Reply To: Brainworx bx Crispy Tuner reg $9.99 reg $399

[Peter DeLegge]

On dsteinschneider said

In this case I think they are making a point about Antares pricing

Take a look at their other plugins. It’s certainly a strategy employed at Plugin Alliance.

Brainworx bx_limiter True Peak and a bunch of their plugins show a list price of $299 US, but I would doubt they sell many — if any — at that price. Would you or anyone you know when you know that they constantly have sales on it for $29 or $39?

Creating inflated list prices just to offer ridiculously inflated discounts, and doing the discounting over a certain fraction of the year (I don’t recall the period the FTC specifies, but the concept is doing it a good portion of the year, let’s say a third of the year, is a violation of FTC regulations in the US, and I believe it also violates German law — and their advertising / marketing related legislation is much more strict than that of the US. Now, it’s been a while since I’ve dealt with UK marketing laws, so I don’t recall (Music Creation Group, the parent company for Plugin Alliance, NI, and Izotope is located in the UK and the owner, Franciso Partners, is located in the US). As the company operates in both markets and the parent company has locations in both markets, they have to comply

My guess is that because the company is small enough, they probably don’t have dedicated marketing lawyers as staff like larger, global companies, because if they did, those lawyers would likely give them pretty strong push back on those practices, as they should (the reality is that a CMO is still going to be able to overrule lawyers’ advice, as lawyers are advisors, a CMO is an exec).  It’s not a tactic you would see a very large global company do — any wisely managed brand would never do this. It’s more of a practice you see with sleazy small and mid-size businesses.

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