CRED

While writing on WhatsApp I made a bold statement that if you are using CRED to save money, you will end up spending more. Few of the readers were interested to know how’s that even possible and cross questioned. However, I just requested them to wait. Before jumping to CRED let me give you an interesting puzzle, solved by Target, an American retail giant. Back in 2000’s they solved the puzzle to identify which of the female customers are pregnant and are in which month of pregnancy simply by analysing their purchasing behaviour. But why to identify such customers at first place? If you can habituate a parent even before the kid is born you have already won a big market share. You are going to have a lifelong customer and new parents purchase like crazy. Most of the big companies including Disney, P&G, gifts the newly born baby a hamper so that the parent get habituated to their product. Target was a bit clever, and moved a step ahead and started to target new parents even before the baby was born. Now you know how clever these companies are else how they will make profitable.

Let’s move back to our topic CRED. CRED has mass data on your purchasing behaviour. It even knows your credit point. Now if CRED offers you a slight more discount you will be inclined to purchase from CRED instead of your current supplier. Indian consumers love more discount, don’t they. But it is money saving for you, not extra spending, right? After building more trust, you are already habituated to purchase most of your items from CRED. This happen at an unconscious level until someone help you realise it. After gaining on more purchasing behaviour CRED knows which product you are more likely to be interested and it will be able to sell you that product unconsciously. It might not be easy to digest. Let’s take an example to clarify how that happen unconsciously.

You might be a pizza lover and order online the favourite Domino’s pizza monthly. There’s an existing research which support junk food eaters become frequent eater with time. A company like CRED can leverage this research and might show you more offers and we start ordering biweekly and eventually weekly that’s how our spending increase exponentially. But what CRED will be showing is how much you are saving per order, giving you a vibe of more saving not extra spending.

It’s a mixture of habit and spending behaviour. People generally think I won’t spend much in a casino but eventually end up losing a ton of money. We might explore someday in future how can you save yourself from this. But the easy answer would be greedy for long term and use cash or debit cards more frequently.

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and maybe on using CRED you might be able to save more. Your data will speak more clearly to you 😛