Recently there’s a series of advertorials on TV lightly disguised as a series of half hourly TV programmes, sponsored by beauty service companies. The series focuses on 3 areas most affecting women (and some men) – hair loss, skin problems and weight and ironically, the title of the programme is something along the lines of “My Confidence”.
I don’t have a problem with such companies advertising their services on TV. What I do have a problem with is the way such blatant advertising is done via a weekly programme. Preceeded by a short skit, the girl or woman (its usually female) with the problem is usually shown being laughed at or ridiculed by strangers, friends and even family.
The case stories are usually quite trite:-
- People purporting to be good friends ignore a girl who has bad acne when they take photos – the friends have flawless skin
- Husband scolds a wife for being fat and unattractive
- Colleagues snigger and poke fun at a girl who has thinning hair
In all cases, the girl in question always ends up a wreck – crying, desperate, in despair and then like a ray of light, hope comes in the form of a beauty service which purports to give you a free trial to cure all your ills and turn you from cygnet to swan.
Free trial sessions are a way to hook you in and can be expensive
A first hand experience of a “free trial” at a slimming salon teaches us that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The services in question are usually very expensive and may in some cases, take you nowhere. Also not everyone can resist the hard-sell of the sales people who, lets face it, are out to make their commission.
The treatments may have worked for the ladies in the case studies but no mention is made of how much they had spent on those treatments, how long it took or whether they had been sponsored by the companies. I’ve been to one of those salons for a free trial (for skincare – its named after the Big Apple 😛 ) and I was quoted a “discounted package price” of RM6,000 for 10 sessions with “free double mask”. When I protested, the price miraculously dropped all the way to RM2,888. Needless to say, I never signed up.
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