I could remember once when I was in my Aunt's shop and my cousin gave a bonanza to buy ten fishes, get one free. Every customer that came in was left in laughter. I mean what will you be doing with ten fishes, is your home a restaurant?
This ‘free thing’ mentality can be a snare. The idea of every business is to make sales. In a competitive market or when it seems your monthly or annual revenue is declining there is always a need to sit up.
Or perhaps, your target revenue for the next year is yet to be realized, you will have to get something done. Always better done by a big company, they know how to get that advertising firepower.
The tactic is to mount internal pressure. That pressure is passed down the ladder; from shareholders to board of directors and it reaches the onfield worker.
When you hear of the probability of a pay slash or redundancy, you will be up and running. At least I know the banking sector for this. Marketers will be running up and down to bring in new customers to increase deposit holdings of the company.
I could remember one time I was in the banking hall and the marketer told me you have to get this account opened, my work is really dependent on how many people I get into this company. I felt a little pity for her and yes, she won over that conversation. Be it a marketing strategy, indeed it was a good one.
As a marketer, you have to always be up and running. Feeling too lazy in the process is just you stepping closer to your exit point. Anyway, one can say that big businesses sometimes operate as exploiters.
Pushing workers beyond limit to keep shareholders in profit; it has been one of those things and those doing the entire activity still settling for survival pays.
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That said, so what brought about this article? A big company trying to stay big and sending onfield workers to apply bizarre marketing techniques. It was one of our service telecom service providers ( I won't be mentioning names, it's their tactics).
Ok, I was returning home last week in the evening when I heard about a free sim card for customers. The stage was set and the speaker was loud enough to get passersby attention. And just as expected, they were able to pull a crowd.
Their advert was this; ‘ get a free sim card, no registration fees and it is instant. You will get bonus airtime and data in the process too for this new sim card’. My first question was this; is a sim card ever free? Of course not, to use it, you will have to recharge or subscribe to a data tariff plan.
So giving it out for free was at no loss in the long run. One of the reasons many crowded that place was that many sim cards have been blocked according to government NIN (National Identify Number) rules placed on its usages.
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Without appropriately linking your sim cards to your NIN, you will be blocked and indeed many ignorant ones have suffered this fate. Secondly, it was an easy registration spot, reaching out to the office especially during working hours is very difficult for many. Some are not too learned and TRY to avoid getting too confused inside one big hall. It was one good feasibility study and it paid out. At least their free sim card give out saved that customer purpose.
Or was it even instantly free? It was something I had to chuckle a little over the next day. Those marketers never voiced out the terms and conditions until you got too close. Probably many of the users were informed about this t/c’s after being already registered. There was a compulsory instant N500 recharge to be made in order to activate your sim. They never saw that coming I guess.
These marketers have enough convincing power; the N500 recharge is yours to use. So what if I wanted to make N100 naira recharge, does a user not have recharge liberty? So how did I know about this, someone who stays around gave out the info that he had to make a compulsory N500 recharge for activation. It was something I had to laugh about, their strategy was indeed superb.
To conclude I am imagining how many sim cards they were able to sell x N500 naira. The take home; ‘don't go around looking for free things I guess’. And yes, another big business just used its onfield workers to fatten their pocket. A strategy that partially looks like exploitation. In the first place, why would you want it ALL free?.
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