Emphasis by mobile telecom companies to switch to e-bill, under the guise of "go green" and "save trees"

The real objective, obviously, is to save money on physical paper bill [printing, packaging, courier delivery, etc.]. In typical MBA/marketing style, this rational business decision is packaged in an attractive story with the theme "save the environment/planet". Who cares how much it costs the environment to produce and run those computers, those servers, those displays...

The basic idea that companies are following here is to give people a compelling reason to behave the way firms want people to behave. Merely suggesting/telling people to take certain actions or to choose something [without attaching a list of benefits for multiple stakeholders] will result in a lower conversion rate. Repackaging the same suggestions with hard-to-ignore and heart-touching reasons/stories will convince people that what's being asked of them or has been told to them is good for them. Absent this good-for-everyone message, fewer people will switch to paperless bills.

Image from 15-Aug-10

Update [9-Jun-17]: More bullshit. It comes in green color.

Jul'12 image

Mar'15 email

Amazon (India) rapidly changes both MRP and selling price of a Lenovo tablet within seconds

Every time I refresh this webpage, it shows a different MRP and selling price, all in a matter of about 15 seconds.

Everyone has a different MRP for this product.

Emami 7 Oils in One print advert hides from the reader that the product has 93% mineral oil

The ad emphasizes 7 oils and makes bold claims such as 96% less hair-fall and 20 times strength, but not the most important fact - that this spaghetti actually contains no less than 93% mineral oil.

Bournvita renames vitamins to ProHEALTH Vitamins in order to fool the public

Renaming vitamins to ProHEALTH Vitamins doesn't make them any extra pro-health or any extra nutritious. If I label my drinking water as 'Hydrating Aqua', that won't make it any more water or watery. Ideally kids need to be taught right from school days to not fall prey to such marketing tricks. Equally importantly, use of such deceptive tricks should be made illegal and hence punishable.

Google is shrewdly pushing Google+ posts for news stories into Google News, instead of linking directly to the actual news source

The 'CBS News' story on this Google News section isn't actually linked to the actual story on CBS website, but to the Google+ post about this story. Shrewd, anti-customer, pushy, Microsoft-like, and overall in bad taste.

Energizer fools customers into thinking that its alkaline battery is the "world's longest lasting" by cleverly keeping key text in small size

Microsoft misuses psychology to make IE users apply its Microsoft-friendly "recommended" settings

In Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft has gone a step further in wickedly using human psychology in order to make more users choose the so-called recommended settings [which are in fact more Microsoft-friendly than user-friendly]. Two things come to my mind:

1. "Don't use recommended settings": How alarming and unfriendly does this sentence sound? Quite a lot, at least to the average user. There you go. Instead of saying something like let me choose my own settings, when IE says something as alarming as it says in version 9, it's logical that most average users will not choose the second setting and instead feel safe in choosing the first one.
2. Clubbing a Microsoft-friendly setting with a user-friendly setting: Instead of giving separate checkboxes for SmartScreen and Compatibility View, Microsoft has clubbed them into a single recommended settings banner. Obviously, when presented with only 2 radio buttons, out of which one sounds alarming and the other sounds nice and safe, most users will end up choosing the first one, and Microsoft's objective of harvesting users' URLs will be served! If a user wants to choose only Compatibility View [and not SmartScreen], he doesn't have any option here, and he'll most likely choose the first option.