So I made a bit of a joke on facebook this week with my friends there… I admitted that even though it was still November, I was doing online Christmas Shopping!
I genuinely felt under pressure to get it done in good time. It is crazy.
When I sat down, laughed about it and gave it some thought, I wondered if I had also been snared by the mass hypnosis that is Christmas shopping….
I mean, just look at all the tricks and strategies used by retailers and manufacturers these days — every technique in the book is used.
On the news last night was a piece discussing the fact that the UK was running out of Nintendo Wii consoles and that there were loads available in Germany — hahahaha — come on, don’t give me that… My niece was bought a doll of Iggle Piggle from In the Night Garden last month in preparation for Christmas because it was rumoured that by December they were all going to run out and people would be paying a fortune or them on ebay!
The law of scarcity as identified by the work of Robert Cialdini and my good friend Kevin Hogan is a very hypnotic principle — I even mention it in my own book the Hypnotic Salesman – which has to be a truly magnificent gift for nyone you truly care about this Christmas 😉 I suppose I should be saying that there are only 10 copies remaining in the entire world… Until New Year that is, when we reduce them in price… Which is what everyone else does…
What about the huge media attention surrounding the iPhone — just released in the UK ready for Chrsitmas? The day before the release BBC news showed queues of people standing in line to be among the first to get it… Surely all those people can’t be wrong, can they? The old notion of keeping up with the Jones’s is surely past it’s sell by date, isn’t?
Not on your nelly!
We tend to join in the group consciousness — everyone else is buying it, maybe I should… I do not want to be left behind… The iPhone stores were opening up late at night especially… We are being influenced by public displays of hypnotic social proof…
The thing is we all know about why we are given freebies… I mean, I give a free hypnosis session, ebook and ecourse away on this website to show you my work, the very high standard of it and of course, it induces reciprocity…
That law states that we receive something of perceived value, we feel inclined to reciprocate…
In reality, I know these things are manufactured in developing economies around the world and these products are hugely, I mean vastly marked up and even when they show mamouth slashed prices to snare an opportune bargain hunter, they are still making a ton of money out of us.
Even being a professional in the field of hypnosis it is happening to me and my self-hypnosis skills are being used to the maximum right now to maintain some balance and ensure my Christmas bills are not making me scream in the New Year!
This is a very insightful post Adam and sometimes its easy to forgot that we are literally being bombarded with every last marketing and psychological trick in the book. All I can say is I’ll be looking at all the Christmas hype with new eyes this year.
I also saw a news item about the scarcity of Christmas Trees this year. No mention of why except that we were planning to import thousands less than last year. In simple terms your trees will be more expensive.
Maybe the plastic one – which we used when we were living in the Middle East will see the light of day again.
Keith
I have to say, last year I slept overnight in the Circuit City parking lot to get a Wii for my partner (after calling practically every store in the area every day for a month). The fact that I was able to get one and the trouble I went through to get it added an incredible amount of value to the gift when I gave it to him. He deeply appreciated the sacrifices I made to get it for him. And what’s more, I was bale to buy a second one, sell it on Ebay, and pay for the first one, so it ended up being free.
Of course, now I know that my time is a lot more valuable than that, so I doubt I’d do it again, but at the time I thought it was more than worth it. And I actually enjoyed it too – I’d never slept in a parking lot before. 🙂 And we met some really interesting people and had some great conversations as we all shared in the (hypnotic) event.
oops – I just glanced up and noticed that it says I was “bale”…should be I was “able.”
🙂