Your "Buying Buttons"

How do they get you to buy things you don’t need, to get involved with things that are superfluous to your financial well-being or even dangerous?

It’s a cocktail, a mixture of several different come-ons and messages.  The thought process is that everyone has their “buy buttons” and it’s just a question of pushing the right one.

Miranda Marquit at Good Financial Cents (hate that corny blog name) has the drop on them though.  In addition to Urgency and You Deserve It, there is the most hard to identify trick: When they make you feel like you’re an insider.

Check this out:

We all like to feel special, and as though we know something others don’t. The feeling of being elite, and having inside information that others aren’t privy to can be heady. Perhaps you are receiving the “inside track” on a new artist or author, and have the opportunity to buy something before it “gets big.”

You deal as though you are in on a secret, and once the secret becomes known, you will benefit from having gotten in on the ground floor. Paying extra to get access to “insider” information can be one way to do it.

However, the insider technique can be a little more subtle. It can encompass paying for more expensive food or wine in an attempt to appear as though you know about “these things.” The idea that spending more indicates that you are paying for quality, or that you are a connoisseur can be appealing to many.

However, if you don’t actually know about the product in question, you might end up just paying more, and getting a product that isn’t substantially better than something less expensive. This is a fine line to walk, and you need to be careful before you shell out extra in the hopes of looking like an insider.

This is the one that wealthy people and aspirational people are most susceptible to, this is their primary “buy button” for sure.  Think about how extensively this trick is used in finance.  Poorer people are usually more susceptible to promises of redemption (think evangelists) or get-rich-quick opportunities.

Head over to read about some of the other tricks.

Source:

Tricks Used to Get You to Spend Your Money (Good Financial Cents)