Wyn Drabble: Tricks of the marketing trade - how the netting around fruit is manipulating you to buy it

Orange fruit inside red netting - very appealing. Photo / Unsplash

Today’s special: Buy any two items and pay for both of them.

Customer: If I buy four can I double my savings?

This week I would like to alert you to a few marketing ploys or, in some cases, misdemeanours.

The first is what has been labelled “mistake marketing” which is a systematic attempt to capture consumers’ attention and manipulate them into buying a product within a short time-frame.

There have been a couple of recent examples.

Saben sent out an “internal only” email offering 30% off bags. But they “accidentally” sent it to a wider database.

Then Breeze Balm which makes, among other things, pomegranate lip balm, told online followers that their “marketing girlie” had made an error and enabled free shipping a day early.

Massey University marketing expert Bodo Lang claims that an email with a subject line claiming an error might be more likely to be opened.

Because of their appeal they also often go viral, typically through social media. This is, of course, a bonus for the online retailer. It’s free advertising on a grand scale.

The second issue is the misleading labelling of “colony eggs” which you could easily misinterpret to mean “eggs laid by gannets”. Of course, eggs from battery-caged hens have been banned since 2022 but introducing the word “colony” raises some questions.

According to University of Auckland associate law professor Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere, “if you put 60 to 80 hens in (a colony cage) they actually only have about the same space they had in a battery cage”.

Retailers who sell these put “colony eggs” or “farm fresh” on the packaging. According to my perhaps old-fashioned understanding, a wire cage does not constitute a farm. I believe a farm has grass and at least one tractor.

Such eggs are likely to be very much cheaper than their competitors.

And have you heard of the Munker-White Illusion (also called White’s Illusion or the Munker Illusion)? It is where the foreground colour pulls the background colour closer to it, which I believe explains why supermarket oranges are often sold in red netting bags.

Perhaps you hadn’t even realised you were being manipulated. Yes, the more vibrant the colour, the fresher we believe the fruit to be and the more likely we are to buy it.

And I’m sure I don’t need to enlighten you about shelf placement of items in a supermarket. According to one study, eye-level shelf positioning can increase sales by up to 23%. It can be even higher for endcap positioning. Just imagine endcap positioning and red netting!