When people are given the opportunity of choice, they are likely to choose the item that they can have right there – on the spot. I have experienced similar cases in my company when dealing with new clients. A new client came to our office with the need to buy a backhoe loader. We offered him one that we had right outside our office, which had only been used a couple of times, and was last year’s model. He said that he specifically wanted this year’s model, completely new from the factory. This, of course, wasn’t a problem, but at that time, it was better to sell the one that we already had. We gave him the offer of the new backhoe loader, but intentionally made it easy to see that it would be only available in a month’s time. He was satisfied with the price of the new item, but not with the delivery time. We offered to show him the one we had outside and he agreed. Upon inspecting the older backhoe loader, he decided that now this didn’t seem such a bad idea. We equated the price to the price of a new item, but gave him a 3000 euro discount, so it would seem he had benefitted with this purchase. But, as it always is, the real benefiter was the company, who had managed to sell an older item for the price of a new one.
This just goes to show that people can be easily manipulated once one knows how it’s done. Choices are made based on the situation that person is in at that moment and previous decisions can be easily forgotten with the right amount of persuasion.
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