only for orders placed up until midnight on 23 August 2006.”
“Wow!” you think to yourself, “lucky I visited this page now! If I don’t order by tomorrow night, I might miss out!”
The offer screams out to you “order now” because there’s a possibility that you will have to pay more — or the offer won’t be available — after midnight tomorrow night.
However, just about every instance I see of this tactic in use is a false deadline. If you visit the page again on the 23rd August, the new “deadline” is midnight on 24 August. The date keeps changing according to whatever day it is that you’re reading the sales page.
Now, for a naive internet user, this tactic isn’t obvious. But once you’ve seen it in action, and are aware of it, the influence of this tactic diminishes significantly.
And this is where I think marketers go wrong. Although I can’t cite an exact reference, I remember reading of an airline survey where passengers believed (not all of them, but enough to take notice) if the seat tray table was dirty, then the engine maintenance was probably shoddy too (attributed on various websites to Tom Peters, but I can’t find it for now).
So, once you’ve “discovered” this dirty little marketing tactic, you are less inclined to believe it is being used truthfully.
I even read a sales letter this month where the deadline was “midnight tonight (no rotating dates here…)” — however, the next day, the deadline of course was still “midnight tonight”!! No deadline at all, but at least it was a bit more upfront (and cynical) about the use of rotating dates.
Most often they have a secondary “benefit” for a lazy publisher: the date never needs changing, as it updates automatically depending on the date you’re viewing the page.
Want to see one of those dates? Normally, if you view the HTML/source code of the web page, you’ll see some little javascript tool in action that makes this date happen. Some scripts aren’t very good though: the date can sometimes be way in arrears, or, better still, be set to the timezone of the webserver. That often means that if a “same day” date is used, it can be the day prior for those readers like us here in Australia that are way ahead (+10) of Greenwich mean time.
And some dates are set according to the reader’s computer clock — here’s a funny tip: set your clock to be years behind (eg 21 August 1982) — and see the date suddenly appear decades out of date. That’s a guarantee the publisher is not only hoping you’ll believe the false deadline, but they’re not very smart about testing to eliminate silly potential errors like this one.
A better way is to use something like PHP, as the plain text is all a user sees — so they might find it more believable. But a re-visit the next day will still give the game away.
So how is this stupid tactic being countered by “smart” sellers?
Well, they’re upfront about not having a false date. They point out a “real” deadline and thus attempt to create a real sense of urgency. In 2006, this tactic is growing in popularity in some very successful marketing campaigns. And it looks (from observation) to be working.
2. Creating a deadline but extending it anyway
But that’s where some marketers get caught out: they want MORE sales beyond their self-enforced sales limit (eg 1500 copies, 200 students only, 450 seminar seats). So they “invent” legitimate-sounding reasons to extend their limit.
This extension probably works best with reproducible products, but it still diminishes the overall effect of creating urgency through limitation/access.
I guess if the sellers are really clever, they’ll assume (a) existing buyers won’t re-visit the sales page anyway, as they have already made their purchase; and (b) they’ll make sure they remove the email address of those people who have already made a purchase from their further emails regarding that product’s newly extended deadline.
I know of one such sales project this month, where the product was “limited” to just 1,500 sales. In such cases, a countdown figure is often used to show sales progress towards the limit — eg 1500 1182 986 711 533 311 copies left!
But in this case, the limit was reached, and the order page was still left open. Hundreds of extra copies were “accidentally” ordered — what a psychological tool — “hey, the limit has been reached, but I can still access the order page, so I’d better do it RIGHT NOW”.
And the sellers explanation? Well, sheesh, we can’t tell who made it into the original 1500 orders, and who ordered in the extra 400-odd lot: so you can all have a copy (gee, aren’t we nice?).
They can’t tell? You mean their order system doesn’t email them with new orders, and those emails don’t have time/dates on them? Or, their weblogs can’t tell who was on the order page (and their IP address) at what time — to the second — on their server?
Is this a new tactic that is just a dressed up 2006 version of the rotating javascript date?
So suddenly that order limitation of 1500 is nearly 2000. But it gets even better: the sellers explain that their printer probably has to do a print run of 1000 to make the print quantity viable, so they might even release an extra 500 or so copies for sale.
And when the product is worth around US$1800, it starts to add up.
This attempts to imply: hey, you missed out the first time, and this offer was so popular that we too in nearly 30 percent in extra orders by “accident”. So if we offer more, you’d better be quick and grab your copy.
Does the sell-out of a limit that was only created for psychological influence then allow the seller to find “excuses” to keep making more money?
However, would you believe the same publishers next time they have a limit of 1500 copies, but really sell 2500 copies?
Another part of this strategy was the release of the recording of a teleseminar for just 24 hours. Four days later, it was still online (and, 3 days after orders had closed and the product “sold out” — there is still a working link to a working order form on the sales page that accompanies the teleseminar recording).
I have seen this tactic used more than once in the past year. Order limits and deadlines are extended beyond a stated limit, probably both out of laziness or the quick opportunity to make more money by just ignoring the self-imposed limit.
As a seller, you probably have to weigh up the trade-off between having angry buyers who were “sucked in” by your false limit, or the revenue of the extra sales. No wonder it is used: it probably works and the extra revenue is worth it. And the buyers of the original “limited” item are either none the wiser about the extra sales, or can convince themselves that there is a legitimate reason that the extra sales happened.
It’s like excuses for being late to work, or a meeting, or school: they will start to wear thin eventually.
But at the same time, I think the tactic is disappointing. It’s another way of abusing the trust of your customers or potential customers: so that any time the tactic is used by that seller or other sellers, its effectiveness is reduced.
Trust-building? No. Fair dinkum? No. Sustainable? Not really… unless you’re always banking on new customers, and not the far better strategy of customer retention.
As I just read on Tom Peters’ site, here’s a very apt quote:
“Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust.”
– Stephen M.R. Covey
Here’s to this type of marketing approach becoming a “Claytons markeitng tactic.”
