Out of the box Marketing gimmicks that lead to wasteful practices
I dislike marketing gimmicks that lead to wasteful practices. 

Here are some examples:

a) Credit cards, airlines and telephone companies offer points based on purchases. These points can be converted into benefits. I find it confusing to use the points. Quite often, they are a waste of time. After a while, I decided to ignore them. These businesses have to spend a lot of money to maintain their schemes.

b) New businesses, such as the ride hailing and food delivery companies offer attractive promotions that result in large financially losses to them. They want to build up their customer base. However, the customers will not stick to them, and can easily move to a competitor that offers better promotions. 

c) The government also introduces convoluted schemes to provide subsidies or grants to certain groups of citizens. These schemes are difficult for the citizens to understand and are costly to administer. 

I dislike these kinds of marketing promotions, including the complicated schemes run by governments. 

I prefer that the businesses offer useful products at low cost and give value to their customers. They can save on the costly promotions and provide lower prices to their customers. Alternatively, they can charge the normal price and offer a cash rebate. 

There is no need to waste the time of the customers to understand the complicated benefits or to employ staff to explain and manage the customer inquiries and complaints. 

Does this mean that there will be less jobs for people? What will happen to the jobs that are now created to administer these marketing schemes?

We need a strategy to create useful jobs to citizens that improve the quality of life. These jobs include the following:

a) Taking care of children and elderly
b) Helping families to cope with the stress of living, e.g. provide transport and personal services
c) Educating the people for jobs and for leisure

Many of these jobs may have to be funded by the state and tax payers. If they are useful jobs, the tax payers should accept that they have to pay taxes to pay for these jobs. Some of them will become employed as the service providers. 

Many of these jobs can be provided by the market, i.e. fully paid by the users. However, the government has a role to provide the regulation for these activities to be carried out effectively and to avoid wasteful and unproductive competition. 

We need visionary leaders who can recognize the useful services and are able to organize the resources to provide these services and ensure that every citizen can be gainfully employed.
  
Ministers, are you listening?

Tan Kin Lian 

Vote - do you agree that the wasteful marketing activities can be stopped?



 

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