The hard sell? It’s as easy as ABC
June 30th, 2009 | Published in Comment, Features | 2 Comments
Sales Rep of the Month? Copyright: Divine Hervester
A friend of mine recently remarked that new parents are second only to tourists for being treated with utter contempt by marketers and sales representatives. Us freshly minted mums and dads are targeted as sentimental fools to be parted from our hard-earneds, our judgement having been subsumed in the mists of a post-natal emotional hangover. We are soft touches to be bullied, cajoled and even emotionally blackmailed into buying things we don’t really need, with extra zeros added for good measure. I wouldn’t have expected such voraciously capitalist thinking in France but I had such an experience recently here in Grenoble that I feel duty bound to share. It might interest anyone who has been subject to a home sales visit in France or finds that increasingly in this country the price of a product has absolutely no relationship to its value.
After the birth of our daughter my wife and I were approached at the Clinique Mutualiste aux Eaux Claires by a woman photographer from the ABC Photo agency who offered to take some professional shots of our baby. We were told one print would be free and that we would be under no pressure to buy anything else. ABC has an arrangement with the clinic – something of a monopoly in fact – in going from room to room offering new parents this service. The woman took what appeared to be some nice pictures and told us she would be in touch to let us choose those we wished to have printed.
However, when we were contacted – two months later – it was by a different woman, an ABC Photo sales representative who wanted to visit us at home. We were not really in a position to refuse because we wished to see the pictures, but immediately braced ourselves for some kind of hard sell. What transpired was so ridiculous that it would have been laughable if it didn’t smack of incredible cynicism on the part of ABC.
When the woman arrived at our apartment with giant portfolio carriers, dollar-sign shaped alarm bells immediately started ringing. After some cursory chit chat and some nosey questions about why I wasn’t at work on Monday morning at 10.30, she slipped a hardback book out of her bag, with the stagey delicacy of one proffering something Very Precious Indeed.
In fact it was an album with pictures of our daughter used repeatedly in different backgrounds, which the sales representative proceeded to present page by page, explaining the logic of each themed chapter: bathtime baby, dinnertime baby, bedtime baby etc. The suggestion that was she was showing some bespoke emotional souvenir that had been created uniquely for us. She kept the price discretely to herself at this stage as she continued with her pitch.
Then things took a turn for the surreal, as she preceded to pull out very large framed baby portraits; just examples, thankfully not pre-made ones of our daughter this time. Some were photographic reproductions, and others had been transformed – presumably on Photoshop, and with extraordinary lack of taste – into fake watercolour paintings.
It was hard to keep a straight face in an apartment of a meagre 55 square metres and have someone try to flog you a huge picture of your own baby – who you can see at any time – that would dominate your living room. I resisted the temptation to ask the saleswoman if she would put such a thing up in her own home, or asking her why she thought we would contemplate transforming our salon into an enormous shrine to our baby.
If if this wasn’t ridiculous enough she started setting down her formule on paper, in her neatest script, as if she was going to offer us the deal of the century. The book, plus the painting, plus some prints, for a mere 770 euros! She even had the cheek to condescend us with the analogy that it was just like in a restaurant, that if we ordered a menu it is cheaper than à la carte! She would even throw in a free teddy bear wearing a t-shirt with a print of our daughter on it, just to show us it’s not all dollars and cents (or, rather, euros and centimes)!
Given that we had expressed little enthusiasm for the watercolours or the bear she announced that the book alone would cost a mere 200 euro. I almost spat hot coffee all over it. If the price had born some resemblance to the normal market price – 30 euro? – I might have felt inclined to buy it as a present for our daughter. Such standardised, cheaply manufactured products are easily ordered over the internet, and many people have them made as a memento of their holidays. ABC evidently think people – or specifically new parents – are unaware of this, and pre-print the book without asking, assuming parents would feel obliged to pay a vastly over-inflated price.
We politely explained that this was not really in our budget; I’m never rude in such situations. But I’m still annoyed that the photographer had given us the impression we would be able to choose the prints freely, while the saleswoman was leading us to believe they were not sold as such, but only part of some exhorbitant deal including other, unwanted items. I told her this as politely as I could, and she relented, allowing us to choose the prints only. We sent her on her way having purchased 60 euros worth of prints, feeling as if we’d had a narrow escape even though we had been blatantly robbed.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that France is starting to seem very expensive indeed, but only someone without any sense of the relative value of things would be foolish enough to pay 200 euros for a book. I have limited edition art catalogues with tritone lithograph prints that cost half that. Money doesn’t always equal taste of course, but who does have the best part of a grand down the back of their sofa to blow frivolously on such things? Since the visit I’ve amused myself with visions of buying a number of the enormous, vulgar, fake watercolours of my daughter and having them shipped at massive cost to relatives. I could clear my rainy day account to blow several thousand on tasteless, unwanted tat! It would all be so easy!
This type of sales pitch has never happened to me in England and I’m left wondering if France is stuck in a bit of a time-warp as concerns to sales. One of the great advantages of the internet is that it means people can avoid being pressured into buying things in their own homes. People are aware of what things should cost and can make their price comparisons freely in their own time. They can order uniquely personalised gifts cheaply at the touch of a button.
The techniques employed by ABC seemed shockingly retrograde. Why not just set up a website and let your clients select the prints at their own leisure? Here’s a novel idea: sell people what they really want and what they had originally agreed to buy! Then you can charge a price that does not include the salary of an entirely unnecessary sales rep. No need for that extra zero! The home sales pitch is not even yesterday’s economy, it belongs to the last century.
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July 10th, 2009 at 10:37 am (#)
Wow, this is quite an unexpected French experience indeed! I have been near forced into buying a so-called portrait by prowling “artists” in Montmartre, but people coming into your hospital room? What an uncooth invasion of privacy!
And shame on the clinique for setting up such an agreement! I’m not going to get into the private vs. public healthcare argument but I have to wonder, would this kind of blatantly commercial abuse (I think the word is appropriate) be tolerated in a public hospital?
I would consider writing to the clinique and complaining, perhaps they are unaware of how pushy and invasive (not to mention horrendously scamming) ABC photography is. But again, shame on them for trying to take advantage of that new parent reflex to splurge on anything baby related. Good for you for standing up for yourself!
July 10th, 2009 at 5:46 pm (#)
Hi Christina,
Indeed the clinique has a lot to answer for, and this is only just the tip of the iceburg. I hope one day to write in more detail about our experience at the Clinique Mutualiste, without turning Grenoble Life into a one-man tirade. Suffice to say we will not be returning there when we have a second child.
James