I have worked in electronics retail in the past. It is an interesting endeavor, especially when there are no sales incentives. The whole approach is very interesting, and I feel in many ways gives marketing a bad name, even if the sales tactics used by floor staff aren't tactics endorsed by the company's marketing department.
After my six hour drive from Scranton PA, (break was awesome by the way) I sat down to peruse reddit.com before working on an essay due later this week and saw an interesting thread discussing slanted sales tactics. The original poster spoke about how Best Buy was tuning lower priced televisions to standard digital channels, and the higher priced ones to High-Definition to help convince customers to spend the extra cash.
This doesn't surprise me, though I am not aware of them using that tactic at Best Buy 341 in Dickson City, PA. From my experience, this was probably the most likable Best Buy you could venture into. Most employees were really helpful, and the managers were pretty reasonable as well. Other Best Buys that I've been to had terrible staff that were ill-informed and seemed put out by your merely coming into the store. I'm looking at you, Wilkes-Barre.
I digress, the thread highlights some interesting sales tactics. The aforementioned one is the most detrimental to a brand's image though. If I were a rep for a lower priced television set, I would make sure that the TV's are placed on High-Def stations, or playing a Blu-Ray DVD. If consumers are to see my product, I want them to have the best image in their heads as possible, not the image some middle-manager who bosses around a rag-tag team of punk kids wants it to have. Electronics companies need to be very aware of this, and control their image quality accordingly.
While I was selling, we didn't have too many sneaky tricks. Computers are a little different than televisions. Of course things were placed out and planned for maximum sales, but that's not tricky, that's just common sense. We also started high and worked our way down. Much like the tea salesman at Teavanna did trying to get me to buy $80 worth of tea. My manager taught me the most amusing trick while I worked there though, and once you do it three or four times, you don't feel bad anymore because it was so useful.
Say for instance you're shopping for a new memory stick. There's ten different brands in front of you, and you can't decide which one to get. A sales associate walks over to you and asks to be of assistance. You explain what you want, and he replies with his knowledge about the product, and the quality of the brands. You then take a moment to decide, but before you realize it, he or she has picked the most expensive one (or the one that's on sale if they need to be moved) and placed it confidently in your hand. You think for a minute and realize that this one is the one you want because this person who has built a trusting relationship with you in three minutes feels this is the best fit. When in reality, the sales associate just wanted to move on as quickly as possible and still make a sale.
I swear that worked 85% of the time. I always went for the most expensive one but not to make more money for the store. I found after a couple of tries, that if I give them the cheap one, or mid range one they either think I'm insulting them because they are poor or that they don't know better. I decided to give them the most expensive one and let themselves shimmy down the price points as they pleased --unless there was an item on clearance sale. Then I gave them that one.
there are a ton of comments to peruse through, it's definitely worth a look.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mr7th/reddit_store_owners_what_tricks_do_you_use_to_get/
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