There’s a difference between seeking a product, being invited to investigate a product, and being Sold a product. Examples:
I drink a couple of gallons of milk every week. I go to the part of the grocery store which contains milk, and select the kind I know that I prefer (skim) in a brand selected for price, familiarity, attractive packaging, or incidentally as part of sorting by expiration date. No person has to interact with me to cause me to choose the milk; if it’s not available at one store I will arrange to get it elsewhere. I have sought this product.
On my way to check out of the store with the milk, there is a display of free samples of goat cheese, of a type which I haven’t eaten before. I find taste relevant in my cheese selection, so I try some. It tastes good, so I buy a round of the cheese. No person has to interact with me directly to cause me to choose this cheese, but if it hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have bought any. I may continue to buy the same cheese regularly. I have been invited to investigate this product.
Between the goat cheese and the cash register, I am stopped by a salesperson who entices me to buy a specific brand of yogurt. I have neither a preexisting interest in yogurt, nor any reason specific to the brand to select this and not another yogurt even if I did. The salesperson says nice things about eir brand of yogurt: the company that makes it does good things for the environment, the yogurt contains ingredients I don’t recognize which are reputed to have health benefits, the container is recyclable, the yogurt is flavored with an exotic tropical fruit, if I buy this yogurt I can enter a drawing to get a free tote bag, etc. Note that none of these things were involved in my choice of milk or cheese, above: they aren’t the kind of information I find relevant to my selections of dairy products. They’re things I find weakly positive but not enough to look for them actively. And they’re presented by a person, not by a label. While I might buy this yogurt, and might even continue to buy it in the future, it has entered my life by channels via which I did not mean to admit yogurt when I walked into the store.
I don’t feel like you’re giving a good marginal case—for example:
I go to the store looking for orange juice. The store is out of the brand I usually buy, but there are free samples of passion fruit juice being handed out nearby. I stop to try some, at the behest of the person pouring the little cups; partly because I want them to feel like they’re doing something worthwhile, partly because I’m thirsty.
Drinking it, I realize that passion fruit juice is the greatest tasting thing that I’ve ever encountered. I immediately buy ten gallons and update my favorite things on facebook.
Was this manipulative? What if the juice stand is on the side of the road instead of in a supermarket?
That seems like a blend between all three (you sought juice, but not this kind; you tried a sample and enjoyed it on the basis of approved criteria; a person beseeched you to take the sample). If wanting people to feel like they are doing something useful were a means by which you independently chose juices, there are probably better ways to optimize for it. The strength of your response to the taste of passion fruit juice in this example doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that the sample-pourer could have easily influenced, though, so I’m inclined to process it more like the goat cheese example.
(Incidentally, I learned to like interesting cheeses via a sample of goat cheese in a grocery store, and continue to spend significant amounts of money on interesting cheese years later. The sample table was attended but the person spreading cheese on little toasts was not very interested in making people eat the samples. I had to ask her where to find retail-sized amounts of it; she didn’t disclose the information unprompted.)
There’s a difference between seeking a product, being invited to investigate a product, and being Sold a product. Examples:
I drink a couple of gallons of milk every week. I go to the part of the grocery store which contains milk, and select the kind I know that I prefer (skim) in a brand selected for price, familiarity, attractive packaging, or incidentally as part of sorting by expiration date. No person has to interact with me to cause me to choose the milk; if it’s not available at one store I will arrange to get it elsewhere. I have sought this product.
On my way to check out of the store with the milk, there is a display of free samples of goat cheese, of a type which I haven’t eaten before. I find taste relevant in my cheese selection, so I try some. It tastes good, so I buy a round of the cheese. No person has to interact with me directly to cause me to choose this cheese, but if it hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have bought any. I may continue to buy the same cheese regularly. I have been invited to investigate this product.
Between the goat cheese and the cash register, I am stopped by a salesperson who entices me to buy a specific brand of yogurt. I have neither a preexisting interest in yogurt, nor any reason specific to the brand to select this and not another yogurt even if I did. The salesperson says nice things about eir brand of yogurt: the company that makes it does good things for the environment, the yogurt contains ingredients I don’t recognize which are reputed to have health benefits, the container is recyclable, the yogurt is flavored with an exotic tropical fruit, if I buy this yogurt I can enter a drawing to get a free tote bag, etc. Note that none of these things were involved in my choice of milk or cheese, above: they aren’t the kind of information I find relevant to my selections of dairy products. They’re things I find weakly positive but not enough to look for them actively. And they’re presented by a person, not by a label. While I might buy this yogurt, and might even continue to buy it in the future, it has entered my life by channels via which I did not mean to admit yogurt when I walked into the store.
I don’t feel like you’re giving a good marginal case—for example:
I go to the store looking for orange juice. The store is out of the brand I usually buy, but there are free samples of passion fruit juice being handed out nearby. I stop to try some, at the behest of the person pouring the little cups; partly because I want them to feel like they’re doing something worthwhile, partly because I’m thirsty. Drinking it, I realize that passion fruit juice is the greatest tasting thing that I’ve ever encountered. I immediately buy ten gallons and update my favorite things on facebook.
Was this manipulative? What if the juice stand is on the side of the road instead of in a supermarket?
Even if it was manipulative, is it a bad thing?
That seems like a blend between all three (you sought juice, but not this kind; you tried a sample and enjoyed it on the basis of approved criteria; a person beseeched you to take the sample). If wanting people to feel like they are doing something useful were a means by which you independently chose juices, there are probably better ways to optimize for it. The strength of your response to the taste of passion fruit juice in this example doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that the sample-pourer could have easily influenced, though, so I’m inclined to process it more like the goat cheese example.
(Incidentally, I learned to like interesting cheeses via a sample of goat cheese in a grocery store, and continue to spend significant amounts of money on interesting cheese years later. The sample table was attended but the person spreading cheese on little toasts was not very interested in making people eat the samples. I had to ask her where to find retail-sized amounts of it; she didn’t disclose the information unprompted.)
I see parallels to the clever arguer in being Sold something.