Saving money on car insurance
GEICO commercials chant, “Fifteen minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.” The Allstate home page asks, “How much could you save? People who switched to Allstate saved an average of $348 per year.” State Farm’s website promises (with one small asterisk) “SAVE $489 when you switch to State Farm.” Progressive counters: “Get a FREE auto quote to see if you could save over $500!” And on and on.
I’m not going to link to these sites, because my point in mentioning this advertising tactic is to discredit it. It’s so frustratingly misleading, I think steam is actually going to pour out of my ears the next time I see a commercial using it.
I understand that any business wants to advertise the idea that it has low prices. But at some point, it becomes unrealistic. Some of the offers I hear imply that if I switched my car insurance to a particular insurance company, the company would be paying me — that’s the only way I could be said to “save” that much money in a year. And what if I switched again after that? If every insurance company saves you hundreds of dollars over every other insurance company, it never ends! We might have just discovered a flawless get-rich-quick scheme!
Of course, that’s not the claim they’re making per se. They’ve carefully phrased the ads to suggest it, but they’re squeaking by false advertising laws with their fine print, asterisks, and minced words. The simple fact is, people who switch from one insurance company to another are most likely going to do it because it saves them money. People who would not save money generally don’t switch. These averages are skewed because the sample is biased. Allstate policies aren’t $348 cheaper than all other policies on average; they’re just cheaper for the people who found that Allstate offered them cheaper policies and decided that switching car insurance was worth the hassle for that savings level. When GEICO says that “New GEICO customers report annual average savings over $500,” they haven’t actually promised that you’d have those savings. And presumably, if you didn’t save by switching, you wouldn’t become a new GEICO customer.
My guess at what’s actually happening? Perhaps different companies have different rates for different groups of people. Single people in their twenties and thirties might be seen as risky by most companies, but safe by one. Older married couples might find much cheaper policies with one or two companies than the rest. Adding a teen driver on your policy might be a much better deal with certain providers. When people in the right category find “their” insurance company, they switch and get big savings. I have no data about whether this is true — just speculating. (Feel free to add your better ideas in the comments.) Naturally, if this is the case, being forthright about it wouldn’t be a good business plan. You need to diversify risk in order to run a functional insurance company. If one or two firms end up with all the teen drivers, you can bet their rates for teen drivers would start to change.
The car insurance companies are trying to get you to associate their average new customer savings rates with their overall affordability level. Don’t let them. Sure, take the basic suggestion and shop around when you’re buying car insurance; look for who’s actually giving you the policy you want at the most affordable price. But as with any advertisement, don’t take all the implications too seriously.
Multi-level marketing: still a scam
Our old friend Dear Prudence (a.k.a. Emily Yoffe) has some wise words this week for someone looking for marketing advice. (It’s the last letter on that linked page.)
Dear Prudie,
I have a marketing problem. It seems that since the economy has taken a downward slide, many of my friends and customers have turned to enthusiastically selling multilevel marketing products. I find that I am getting pitched every time we meet for lunch, go shopping, or have a cocktail. I have been presented with energy drinks, vitamins, phone services, and travel companies, to name a few. I have also been told by some of my customers that if I don’t support them in their new business venture, I can plan on not getting any future business from them. I believe these people are being taken advantage of and their excitement is only temporary, as they are riding the high of what was promised to them for potential earnings. How can I tell my friends and customers that I do not support multilevel marketing schemes and I don’t want to hear about their newest business opportunity?—Please Stop the MLM Madness
Multi-level marketing schemes are ones where you get recruited to sell a product — it could be something specific, like Herbalife which sells vitamins and herbal “supplements,” or a virtual smorgasbord of different things, like Amway/Quixtar. This is presented as a great opportunity because you can “be your own boss,” and the like. Not only are you a salesperson for this business, earning commissions on your sales, but the person who recruited you gets commissions on your sales. And the person who recruited that person gets commissions on the sales of the people they personally recruited, and all of those people’s recruits (including you). And so on. If you recruit people, they’re sure to recruit others, who will recruit still more, and you too can make a fortune! So goes the claim.
Of course, it’s nonsense. Not only is it impractical — because the products are typically overpriced and are easily beaten in value by something your potential customers would find at the mall before they call you up about it — it’s also nonsensical. It’s different in a tiny technicality from a pyramid scheme (no commissions on recruitment, only on sale of products) but it’s doomed to fail for the same reason. There just aren’t enough people on the planet to sustain it in a way that’ll be profitable. Profitable for you, I mean. This whole thing is plenty profitable for the people that start these outfits, because they’re churning out these cheap silly products for you to buy for your inventory at marked-up rates (and then fail at selling to your friends and family at even more marked-up rates).
