The cross-selling epidemic

Cross-selling is the phenomenon where you try to get more value out of your existing customers by selling them other things. And from the looks of it it is reaching epidemic proportions in India.

Yesterday a guy came up to me at the gym and asked me to try out some “power yoga” group exercise classes. I told him I wasn’t interested, and he continued to talk (I was on the treadmill so couldn’t run away). Of course my membership includes any group classes so I don’t have to pay more to do “power yoga” but the economics are not the same from this guy’s perspective!

Then for the last two weeks my gym (Gold’s Gym in Jayanagar) has been full of advertisements for protein supplements. And today some of their salespeople had even set up shop inside the gym hawking their stuff. From conversations I overhear in the locker room I know that several other members of the gym regularly take such supplements but the kind of advertising within the gym was way too intrusive!

Later today I had gone to visit a dermatologist (who I found via Practo) for a rash I have on my hand. The doctor seemed least interested in checking me and more interested in putting me through a battery of blood tests (which were done in the lab attached to the clinic). I don’t know why I went along but after becoming poorer by a thousand and three hundred rupees I figured that the tests included liver function and thyroid function test! Why a dermatologist would need such tests I don’t know! Anyway I’ll just pick up the reports tomorrow and run! Oh and when I was walking out the receptionist helpfully pointed out that I could buy the prescribed medicines at the little pharmacy also in the clinic! I refused an walked out!

A few months back I’d gone to my ophthalmologist for a routine checkup. After having got my eyes tested I asked him to check for my power on contact lenses also. He said he’ll do so if and only if I were to buy the lenses from his clinic! Since I’d found those lenses to be of poor quality the last time I’d got them, I scooted. Oh, and this guy has been my regular ophthalmologist for over twenty years!

This brazen cross-sell seems so suboptimal that it possibly drives away customers (but from what I hear, if every doctor indulges in such practices there isn’t much choice anyway!). I wouldn’t have minded paying an additional sum (over and above what I’d paid for my generic eye test) to get my eyes tested for contact lens power also. But this option (which would’ve worked out more simply for both of us) wasn’t available! Bizarre, I tell you!

2 thoughts on “The cross-selling epidemic”

  1. Most of those medical experiences wouldn’t count as cross selling but as bundling. The ophthalmologist will only sell you lens power test as a bundle with lenses. While the dermatologist might be indulging in mis-selling, even his offering is a bundle: will only sell you a hand checkup in a bundle with assorted health tests, which may or may not be required. The pharmacy bit qualifies as a cross all though.

    As for cross selling products and services inside gyms, at some gyms here, it’s hard to say where the gym is and where the promo area is.

    1. fair! I guess it’s a grey area between what is cross-selling and what is bundling! I agree that the ophthalmologist has set things up as a bundle!

      And yeah I can expect all gyms to be going that way. and this one I go to seems to be the gold standard in that.

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