Beat Marketers at Their Own Game, By James Dennin

Marketing isn’t just the vaguely ambiguous professional explanation for your lax bro friend’s summer home; it’s also often to blame for many of your impulse purchases. My dukes are out for whoever invented those roving internet ads that invade your Instagram feed every time you talk yourself down from yet another compulsive purchase (that marketer owes me big time). In this week’s Strategy newsletter, we’ll be talking about marketing gimmicks and the psychological forces that make us fall prey to them.

Try This Tactic

Prime yourself for level-headedness by keeping a picture of your family nearby a work computer. That’s according to Linjiang Lora Tu, a professor of marketing at the Baylor University Hankamer School of Business. Professor Tu’s got a new paper about one the most famous marketing gimmicks of all time: charging $0.99 for something instead of a dollar (a tactic known as “nine-ending pricing”)…