Bottom line: this is not a good idea. It may look good on paper, but it is ultimately a false promise. A tiny fraction of people participating in multi-level marketing turn a profit from sales, and an even tinier fraction of them quit their day job and make a fortune off it. The economy has been hard enough on everyone as it is. Don’t take it as an opportunity to throw even more of your money away. And remember that it’s not just yourself you’d be putting at risk, it’s the people you’ll be pressured to rope in with you, and in particular — as this letter reminds us — the friends and family you’ll be putting in a really difficult situation.
Anyhow, Prudie answers:
Dear Madness,
With your friends, you need to say you wish them the best, but like everyone else, you’re on a tight budget and simply can’t purchase these items from them. If they press you, say you’re being approached all the time, and you’ve just had to make a blanket decision in order to keep yourself from going broke. As for your clients, I’m assuming you actually provide a useful and necessary service to them. How nice that they want to exploit that to coerce you into buying useless and unnecessary products. It’s up to you to decide if a firm refusal is the best way to go, or if being more flexible would be better for you. If it’s the former, explain to them you understand how tough it is out there, but you hope to keep them as customers because they value what you offer, and that one way you keep your prices competitive is not going off your budget. If it’s the latter, you can consider buying their junk a cost of doing business. But before you sign up, explain that you are able to spend only a specific amount of money and will not go beyond that.—Prudie
I’m sorry that anyone might have to set aside a budget for playing along with a scam, but I agree with Prudence here that it might be the best thing for business if you can keep your involvement limited. Limits are really the key with this kind of stuff! Don’t let yourself get sucked in. For a lot more information about MLM, including hard numbers such as income statistics, and a bunch of citations, please take a look at Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid episode from last October. It’s great! You might also be interested in Russell Glasser’s site, The Perils of Amway, which has two epic personal accounts of individuals who were involved with Amway but found their ways out.
Video games for girls
Here is a TED talk from 1998 by Brenda Laurel, software designer and researcher who founded Purple Moon, in which she discusses her philosophy about making video games for young female gamers (via Sociological Images).
I actually owned and played one of Purple Moon’s games, Rockett’s New School, on our old Power Mac back in middle school. Honestly, I found it mildly entertaining while it lasted, but ultimately not worth playing again. It has a plot that you could only deviate from slightly (disappointing given the box’s promise that you’ll “make choices that change what happens”). I never really felt like I did anything — mostly just watched things happen. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t seem like much more than a primitively interactive sitcom.
I may not be a typical female computer user, and it’s possible that other girls loved it. It certainly sounds like Laurel and her company did plenty of research to back up their design. But this video got me thinking: what should video games designed for girls look like?
Now hold on for a second before you jump all over that sentence. Yes, we’re dealing with stereotypes here. Obviously not every girl would like a “video game for girls” just like not every boy would like a “video game for boys” — and this is true of all the other gendered toys out there as well. (To say nothing of the glaringly false binaries!) But, but, but. Let’s accept for a moment that in order to develop and market a product and ideally keep one’s business afloat, one has to think of the big picture, find a large enough target group, and so on. Some level of generalization is necessary.
The Rockett model of girl’s games hasn’t exactly made it to the big time over the past decade, yet female gamers are a substantial demographic. In 2005, a Nielsen study counted nearly 40% of gamers were female, and I’d expect the numbers are even closer to even now. Perhaps the barely-interactive, storybook-type game wasn’t really what girls were looking for after all, and perhaps that “certain flavor of feminist” was right to point out that the premise is kind of demeaning. Sure, girls do think a lot about the social choices they make daily, and do enjoy narrative play, but must their games be so tightly restricted to those stipulations that the ideal game for them consists of helping an eighth-grader navigate middle school cliques? I doubt it.
Look at the most popular games of this year — it’s stuff like Call of Duty, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Left 4 Dead. We’re on the edge of our seats waiting for the next StarCraft game to come out. Arguably these are all male-targeted games, though females play them too. Regardless, I don’t think that this screenshot (from StarCraft 2) is intended to remind guys of their daily lives:
Most people don’t want to play games that closely mirror their everyday thoughts and actions. Most people, I think, wouldn’t even call such a thing a game. Most of the games we play — board games, computer games, pretend games we made up for ourselves as children — are based on the fantastic, the unfamiliar, the surprising and new. They incorporate elements of the familiar but give us a new context in which to experience it. If they didn’t, why would we play the game? We’d just go out and live our lives, and it’d be equally fun.
I think the question that game developers should be asking themselves isn’t so much “What do girls think about?” as “What do girls want to think about?” And perhaps also: “How does that differ from what boys want to think about?” I suspect that these questions will lead girls’-game developers to reduce the number of huge-breasted heroines and probably also the extent to which games are centered around gruesome destruction of one’s opponent. Change the average level of testosterone in your target audience, and you’re pretty likely to change their demand for such things.
