The Gift Of Gut Instinct

I’ve found myself this week looking closer at the kind of marketing that isn’t always obvious.

I’m talking about the kind of marketing designed to put you on the spot and encourage you to decide immediately. For the most part it’s exceptionally clever and builds good business on consumer impulsivity, but then there are occasions when it isn’t that clever, and I often get the feeling that there is an underlying objective. These underlying objectives rile me because I have two specific pet hates in life. Liars and thieves. I’m not talking about the little white lies where my partner phones me and asks if I’ve emptied the dishwasher that she’d asked me to do 5 hours ago and I grit my teeth as I tell her yes whilst running across the kitchen to start the job that I dislike the most in the house! I’m also not talking about sampling the pick and mix as I fill the bag at the cinema whilst preparing to part with a small fortune for a handful of jelly sweets. Let me try to explain what I mean.

Two weeks ago I stood at the checkout in a well-known UK department store side by side with my partner, and during the payment process the lady behind the counter asked my partner if she wanted a copy of the sales receipt emailing to her personal email address? Sounds innocent enough doesn’t it? But this is where I think otherwise. Prior to the recent GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) release we were never asked this question but instead we were asked if we would like to sign up to a ‘promotions and offers mailing list’.

On the release day of the new GDPR the entire EU reverted by default to an ‘opted out’ status. This meant that if a business wished to contact you, they needed your express consent to do so. It therefore became a matter of urgency for businesses to collect data such as personal email addresses for marketing purposes with clearly indicated consent for this specific purpose. You may remember receiving emails leading up to the start of the new GDPR asking you to renew your consent to ‘opt in’ to receive marketing promotions and newsletters and further to give your consent for these companies to store this information. This was only a small part of the opt in campaigns that companies rolled out in order to comply with the GDPR.

So, we’re back to the question. It sounded innocent enough, but my gut feeling was to answer ‘No’ for her and so that’s what I did. My partner didn’t question me but trusted my instinct. I later explained to her what I thought it was all about and I left it at that.

Over the following days I found myself questioning whether or not I should I have answered for her? Was I justified to take away that decision based on a gut feeling? My partner is quite capable of making her own decisions although she does have a tendency to ‘click’ on good offers that pop up before reading any reviews or checking that the site she’s giving her bank details to is a legitimate business but nevertheless I questioned myself. Was I right? Was this really an underhanded attempt at harvesting personal data for marketing and advertising purposes?

There was only one way to find out. Around a week later I found myself in the very same department store making a purchase and at the checkout I waited for the question. I answered, ‘Yes please’, read out my email address and gave no other consent to be contacted for marketing purposes. That evening when I checked my emails, sure enough I had received an email receipt for my purchase. There was nothing sinister about it, just a simple copy of the receipt. It appeared that I was proven wrong. I naturally felt quite awful for having stepped in to say no on my partners behalf. My gut feeling was wrong.

Now for all the years that humans have inhabited this earth we have made decisions based on our gut instinct. Whether that be a gut feeling as a child not to climb the tallest tree in the park for fear of falling, or something more serious such as predicting that a car was about to suddenly pull in without indicating so your gut instinct tells you to back off and give it a little more room. These are all decisions made on our gut instinct. It’s the same instinct however that businesses rely on and cleverly manipulate to entice consumers into buying their products.

My gut instinct on this occasion however actually turned out to be correct and it came as no surprise to me when only 4 days later I started to receive marketing emails from the same department store I asked only to send me a copy of my sales receipt. Sure enough the emails gave me an option to ‘opt out’ but that wasn’t the point. I didn’t ‘opt in’ to this marketing campaign in the first place. I duly opted out as quickly as they opted me in. I didn’t go back to confront the checkout assistant as it wasn’t her fault directly and, in all honesty, and in the grand scheme of things it was a marketing email from a department store which I frequently shopped in. I could also have emailed the store customer services dept to complain but it wasn’t the action or the marketing email itself that got my back up but was instead the way that the company went about it.

In contrast and in a more serious light, last night I took a phone call on my personal mobile from someone asking if I was Mr Travers? I’m not Mr Travers and I have no idea who Mr Travers is so I politely told her that she had the wrong phone number. This didn’t appear enough however as she then asked me if I was the bill payer in my household? I knew instinctively what this call was. It was a phishing call. A company who calls illegally purchased marketing data, asks for a random person who doesn’t exist and when they’re told they have the wrong number they rely on the inquisitiveness of the receiver to answer their questions. That’s their ‘in’ to engage you in a marketing themed conversation. I’ve grown tired of threatening to report them to the ICO if they don’t remove my contact details because it doesn’t work and most laugh or hang up. I answered politely on this occasion by repeating that I wasn’t the person that they were looking for, somewhat akin to the line spoken by Obi-Wan-Kenobi in Star Wars. Often just to confuse this type of caller I’d tell them that I’m just about to give birth and need to go and other times I just answer ‘yes’ to every question until they get the idea!

This is the kind of so-called marketing that I have zero respect for. In my opinion it is the approach of scammers and the approach of people with no moral standing in society.

Identifying the differences between genuine honest marketing and underhanded phishing tactics is becoming increasingly difficult. The control of our personal information such as phone numbers and email addresses is a subject well documented in other areas and we’ve a long way to go before any type of regulation, act or law pro-actively supports the kind of control that we really want to see. Until that time, we can only rely on our gut instinct to guide us.

If something doesn’t feel quite right, it usually isn’t. Even if you can’t put your finger on what it is that doesn’t feel right then you’re best advised to just say no and answer none of the leading questions that you may be asked. Answering even the simplest of questions the wrong way can open up a whole different can of worms. A phishing phone call about pension plans for example could easily lead you to divulge your name and to answer that you already have a pension plan and it’s with ABC Pensions. Unfortunately, the phone call you’ll receive in a few days’ time will fraudulently tell you that they’re calling from ABC Pensions to discuss your investments! So, you see now how important it is to keep tight lipped.

Creative marketing campaigns from genuine companies make me smile because they’re inventive and clever. They are also clear. Creating something that makes you think about a brand and encourages you to subconsciously buy that brand is what we should expect to be a part of. I just don’t have the patience for anything that comes close to being underhanded or misleading. I find that I’m always on the lookout for the next person or company that thinks we were born yesterday. And whereas I can normally spot the underlying motive, the elderly who’s thought processes are much slower and often firmly set in the days of my grandfather where business was done on an honest handshake, or those susceptible to simply taking everything on face value just can’t spot this so easily and so risk falling foul of misleading advertisements or phishing activities.

I’ve included a few helpful links in the footer of this site that offer guidance and support on how to deal with calls and situations of this nature. Even if you feel that you’re fairly adept at spotting a scam or a con it can’t do you any harm to refresh your awareness.