I thought this was interesting; the screenshots tell all. I started my ‘free’ federal income tax return and at no point did I ever choose the deluxe or ultimate edition or use options specific to those versions. I remained within the ‘free’ return throughout the entire process until the end, where it asked to charge $9.95 and no free option. How nice of them to offer their ‘Totally FREE Tax Return!’

While the FDA regulates some aspects of the information presented on the packaging, juice makers still have enough wiggle room to mislead buyers through tricky marketing language.

How do you know if you’re buying real 100% juice?

You have to read the ingredient label on the back and ignore the label on the front. The FDA requires labels that list the ingredients in descending order of predominance according to weight. The heaviest ingredients are first and the lightest are last. Manufacturer’s don’t have to reveal the % of each ingredient in order to protect their trade secrets. Yet, if they claim something is juice, they have to say what % juice it contains. Let’s look at some examples of how buyers can still be mislead…

Safeway apple juice cocktail = not juice
Anything that says ‘cocktail’, ‘blend’, or ‘drink’ is usually code for a mix of cheap ingredients like corn syrup. Companies often substitute the syrup for the real juice, because it’s cheaper to produce.

Mott’s 100% apple juice = real juice
These are 100% apple juice. They’re usually from concentrate and well diluted, but that’s about as close as you can get to pure juice, without buying expensive apple cider. Note that you can’t simply rely on a name brand for real juice. The same brands may offer different product lines- some not containing juice at all.

Snapple = not juice
This Mango Madness Snapple is 95% sugar water and other unnatural ingredients. Only 5% of the drink is the mango juice advertised. The ingredient label reveals what’s really in it: Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Kiwi Juice from Concentrate, Citric Acid, Natural Flavors, Mango Puree, Vegetable Juice and Beta Carotene (for Color).

Sunny Delight = not juice
Some people confuse Sunny Delight for orange juice, but it’s not even close. The ingredients reveal that it’s again just sugar water and various unnatural ingredients, which aren’t that healthy. Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup and 2% or Less of each of the Following: Concentrated Juices (Orange, Tangerine, Apple, Lime, Grapefruit), Citric Acid, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Thiamin Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Natural Flavors, Modified Cornstarch, Canola Oil, Sodium Citrate, Cellulose Gum, Xanthan Gum, Sodium Hexametaphosphate, Sodium Benzoate to Protect Flavor, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6. (This was just copied and pasted from a website)

Dole Pineapple, Orange, Banana 100% juice = mostly apple juice
While this is 100% juice, it isn’t the juice the front label suggests. It’s apple juice with some pineapple juice and even less of the other ingredients.

Safeway Pomegranate juice = mostly pineapple juice, apple juice, and water
This is 100% juice, but not the juice you think it is. When you’re spending $5.99 for it at Safeway, you’re probably serious about getting what is advertised. But a look at the ingredient label reveals this is mostly water, pineapple juice, and apple juice- contrary to the front label saying pomegranate juice and showing only pictures of pomegranates. A much lower percentage than the other juices is pomegranate and blueberry. The FDA doesn’t require them to put the exact percentage of the pomegranate and blueberry, but with 3 higher % ingredients, you could assume it’s not very much.

Pomegranate juice = real 100% pomegranate juice
This is actual 100% pomegranate juice. It says it right on the ingredient label. And it’s the same price at the fake pomegranate blend above.

Misleading tactic:
Marketers discovered people become used to looking for the word ’100%’, as in ’100% juice’. So guess what? They now put ’100% vitamin C’ prominently on many labels- perhaps so you think it’s actually 100% juice, when it isn’t. This is common for grape juice, since it’s one of the most expensive juices to produce. So, they cut many corners in not giving you real 100% grape juice but pass it off as real by the ’100% vitamin C’ tactic. Beware!

To summarize, marketers are crafty with their juice product labels and fancy graphics. The prudent shopper should just ignore the wording and look at the ingredient label for the real story on what the drink contains. If you’re going to shop for fruit juice, you might as well get the real stuff.

Any businessperson knows the importance of research. Market research is critical for business planning. Imagine how much insight it would give you if you had a copy of your competitor’s business plan, for instance. Or, perhaps financial reports, units sold per month, website traffic per month, the number of employees a business has, and more.

Fortunately, a lot of this market data is floating around out there ready to be seized and analyzed- if you know where to look. Sometimes it takes creativity and extra effort to learn secrets about your competitors, but this endeavor is quite worthwhile.

