Sunday, Jan 04, 2015 at 17:21
Yeh... well.
A friend of mine who is a pretty good salesman and a fair sort of bloke with it says.
"the scriptures say, "a fool and his money are soon parted"... I have no hesitation in parting a fool from his money..at least I'll give him some value for it...someone else may not."
I have to say that the average australian consumer is not very clever..some are outright dumb.
It amazes me how little people know or want to know about where stuff comes from and how it gets to them.
I know builders and tradesmen who buy all their
tools from major hardware chains, completely unaware of the quality tool discounters and specialist trade suppliers...and of course they either pay well over the odds or they get rubbish.
You talk to them about
tools and they only recognise a couple of major mass market brands...those brands being medium quality and at full retail price & then some.....when you mention a top shelf brand, they have never heard of it and immediately dismiss it as inferiour to the brands they know.
Mention that some of the generic brands sold at half the price of their favorate brand may actually be of similar or bettter quality..and they wont believe you...in spite of all the mass market
tools comming out of china these days.
I was in a major hardware store this week looking for a mid quality cauking gun.......the excelent value item I have been using is no longer stocked......BUT.......there side by side were three identical caulking guns under three different brands...painted 3 different colours.
Because the quality I wanted was not there at any price....I certainly was not gong to cough $40 to pump a bit of sealer.
I baught the one priced at about $4......next to it was another priced at arround $7 and a little further along the same item in a different colour with a " top spec brand" on a cardboard tag at nearly$20.
How do I know they where identical.....I sat on the floor and looked at em....carefully......mould for mould, rivet for rivet, dag for dag.....it was plain they came out of the same machines.
What sort of ignorance or arogance could support such a waste a valuable shelf space.
we often hear people bleat that it is the consumer that is responsible for the market being price focused.....well when you are being gouged every day and you know it..its hard to be anything else.
But speak to any good sales trainer.....the price focus lies squarely at the foot of the marketers.......it is stupid, lazy marketing......but they want people to buy on price...why because the managers of most of the consumer retailers arent very clever either........they have neither the marketing smarts nor the guts to sell anyother way.
Truth to tell...most of the large retail stores have nothing other than price to compete with.
So much of the retail market has become so price/discount focused.....that they can not see, do or offer anything else.
On the matter of being discount focused......the australian public has swallowed this fuel discount thing hook line a sinker.
It is amazing what poeple will do to get arround 2.5% discount on their fuel....THEN..under the guise of a further 2.5% discount have the money saved taken off them in the extra margins charged on the goods ( that they did not need) purchased to achieve the extra 2.5%.
That is without the actual arguments about fuel prices.
Yeh Ill use a fuel discount voucher...but only if I have one for the service station in question.
The average retail customer needs to get smart.....yeh and not half smart like many....or they will continue to pay more for less.
cheers
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