Yes, that’s right! You’ll be made to buy through a very simple approach. You get a compelling e-mail announcing that day’s deals on a limited supply of high-end merchandise. You are directed to a website where it’s easy to buy and where you see the products being snapped up in the limited sale time remaining. Caught up in the buying frenzy you buy too… regardless of whether you really need the product or not!

The process is called “Flash Sales” and Kit Yarrow,s a professor of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, wrote an interesting article “Flash Sales: The New (Deeply Psychological) Budget Busters” about the phenomenon in a recent edition of Psychology Today.

It worth a read and some thought about how you can avoid being caught up in a frenzy but also how you can make the idea work legitimately and ethically for your business The emails you get from the giant Groupon site, Star Deals, and others of similar ilk will give you an idea of how you can generate masses of new customers. The trick is to turn these once only bargain buyers into long term clients.