I would like to share the 3 useful ways to glean information from your competitors. This mostly applies to internet businesses, but can be a source of inspiration for any general business, as well.

1. Estimate a competitor’s web traffic

Use tools like compete.com, alexa.com, and quantcast.com as general guides for traffic. You can also see any competitor’s page count in Google or Yahoo by typing in a search ‘site:domain.com’. The higher the page count, the better. You can also see exactly how optimized their site is and how many incoming links it has from tools like websitegrader.com. You can logically figure that a website with x pages with only x% optimized will yield about x visitors per month. If your competitor is lacking in optimization for certain keywords, but is fairly successful in traffic from a low quantity of incoming links, you can make predictions of how much more traffic you can get with your own similar site, but better optimized.

2. Acquire competitor information through a ‘business for sale’

Pursue a possible purchase of another business like yours- perhaps even a direct competitor- and learn a lot of critically important information about a business’ health. Use websites like bizbuysell.com.

The idea here is not to manipulate the seller, but to be genuinely interested and open minded about a potential purchase while enjoying the informational benefits. You will likely sign a non-disclosure agreement and perhaps even write a letter of intent. The time invested is worth it to learn about another business’ strategy, financials, strengths and weaknesses. This information can be invaluable to help you operate your own business, and who knows, you might actually choose to buy it.

3. Calculate competitor’s Ebay sales

For Ebay businesses, you have it made. Ebay is fairly transparent and allows you enough information to calculate units sold per month and monthly sales revenue of any competitor. How? First you can estimate units sold by feedback. If you figure about 85% leave feedback, you can take the feedback from the last 30 days, divide by .85 and you should get a rough idea of a business’ monthly customers, which may correspond to the units sold, then just multiply their average selling price by the units sold to get their estimated monthly revenue.

Even if you don’t sell on Ebay, it may still be interesting for you to compare prices of someone selling similar products/services as you in the Ebay marketplace. Ebay may also be used for test-market new products, such as to estimate demand. You can test pricing, for example, by listing something at $1 and see what it bids up to. You aren’t obligated to sell the item if you simply put the hidden reserve price high enough that no one will ever buy it. Craigslist is another place you can test interest in a particular product/service.

BONUS TIP: Estimate retail sales

This is the single most useful piece of information I learned in my graduate school MBA program.

If you’re interested in buying a brick-and-mortar retail store, here’s a very useful way to gauge sales. Let’s say you’re thinking about buying a Taco Bell franchise…

1. Walk into the store as the first customer at the beginning the day and buy the cheapest thing they sell- a Coke or something.
2. Keep the receipt and notice the customer number on it
3. Return at the end of the day and order something as they close, trying to be the last customer of the day. Try to order from the same cash register.
4. Subtract the customer # at the end of the day from the one at the beginning. Now, you have a good record of how many customers came to that particular cash register. You could also ask whether that register was used most of the day or what % it was used in order to estimate more precisely how many customers they served.
5. Finally, estimate an average cost per customer (you can even ask them) and multiply by the # of customers. Now, you have a rough estimate of daily gross sales. Very cool.

I hope this competitor research information helps equip you with more tools to make better business decisions.

Annoying popups will keep harassing you to upgrade as well. Clearly, the hunger for corporate profit outpowers the desire to make the software useful for the end user.

Since my 2005 software no longer works, I did indeed buy an upgrade. Upgrades, as it turns out, are exactly the same cost as buying the package brand new. In fact, I saved $50 from buying QuickBooks on Amazon for $150 instead of buying the special low ‘upgrade’ price of $200 from QuickBooks direct. What a scam.

But now that I have QuickBooks 2008, even though I haven’t owned it 2 weeks, it’s already pestering me to upgrade to 2009! …claiming that it’s way better than that OLD version.

This is being posted to the ‘Marketing Tricks & Scams’ category.

Buyer beware is a good mantra for navigating the waters of ‘free’ services. This posting will highlight common ‘free’ offers and will shed light on some of the unethical marketing practices we see corporations engaged in today.

In most all cases, the company offering the ‘free’ service will only offer it free for a short trial period, then will automatically bill you thereafter. Companies will get you in a contractural agreement and will usually make more money off you- more than recovering their cost of offering something ‘free’ for a limited time.

