Shoppers are bombarded with messages of sales, specials, and deals. These marketing messages almost always make the deal sound better than it really is. Here are a few common messages along with translations into more neutral language. Buy one and get the second one at 50% OFF! Translation: “25% off, but you have to buy two of them.” We’ll pay the HST! Translation: “11.5% off.” The HST may be 13%, but taking it off saves only 11.5%. Fill all 10 spots on your sub card and you get a FREE SUB! Translation: “9% off, but you have to buy 11 subs before this promotion ends.” Buy with our card and collect valuable points! Translation: “Trade dollars for another form of currency called points whose value we control and can devalue with redemption rule changes any time we please.” None of these deals is necessarily good or bad. They just aren’t as good as they seem at first. Do readers have any more good examples?

Apple has had quite a run over the last decade selling a string of products that have changed our lives starting with the iPod. Looking back over this period of time, what amazes me is the way that Apple went about promoting these products. As each new iThing became available, Steve Jobs made it clear that only out-of-touch losers wouldn’t own one. The truly amazing part of the marketing story was that when a new version of each iThing came out less than a year later, Jobs managed to create the impression that only out-of-touch losers would be caught owning the old version. Being an out-of-touch sort of person, the only Apple product I own is the least cool and least expensive iPod: the Shuffle. It’s a good thing Apple didn’t have me anywhere near their marketing strategy because it would never have occurred to me that the best way to market electronics is to exploit people’s inner drive for social climbing.

House shoppers get a lot of comfort from having a pre-approved mortgage. Knowing how much a bank will lend you removes one big worry from the process of finding the right home. In this context, “pre-approved” means that the bank took your relevant personal details and determined how much they would lend you. However, when it comes to credit card offers from the very same banks, “pre-approved” seems to mean something completely different. According to [a resource no longer available online], when it comes to credit card offers, “pre-approved” means “not yet approved” as opposed to “approved in advance”. When yet another pre-approved credit card offer from RBC arrived in the mail, I decided to check just how pre-approved I really was. A footnote from the heading on RBC’s offer pointed me to some fine print on the back that explained what they mean by “pre-approved”: “This pre-approved offer is based on the credit and financially related information the Royal Bank of Canada has ...