Undercover Sales Consultants?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I was speaking to a friend of mine who recently got a job for a major computer printer company. I asked him was his job was and was very suprised with his answer. The main function of his job was to work at one of the major US computer/electronic stores in the printer aisle. His company pays this retail chain to let him do this. He dresses in the same outfit the regular employees do, and spends all his time trying to convince people to buy printers made by his company. My question is, how common is this? Has this been going on for a while now, or is this something new? And am I the only one who thinks this is sleazy?" The only sleazy part is the fact that they are undercover. I would be really impressed with the company that would actually put some of their own people in sales chains and had them identified as such. Thoughts?

Comments

Sleazy!

[theDigitizer]

This is a very sleazy practice on the part of the Printer company. I wouldn't have a problem with having true non-undercover Canon or HP representatives in the printer aisle at Best Buy. I would love to ask them questions, because unlike most employees in those stores, they either don't know the answers to your questions, or are way to busy for you to find them and ask anything.

Being able to ask a true live printer sales rep wouldn't be half-bad.

On the other hand, having these undercover sales reps is totally wrong. If I'm asking an employee of one of these chains a question about this printer or this printer by another company, etc. I would expect unbiased opinions and facts. (as much as you could expect to be unbiased)

However, with these undercover sales reps, it's biased, and you the consumer has no idea that it is. The undercover guy is pushing his product and you don't know that he is, and of course the main reason that this is wrong, is that the product he pushing you towards may not be the best and/or suit your needs properly as some other companies'.

I guess all we can say is Cavet Emptor.

Sounds unfair for the retail chain.

[billcopc]

I don't understand why a retail establishment would allow this sort of practice, although I don't know a thing about marketing. Assuming this did improve sales of Product-X, and I believe it does work, then it would have the inverse impact on Products Y and Z. The store wouldn't sell more products (maybe just a little), it would just keep selling the same stuff and eventually be stuck with obsolete hardware from the other brand names.

As an example, picture this : Say your local pizza shack gets a Coca-Cola consultant "donated" to their business, who then takes orders on the phone. That guy will naturally sell much more Coke than Pepsi (or other Pepsi-brand drinks). The result is that for those who actually tell the Coke guy to fsck off and get their Pepsi, it will be a very flat Pepsi since it's been on the shelves for much longer than the other drinks. Still, the pizza shack doesn't sell many more drinks in total. Sure, Coca-Cola would be bribing them, but that probably doesn't make much of a difference.