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They key with many of these manipulative sales techniques is that they are on rare purchases for which the buyer has little knowledge. Most people don't buy hom
by kurthr 2y ago
They key with many of these manipulative sales techniques is that they are on rare purchases for which the buyer has little knowledge. Most people don't buy homes, cars, mattresses, with any regularity so whatever badwill you generate will be irrelevant 10-20 years down the line and likely born by a different seller.
Like healthcare, it's hard to treat individual private buyers as an efficient market. Housing has become more like NFTs and memestonks (It can only go up!)... which is true until it isn't and everything goes down. Supporting prices through leverage and regulatory control is now so ingrained that it's hard to do price discovery. (edit: strangely, like memecoins you can actually overbuild a lot of housing like in China and keep prices going up for up to a decade out of sheer buyer momentum)
- tivert 2y ago> Most people don't buy homes, cars, mattresses, with any regularity so whatever badwill you generate will be irrelevant 10-20 years down the line and likely born by a different seller. One scummy trick in that area is owning multiple brands. My understanding is the appliance market is very consolidated (basically 2 main players own almost all the brands). They've carefully maintained the separate identities of the brands they acquired, even as they consolidated design/production, so any "badwell" they create will have a good chance of just causing the customer to switch to another one of their products. There probably should be some kind of "reverse-trademark" law that requires companies to maintain only one brand in a product area. Trademark is about allowing them to protect their reputation from bad actors, and my "reverse-trademark" would protect consumers from using multiple trademarks to avoid the consequences of a bad reputation.