1. Free Credit Reports

Free credit reports are never free. Notice the above signup form from a popular ‘free’ credit report website. It asks for all of your contact information on the first page, then when continuing to the next page (after you already invested the time to fill out the first form), it then surprises you by asking for your social security # and credit card information. This is their initial explanation for that:

Your credit card will not be charged during the free trial period. However, valid credit card information is required to establish your account.

Then, more hidden is the real legal agreement text:

When you order your free report here, you will begin your free trial membership in Triple AdvantageSM Credit Monitoring. If you don’t cancel your membership within 9 days of enrollment, you will be billed $14.95 for each month that you continue your membership. If you are not satisfied, you can cancel at any time to discontinue the membership and stop the monthly billing; however, you will not be eligible for a pro-rated refund of your current month’s paid membership fee.

That hidden legal agreement text no longer calls the service a ‘free trial’, but now a ‘membership’. Nine days is quite a short window of time to ‘cancel’ the membership- in fact, it’s only 1/3 of the way through the ‘free trial’ period. In the rare case a person is diligent enough to call within the limited 9 day timeframe, good luck on finding a live person on the phone. You can guarantee very long hold times, talking to multiple representatives, and perhaps having to call back a few more times just to ensure the service is indeed cancelled. Representatives are trained to do everything possible to not let you cancel, so you can bet it will be a frustrating experience trying to cancel.

It no longer seems worth it after learning the true meaning behind their words ‘free credit report’. It’s almost inevitable that you will pay them money.

2. Free Website Services

Trails.com is one of the most spammy and unethical websites I’ve seen.

Unfortunately, they rank super high in Google under lots of keywords, so they get lots of traffic. What happens is you might find a page like this.

Then, when you click to see the map and directions, you get a free trial signup page…

At the bottom of the signup page, you can also note that you are agreeing to receive spam from third parties, which they waive responsibility for, as well as saying…

For your convenience and to ensure that your access to your Trails.com subscription remains uninterrupted, unless we hear from you, we will automatically renew your subscription(s) at the expiration of the then-current term. If you elected to pay for the subscription with your credit card, Trails.com will charge your card on file for the cost of another term at the then-current rate using the information you previously provided us by phone or on our web site. You will not be notified in advance of your impending renewal.

It’s so nice of them to take, store, and auto-bill your credit card as a ‘convenience’ to you so your service ‘remains uninterrupted’. That’s one way to look at it.

And finally, on the next page, lo and behold, the ‘free’ signup page asks for your credit card. What a surprise.

3. Free Magazines

Free magazine offers are old school now. Yet, the same old marketing trick continues to be used and people continue to fall for it.

Free magazine offers can be found in a variety of places- through websites, direct mail, in magazines themselves, and in odd places like in grocery store halls near the restroom.

The trick is to get you to signup- which may open the floodgate for lots of junk mail- then later surprise you with a bill. Sometimes they will say you get only 1 issue free, but will go ahead and send you a few extra issues of the magazine. They will of course bill you for it and hope you will pay it, perhaps from feeling guilty for receiving the extra magazines.

4. Free Windshield Rock Chip Repairs

You may have seen ‘free rock chip repair’ tents in shopping area parking lots throughout the United States. The trick is they will say it’s free to you, but will bill your insurance if you have full coverage. It’s faulty logic to say it’s free, because you pay for your insurance. It’s also possible your insurance company will deny the claim and stick you with part of the bill or raise your rates.

It it really free? No.

5. Free Computers

Free computer offers still exist today, but this scam was most popular back when CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, MSN, and other internet dialup subscription services were popular. Stores like OfficeDepot, OfficeMax, CircuitCity, and Best Buy offered huge ‘rebates’ for buying computers with the internet subscription- often claiming to move than cover the price of the computer. The subscriptions were usually 3 year contracts at $25 / mo or so, making a $900 commitment, for example. The rebate was often for $300-$400 or so, making the computer ‘free’, but people didn’t walk out of the store with a free computer. You paid in advance, and later hoped you would receive your rebate.

Of course, rebates are usually outsourced to third party vendors, who often handle the rebate claims carelessly. Ever see your name and address grossly misspelled on a rebate form? Yes, they will do everything possible to not give you your rebate. This allows the retailer to save money while claiming no responsibility when people don’t receive their rebate, since it was outsourced. Unfortunately consumers were led to believe they could get a free computer only through buying dialup internet access- perhaps something they may have thought they would have used anyway, but it cost them dearly.

