The Toxic Team series
A series of articles focusing on the common problems caused by improperly managed teams.
Learn how to detect toxic situations, deal with them, and her your team with this curated topic of articles.
Story time: I was testing a transportation application, offering bus, train, and plane connections between European cities.
Sadly, the connection from Berlin, where I live, to my desired city was unavailable by any means in the app. Imagine my surprise when 2 days later I received a push notification: "Hurry up, prices of connection to [my city] are going up!".
No, they are clearly not going up, if there are no connections. At all.
If you are a marketer, do not ever fall into the trap of generating false price pressure, or at least be smart about it. It's a dark pattern of marketing, a deceptive marketing practice.
I would rather receive another notification: "We found a connection to a city near [my city], wanna check the prices?". This way I don't feel cheated, and stay as the customer.
Marketing is a tool to enable communication between us—don't cheat, nor abuse this privilege.