So what would developers replace those things with? I haven’t done the market research, so I can only offer my conjecture, based on my own gaming experience and conversations with friends. Although I enjoy real-time strategy games like Warcraft and StarCraft, and remember really liking some first-person shooter games like Heretic, the aspects of those games I most enjoy have always tended to be the “building” rather than the “battle” ones. I like the parts where you set up a base, get upgrades, or train for new skills. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also love games like SimCity and Civilization. (And hey, maybe it’s my girly nature, my interest in social interactions, that makes me appreciate the diplomacy and public relations aspects of games like these.) I’ve also heard of games more in the FPS mold where, instead of walking your character into another battle, you walk them into a puzzle challenge. That’s not typically my cup of tea but I know girls and women who enjoy it.
At the end of the day, I hope people remember that male-targeted games are currently enjoyed by girls and women, and female-targeted games can be enjoyed by boys and men. I doubt that when they began their long line of Sim games the developers at Maxis were even thinking of a female audience in particular, but I’m sure they had a sizable one even before The Sims. “Video games for girls” don’t have to be all about fashion and parties and make-up in order to be appealing; simply by having a premise other than wreaking testosterone-fueled havoc they are making a major step in the direction of inclusivity.
Think before you speak
An interesting story was brought to my attention by this Penny Arcade comic. Typically, Penny Arcade is about video games and the gaming community (of which I consider myself to be on the periphery), though they do occasionally cover topics of more general interest. This is one of these occasions, and the topic is the Think B4 You Speak campaign which aims to stop people from using the word “gay” as a derogatory term. There’s a news post that goes with the comic that explains what the cartoonists were thinking when they drew this.
I gather from that news post that Tycho is in favor of GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which is running the campaign along with the Ad Council) and groups like it, and in favor of their general goal of tolerance of and respect for people regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. I am, as well. I say this up front because I’m wary of being misunderstood (or encouraging readers to misunderstand someone else) on a sensitive topic like this.
The Think B4 You Speak campaign includes some print ads and some radio and TV ads. Three of the print ads they have on their site are structured in the same basic way: a teenager’s face fills most of the background, and text covers their face, saying:
- That’s so “jock who can complete a pass but not a sentence.”
- That’s so “cheerleader who like, can’t like, say smart stuff.”
- That’s so “gamer guy who has more videogames than friends.”
An inset at the bottom of the ad says, “Think that’s mean? How do you think ‘that’s so gay’ sounds? Hurtful. So, knock it off.”
Tycho’s reaction?
…Bigots and stupid kids speak this way expressly to promulgate the root concepts or to provoke a reaction. Telling them to “knock it off,” as this campaign hilariously does, is like exposing your belly to these wolves.
Lexically speaking, the word Gay is a battleground of warring meanings, uses, and baggage. The fact that the slur has retained its power – for all parties involved – is evidence that the conflict is ongoing, and that its destiny is not yet established. I have tremendous support for them in their aim: the wresting of language, which is identity, from the unworthy foe. If you want to hunt this kind of game, though, you need bigger ordnance.
This criticism is an important one. The ads come off as almost wimpy, merely pointing out that people’s feelings are hurt. That’s often the goal, “to provoke a reaction,” to make people feel insulted. The target audience may just think: “So what?”
My take on this campaign, however, would come from a slightly different angle. You might recall what I wrote about the Spread the Word campaign (against the word “retarded” as an insult), basically explaining that there is a negative quality to mental retardation that leads to its use in a derogatory context. For most people who use “gay” to mean “bad” or “stupid,” homosexuality itself is a negative quality. (Sure, there are some people who say it unthinkingly, but my sense is that they are a minority. I don’t know of any statistics on this; maybe I’m wrong. The lines given to the character of Gabe in the comic strip do illustrate basically what I imagine to be typical. He knows what he’s talking about when he says “gay.”) If you go back and read over those poster slogans, you’ll see that they all do refer to negative qualities: being unintelligent or illiterate or unliked by others. They didn’t choose to stop at, “That’s so cheerleader” or “That’s so jock” or “That’s so gamer”—they had to add extra phrases to make the statements actually sound insulting.
The point of this whole thing, as I understand it, isn’t just to stop people from insulting people. It’s to teach people that “gay” shouldn’t be an insult. To achieve that, you need to show that it’s just a descriptor, a part of some people’s identities. Maybe the posters would be better if they said things like, “Ugh, that’s so 27-year-old guy from Michigan.” Really basic, using innocuous qualities, but obviously intending to convey disgust. Then the point you’re making is a bit more clear: how would you like it if someone used your identity as an insult?
