Book 15 with Tom
If you have ever tried to buy a piece of assistive technology for someone you love, you will recognise the afternoon. Twelve tabs open. Four brochures full of stock photography of somebody’s grandmother looking wistfully out of a window. Not one price.
You fill in a form. Nothing happens for two days. Then a very nice person rings you and asks what your budget is, which is a funny question to ask someone who has spent two days trying to find out what things cost.
The three tricks
Price on application. There is no good reason for this in a consumer product. It exists so the seller can work out what you can afford before telling you what it costs. Everyone knows this, which is why it feels the way it feels.
Manufactured scarcity. Limited stock available, on a product somebody needs to get out of bed safely. If it is genuinely scarce, say so and say why. If it is not, that countdown timer is a lie you are telling a frightened family.
Never saying what it cannot do. Every product has limits. A monitoring system that watches for falls is not a carer. A robot mower will not manage a steep wet bank. Hiding the limits does not sell more units; it sells units that come back, to people who now trust you less than they did.
What honesty costs
We built Mr Purple Assistive Technology on the opposite of all three, mostly because the alternative annoyed us. Real prices on the page. Real demonstration video rather than a rendering. And, on every product, a plain list of what it does not do.
That last one loses us sales, and it is the part I would defend hardest. Somebody reads the page, realises it is not right for their mum, and leaves. Good. That is a person we have not taken money from under a misunderstanding, and they now know we will tell them the truth, which is worth rather more than one sale.
It is not an assistive technology problem
None of this is unique to this sector. It is just more visible here, because the buyer is usually tired, often worried, and rarely buying for themselves.
But the same three tricks run through most industries, and they all rest on the same assumption: that a customer who knows everything will not buy. In my experience the opposite is true. A customer who knows everything buys once, quickly, and tells people.
The site is at mrpurple-assistivetech.com.au, with Seenyor home monitoring and the Husqvarna Aspire R6V to start. Prices on the page. Limits on the page. No countdown timers.