Think How To Outsmart Your Customer Using Simple Ideas
(Ethical + Smart + Gutsy) = (Genius + Profit)
What is the difference between being unethical and using a growth hack?
(Understanding the psychology of the user and using it to your business' advantage)
First things first, if you're not sure what does the term "dark pattern" mean, let's get that out of the way.
A simple Meta AI search reveals the following definition of the term:
Dark patterns are design choices or techniques used in websites, apps, or software that manipulate users into doing something they might not want to do, often to benefit the company.
Now, I know this may seem extremely conniving, evil, bad, and unethical.
Well, let's be honest, most dark patterns are.
Most being the operative word here.
Once in a while, brands come up with simple ideas, which "by definition" may be termed as dark patterns, but there are simple ways to break those patterns.
For example, the biggest ticket + event booking website of India played a simple trick with the minds of their customers.
Imagine being at the check-out page of any website, and you see only 2 options:
01. Make Payment, and
02. A countdown of 5-15 mins telling you that the deal/ cart/ seats that you've chosen for your booking will expire if you don't make the payment before the timer runs out.
Do you see what's missing here?
This company simply eliminated the CANCEL button from the checkout page.
Is this a dark pattern? Technically, yes.
But is it evil? No... If anything, I'd call it an evil genius.
The user can simply close the browser/ kill the app and move on with their life.
However, this business understood the consumer psychology.
A timer intuitively gets humans for lack of a better word... anxious.
It's out of this presumed/ artificially created sense of scarcity, this company managed to expand their revenues and sales tremendously.
The question I have for you is....
According to you, is this a dark pattern, or just clever execution of an idea?
Drop a comment/ question below to support this post
Thank you for reading till the end.
Keep Going Keep Growing 🚀
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P.S.: Image made on Meta AI using the prompt, “Imagine an Indian ecommerce founder and team celebrating high revenues for the quarter because the growth hacking ideas have paid off much better than expected”
#GrowthHacking #DarkPatterns #ConsumerPsychology #Business #Ideas