new mediaist consulting - focus on what counts

Using the fear of failure as a sales tool

Ari — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:24:02 +0000

One common sales tactic in advertising is to instill the "fear of failure" in potential customers. Usually, the goal of instilling fear in customers is to encourage them to purchase a product or service to prevent that fear from becoming reality.

For example, a gym may advertise in wedding magazines that brides-to-be should take their classes to ensure they still fit into their wedding dress on their special day. This sales message is very different from the traditional aspirational messages of gyms; rather than encouraging people to lose weight to look and feel better, they are instilling a fear of failure by suggesting that if people do not go to the gym, they may no longer fit into their wedding dress.

These coffee ads from the 50's and 60's use a similar tactic, by teaching women to fear that their husbands will be disappointed if they don't buy a specific brand of coffee:

The fear of failure is still commonly used by marketers today. One of the best examples which come to mind is the famous Apple versus PC TV ads, which suggest that people need to buy a Mac, as otherwise they will experience all sorts of troubles with their PC. Online, eBooks yell that they are the "secrets you NEED to prevent failure" in weight loss, SEO, or dating.

It seems like the reason why we see the fear of failure so commonly used as a sales tool so often is because it works; most humans are scared of failure, and therefore are willing to make a financial investment today if led to believe that it will reduce the chances of future failure.

Using fear of failure as marketing tool changes the perception of a product or service from a utility to an insurance mechanism.

Hack to Add Meta Tags to Page Views in Drupal

Ari — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:50:00 +0000

The Drupal Nodewords Module is one of the most common ways of adding meta description information to the Drupal CMS. Unfortunately, it does not integrate with the Views module very well, making it difficult to generate appropriate meta descriptions on-the-fly based on views arguments.

One way I found to work around this issue is to use the views' header, along with the PHP Input format, to manually add in the meta information.

To do this, when creating the page view:
Under Basic Settings, select "Header" - input format PHP.
Type the following code in the header:

<?php
$view = views_get_current_view();
drupal_set_html_head('args[0].'" />');
?>

There you go - now you have dynamic meta descriptions in your drupal page view which includes the argument passed within the view. You can set the title tags for the view as well using a similar method, although that shouldn't be necessary as the title of the pageview will automatically flow out to the page title.

Roam Mobility Roaming / World SIM card review

Ari — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 16:12:08 +0000

There used to be a review here for the Roam Mobility Global SIM Card - a product which is no longer offered as of Jan 11, 2012. Previous Roam Mobility World SIM customers were given the option of transferring to a company called GeoSIM on that date, and a new US-focused product was launched .

I haven't used the "current" Roam mobility service so I can't comment on its quality / utility.

My current solution for US roaming is a prepaid T-Mobile sim card I bought from a generic cell phone re-seller the US for about $6, and just recharge it on an as needed basis. I got a free VOIP number online (available from Google Voice, etc...) which I forward to the prepaid SIM, so if I forget to renew my prepaid USA card and it expires I can just buy a new one and still keep the same number.

This system works well for my needs - more info on the "new" roam mobility can be found here: http://www.roammobility.com/ , and T-Mobile's prepaid rates can be found at http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/pay-as-you-go-plans