Market Research and Its Role In Enslavement A Brief Description of Techniques Used By Marketers To Enslave	Not Assigned
30 March 1999	by Tony ByGarthno
	Courtesy of Fravia's page of reverse engineering	slightly edited by fravia+
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I attained much of the following information through my own research, 
some of this information may seem obvious or it may be new to you…my 
goal is to share this information….enjoy.

The art of training the consumer to buy particular products stems 
from extensive data analysis of product distribution and analysis 
of historical sales.  This analysis along with other data is used to
develop “Category Management” plans which are literally schematics 
of the supermarket shelves with products strategically placed where 
the analysis tells the category manager the product will sell the 
best.  The placement of the product on the shelves is an extremely 
important part of the marketers planning.  You will notice that
new products are often at eye level so that they are seen first, 
increasing the probability of the consumer to purchase the product 
while older products are either high on the shelves or low where 
they are not as easily seen.  Marketers study many aspects of the 
consumer’s shopping trips such as market basket analysis, buyer 
conversion, trial and repeat purchases and cannibalization.  These 
are just a few of the studies that are carried out and I will expand
on these and other methods of research carried out by supermarket 
retailers and consumer packaged goods manufacturers in future essays.

Market researchers compensate consumers willing to participate in 
their studies…these participants use hand held scanners and cards 
similar to frequent buyer cards to track all of the purchases made 
by the consumer and all the different data that goes along with the 
purchase.  This data includes the name of the supermarket, its 
location, the demographic makeup in the area or market that the 
supermarket resides in, if the product was purchased on promotion 
such as buy one get one free or coupon, time of day and 
all the other products that were purchased on this trip to the 
supermarket.  These participants are also encouraged with “gifts” to
participate in surveys which touch on issues that the clients of the 
market research firms want more information on or if the market 
research company believes they can profit from the sale of a particular 
study by selling the information to many of its clients it will carry 
out the study.  All the data that we voluntarily provide supermarkets 
and market researchers is often sold to manufacturers of consumer 
products and the data is used to manipulate us and our children into 
wanting their wares.  

Ever notice that around the end of September you begin to see coupons 
for candy and Halloween related goods in your Sunday paper.  They are 
put there to act as catalysts to jump start the sales of consumer 
packaged goods manufacturers products, products with slightly altered 
packaging for the season or the marketing event (Holiday), this is 
another plot to generate sales.  The marketers job is to CREATE a need 
for their product, the need is often created through the ever so subtle 
programming of the population by overexposing them to advertisement 
with the belief that if the consumer is exposed to the product enough 
they will slowly begin to believe that they do have a need for this 
product or good.  There are also social pressures used to manipulate 
consumers….often times in upscale markets private label products 
(generic or store brand) are rare and occupy some of the less visible 
shelf space and the variety of the private label products is slim.  
This is done because people in upscale markets often will not buy the 
private label brand and marketers realize this through the analysis of 
their historical sales data.  So what do they do?  They don’t encourage 
the sales of less profitable private label brands, they promote the name 
brands whose only difference is the brand equity or consumer loyalty that 
the manufacturer has cultivated in the consumer.  This is all for now….if 
this essay is published I will go into further detail on each of the 
subjects I discussed.  

Thank you for taking the time to read this essay.

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