Customer Reviews

Selling It: The Incredible Shrinking Package and Other Marvels of Modern Marketing

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"Selling It" is a wonderful collection of selections from what has been and is one of Consumer Reports magazine's most appealing and long-time features - the half-truths and hanky-panky used by vendors to "sell" their products. Written mostly in a humorous, tongue-in-cheek tone, "Selling It" is a first-class antidote to caveat emptor. It's unfortunate that Leslie Ware, the editor and custodian of "Selling It," didn't know in advance what was happening at Enron Corporation. A small entry about Enron on the last page of Consumer Report might have changed history!

As a marketer, I've always loved the "Selling It" column in Consumer Reports. Each month offers humorous examples of how not to market your products and services! This entertaining book captures the best of the scams, misleading copy, convoluted syntax and laugh-out-loud idiocy that companies have tried to slip past us over the years. A great collection!

I don't find the topic of the book funny anymore. Corporate America has lost it's mind and we are paying for it.

This entertaining, amusing and sometimes hackles-raising book exposes the sneaky tricks of the advertising industry in trying to separate you from your money. It features examples from the "Selling It" column of Consumer Reports magazine in the USA.

You'll see examples of "free" offers that cost a lot, "all new" products without anything new (except perhaps less value for money), deceptive packaging, sneaky tricks from car dealers, and more.

At the least, you'll be entertained. And if it makes you look more carefully at the advertising and marketing that bombards you in everyday life, that's a bonus.

The only conclusion I can come to after reading `Selling It' is that they are all out to get me. Fortunately I'm now hip to weasel words, tiny type and the true significance of those asterisks that are placed at the end of ad headlines. This breezily written book is a collection of items from Leslie Ware's column in Consumer Reports and reproduces (in color) the packaging, labels, ads, products and more which have appeared over the last few years, the book is nicely designed and printed too.

In case you might think that [ethically questionable business transactions]are only perpetrated by obscure, small companies, read chapter five about medical miracles and chapter nine on the auto biz, here huge corporations do their best to screw as many dollars out of you for as little as the competition and the law will allow. The introduction mentions, in 1955, a salesman telling author William Whyte "The man on the other side of the counter is the enemy" and this still seems to be true at the beginning of this new century.

I think it's worth quoting a few examples of the marketing man's black art:
A finance company who stressed `Pay nothing till first payment.'
Buy a Joe DiMaggio baseball with an `authorised facsimile signature.'
Get a 105 piece tool set that includes 85 assorted screws as part of the 105 piece total.
The photo in a furniture store ad that says `Photo shown for photography purposes only.'
A ten once box of dates with a label stating boldly `25% More Than 8oz. Box'
And there's plenty more in this fascinating book, to quote in the argot of the huckster "No home should be without a copy!"

This is a very good book. It uncovers the amazing ways that marketing people work thier ways.

The book is informative and fun to read.

GOOD SUBJECT BUT IT CONTAINS A LOT OF ITS OWN SELLING IT.