Of course, none of this erases the deeply held beliefs that many people have about homosexuals being condemned to hell. And there will probably always be some straight people who feel squeamish about homosexuality, simply because the orientation is unappealing to them. I think the best that society can hope for from this campaign and others like it is to establish that some things are off limits. You might personally be happy that you’re not a different religion or of a different ethnic background, because some of their traditions and customs don’t appeal to you, but that doesn’t make it okay to mock people who do belong to those groups. We need this rule to apply to sexuality as well.
It’s not clear that this campaign, as it is, is counterproductive, though… maybe at worst, just unproductive. Tycho wrote that “the conflict is ongoing, and that its destiny is not yet established.” This is the next phase of the conflict, the next statement in the social dialogue. It doesn’t have to end the conflict, but there’s nothing wrong with strategizing in the meantime about the most effective next step.
Back, with gratuitous advertising
Hello again! I’m back to blogging again. I missed you; how’ve you been?
While I sift through my list of post ideas and put together some real articles for the coming days, here’s a video for you. This makes me smile every time I see it on TV. I don’t plan to put real ads on this site any time soon, but Intel deserves some extra buzz for this fantastic campaign. As fellow thinking people, I thought you’d get a kick out of it as well. Isn’t it nice to see marketing that emphasizes how smart can be cool and exciting?
(It makes me want to work for them, actually, more than it makes me want to buy Intel products.)
A sense of humor
I’ve been watching with some interest the comments on this post from Sociological Images. With just an embedded video of a Superbowl ad and two sentences of summary, they seem to have triggered some real anger from their readers. One vowed never to read the blog again. Why?
To some extent, this is what happens when a website gains popularity. Nearly every post on the Photoshop Disasters blog is covered with comments crying foul (“That’s not a disaster! Women really do look like that!” and so on). Everyone’s a critic. Occasionally there is the case of a shirt sleeve blending in with the wallpaper and leaving what looks at first like a hand without an owner, but that is very rare. Now that Sociological Images is gaining a larger readership, beyond the professors looking for examples to show their classes during lecture, they have to contend with this sort of thing. “That’s not sexism!” they say, or “That’s not racism!” In other words, that’s not representative of a sociological phenomenon. It’s just a funny joke; why don’t you have a sense of humor?
These people are missing the entire point. I suspect it’s because they’re reading Sociological Images for things that are shocking and outrageous, or at least good for a laugh. Their goals aren’t intellectual ones. If they were, they’d realize that commercials like this one are examples of jokes that fall inside the set of what our society considers acceptable. That makes it worth studying. Obviously there are differences between men and women (or between any two groups within society, but I’ll stick with men and women for now). Which differences that we perceive are real, and which ones are made up? Which ones are okay to talk about, and which ones are taboo? Which ones can be made into jokes? That’s what this ad demonstrates.
Pointing out that this ad is humorous to you is a particularly ineffective tactic, since that’s exactly why it’s there. It’s pretty indisputably based on a common stereotype (nagging wives). There are enough people out there who think that this stereotype is realistic and amusing to make it profitable to write an advertisement catering to their mindset. In other words, if it wasn’t funny to anyone, it wouldn’t be an ad. Sociologists then ask: why is it funny? And sometimes: is it fair that it is funny?
I hope that some professors writing at or reading Sociological Images use the comment threads as part of their lectures, too. Now that more readers there are simply people going online to look at something interesting, without a particular academic goal in mind, they’re collecting people’s uninhibited reactions to the images posted. There’s certainly a lot of material ripe for sociological analysis.
Strange ads from Glade
Have you seen these Glade commercials? They were on all the time in my area in December, I guess because of all the big parties and family get-togethers everyone had at the end of the month. This first one is for their Fabric & Air Odor Eliminator. (Sorry, the resolution is not so great.)
Then there’s this one, for Glade PlugIns.
Both of these ads strike me as very odd. The first and more superficial reason is that I don’t understand how it could be a good marketing decision to teach potential customers that they should be embarrassed about having used your product. You’ll be mocked by your husband, laughed at by your friends… yeah, that sounds great, sign me up. Seriously, does this convince anyone to buy from Glade?
More importantly, though, I think it says something about the assumed role of a woman as housekeeper. In both cases the woman lies about how much effort she put into making her home smell nice; in the first, she says she spent the whole day cleaning, while in the second, she says she discovered this unique fragrance at a special boutique. It’s not enough to make your house tidy before your friends come over, or to wash the dishes and maybe vacuum a room or two before your kids and husband come home. A good woman really knocks herself out to get that extra-special clean. (Or, at least, pretends to. And everyone else expects her to — that’s why they laugh at her when they find out she didn’t.)
I don’t know what message Glade intended to send with these commercials. It doesn’t make much sense to me, and the part that does make sense just seems outrageous.
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