Some stores like OfficeDepot took the internet subscription trick to a ridiculous point, claiming “Free $300 cash for anything in the store (with internet subscription)”. That’s code for you giving them $600. Incidentally, the FTC investigated OfficeDepot for some of their misleading advertising.

Summary

Those are five ‘free’ services you want to avoid. There are numerous marketing scams to beware of like credit watch services, rebates, free cell phones, free music CDs (i.e. BMG), add-ons, bad contracts, and more. If you mainly avoid anything free that involves signing a contract, you’ll probably be in good shape.

I have had some nightmarish experiences of waiting of trying to reach live human beings. It seems they are in short supply. In this modern world of computer automation live human beings have been replaced by senseless, generic, pre-recorded messages. Yes, we’re just too expensive to hire anymore.

I can imagine the company’s decision process when it comes to managing their customer service. Investors pressure the company’s managers to cut costs and streamline for maximum efficiency. VPs turn to the customer service managers for cutbacks. They decide to put in a more ‘sophisticated’ phone answering system in order to minimize the amount of actual calls received. They think ‘if we just put in enough options and information upfront, why would they need to speak to us?’ And after a lengthy meeting in their conference room, the managers also decide that it would be a novel idea to mention their website URL at least 10 times during the hold process. Perhaps customers don’t yet know they have such a website. ‘Maybe if they find the website they would avoid calling us altogether!’

For me, I only call when I need to speak to a live human being and never call for any other occasion. If the situation didn’t require a call, I wouldn’t be calling. I don’t want to waste my time either. And of course we already know about their stupid company website. We call customer service because we already exhausted all other resources.

Unfortunately, it takes a skill, like the skill of an experienced sailor, to navigate through the rough waters of the automated phone system. Remember, the system is designed so you will fail- that you WILL NOT find the cheese at the end of the maze. Their management doesn’t want you to talk to the live person- because it is inefficient for them. More calls means they have to increase staff and resources, which affects their bottom line. ‘If we can only offer them less customer service without sacrificing profit, we’ll be doing good.’

After calling, my strategy of connecting to a live person is usually pressing the zero button several times. This seems to work in a majority of cases.

But this doesn’t work for Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae is perhaps the worst automated phone system in existence. They seem determined not to speak to you. Here’s a sample phone call:

1. Call 1-888-272-5543

(automated answer)

2. Do you want to continue in English?
[come on, are you serious? You're asking me in English if I want to continue in English? 96% of people in the U.S. speak English and it's the national language, so it's a pretty good bet that's what I'd like]

3. If a customer press 1. Otherwise press 2.

4. Enter your nine digit account #.

5. We’re sorry, we didn’t get that. Please re-enter your account #.

6. Please listen to our 7 options, as our menu has changed…
[menus always change because they don't want us to memorize the path to a live person. They keep changing the maze!]

7. (Recording slowly speaks all 7 options and none apply!) or to repeat the menu press 9.

8. (more menu options [none apply]), for more menu options, press 5

9. (more menu options [none apply]), for more options, press 5

10. (press 0) for customer service

11. Our office is currently closed. Please call back during regular business hours. (click)

Meanwhile, until you reach a live human being, your monthly bill still remains incorrect- with those extra finance charges happily holding on, until one day, you might speak to a live human being and get it straightened out.

And you can rest assured that when/if you ever do get to the goal of the live person, that he/she’s sole purpose is to get off the phone with you. Because the more time spent talking to you, the more waste, and higher company overhead.

With this strategy in mind, the company decides it is best to outsource all live people. They don’t need to live in the U.S. or even have American English accents. Indian contractors will work just fine. Anything for protecting our corporate profit. Usually this person is only trained to handle bare minimum account inquiries. Anything requiring adjustment or correction will have to be transferred back to an actual customer service manager back in the United States, requiring even more hold time on your part. And if you’re lucky you might get disconnected and have to start all over again.

On hold for 10 minutes, 25 minutes, 45 minutes? No problem. They have to watch their bottom line, you know.

Sallie Mae’s automated phone system seems worthless. Another kind feature is that if you press zero too many times, they will automatically disconnect you. Maybe they don’t want to deal with anyone too ‘impatient’.

Other companies that are similarly worthless when it comes to customer service include:

1. Ebay (forget it- they aren’t available)
2. Amazon
3. Citibank
4. Bank of America
5. Comcast

‘We are currently experiencing a heavy call volume, please hold while connect you to the next available representative…’

…yeah whatever.

Can you count how many times a piece of software has asked you to “upgrade now!”? Upgrade offers are always presented as if you’ll be behind in the world if you continue using your now ‘outdated’ software. The upgrades usually comes at a cost. “Yes, it can be yours for the low, low price of just $99.99.”

Before you fall victim to the upgrade trap, just remember the current version of software you have will always continue to work fine as it is, just as intended. Don’t fall into the upgrade trap- it’s another marketing device aimed at convincing people to spend more money on a typically insignificant change of software.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

There is risk involved in upgrading your software. In fact, an upgrade can sometimes be a downgrade.

If you ever used Adobe Photoshop, you will know indeed that some of the ‘upgrades’ are actually ‘downgrades’ in disguise. Let’s take Photoshop 7.0 for instance. One of its features is it shows thumbnail previews of .psd files right on your operating system, such as Windows XP. So, it’s convenient and expected behavior, actually, to browse your files and see what your images look like before opening them up. Enter Photoshop 8.0, which boasted huge essential and urgent features. Well, if you upgraded, you just lost your ability to view your .psd files. Yes, you would then have to open every one up one by one to see what they were. What a pain! In fact, it was such a pain, Adobe tried to release its own ‘workaround’- Adobe Bridge- to address the issue. Another example of a piece of crap software. It was clunky slow, and riddled with bugs. Having the ability of previewing .psd was so essential, I kept my older version of Photoshop on my machine. It was not worth upgrading and losing that!

Another example of poor upgrades includes piece of graphics software called Extensis PhotoTools. The Photoshop plugin used to include a great filter, called PhotoGroove. It really made incredible effects to typography. But when they ‘upgraded’ to be compatible with a newer version of Photoshop, the PhotoGroove was quietly left out. It lost the most important and useful tool in the package.

The same thing occurred with Extensis Portfolio. The entire application was coded for one of their newer versions and unfortunately, the html output was no longer clean. It had all kinds of Javascript garbage code which left it very hard to edit or validate for W3C standards. They tried hard to improve some components, but in doing so, made others worse.

Those who have used graphic design software for a length of time may remember the big Quark 3.3 upgrade to Quark 4.0. It was supposed to be a big leap, adding editable polygon boxes and additional drawing tools. What it did, however, is cause a lot of crashes. Those who paid the hefty fee for the upgrade traded a stable version of the software for one that was full of bugs and ready to crash at any time. Printers took time to even accept the new format, making it a rough transition, and an open door for another competitor program, like Adobe InDesign.

Another graphics program that has a worthless upgrade was FlexiSign Pro- a program used for plotting and cutting vinyl sign decals. When they urged for a certain upgrade (at a premium price, of course), they did not inform you that you would lose the use of many of your fonts. The new version simply was not programmed to be compatible with the other fonts like the previous version. Plus, you could expect a lot of crashes and system incompatibilities. Was it worth the upgrade? Probably not, even if it were free.

Upgrade scams extend far beyond graphics software. Common software such as antivirus programs can be plagued with problems. The two largest antivirus programs, Norton AntiVirus and McAfee VirusScan are both spammy applications that have continual popups pestering you to upgrade. There is no way to turn them off either, without disabling the program. It’s like having a used car salesman always on your screen, ready to harass you at any moment and halt your productivity. They make you stop what you’re doing to click a button to continue or ignore until the next day. It never ends. The software also tracks your behavior and connects and sends your information to their internet database and is a drain on your system resources. When you try to uninstall, it is embedded into your registry where it requires heavy research and multiple complex steps to remove it. The antivirus software has every characteristic of being spyware in itself. How ironic that the software we buy to help avoid spam and spyware actually causes it. These software upgrades are only to keep the virus settings ‘current’. There are other free options out there that will do close to the same thing. This upgrade is just another marketing scam and the software is garbage.

Many people have complained about the Windows ME (Millennium Edition) upgrade from Windows 98. It was apparently hard to install and had huge compatibility problems. PC World named this software one of the 25 worst tech products of all time. So, clearly, this was not worth the upgrade.

It gives me a headache just thinking about all of the upgrade offers and all the marketing ploys out there- all in effort to slide more bills out of your wallet in exchange for a product that in many cases, could be worse. Think twice before upgrading and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”