How Instagram Scams are using the new fad of customization to sell old products to hopeful shoppers.

Have you been inundated with ads on instagram from all kinds of companies that seem to know exactly what you need and all have a little quiz to customize their products to you? Is instagram becoming the coolest new way to shop? Have marketers finally found a way to customize products to your individual needs? Why hasn't this been done before?

Well sorry to burst your bubble, but the sad truth is the majority of these companies are overpriced scams using marketing tricks to appear special.

Those quizzes you are taking have specific health questions that make you feel like the brand really cares about your personal needs. It makes you feel seen and heard, and gives you the impression that at the end of the quiz you are going to get a recommendation of a product that perfectly meets your needs. 

Its genius, but also quite awful because its misleading and untrue. They don't care about your needs and they are not customizing anything to you. To test this out I took many quizzes for similar products, some skin care, some health products and some hair care. 

It all leads to the same thing:

What I found was that no matter how different my answers were, when I took the test over and over I got the same or almost exact same results.

For example many of these companies if you actually take the time to look around their sites have only 1-3 variations on their products anyways. This is no different than pretty much any other skin care company. So while they give you 15 questions to make it feel very pinpointed, they are actually only using maybe the first or last two questions to customize your product.

Your customized skin care line then is just a choice between oily skin, combination or dry, just like any other skin care line. But they make it feel like their product is custom made for your specific needs. 

Yes the skincare might actually have quality ingredients that help with wrinkles or dark spots, but no if you #1 concern is fine lines around your mouth, this is not pinpointed those over the dark spots just because you selected "fine lines" as your #1 concern. It's just as good for that as any other similar product

The ingredients are the same one's in other common products, the same quality and the same amount.

While sometimes there is a difference between the quality and amount used of certain ingredients in one product vs. another, I found that in many cases the ingredients used in the products I saw for sale

They recommend a product to you based on a quiz, but you may be able to pick the product you need or would enjoy most better yourself, so the quiz can actually hinder your shopping experience. 

I tried to get some custom skincare from "Spoiled Child" and while I do like their products, and they seem good quality, I did not like how I could not choose which of their products or line options I wanted to try. They have a trial program where you can try the products for free for 2 weeks, super cool right? But you can only try the products that are recommended to you by the quiz. 

While Spoiled Child actually has a decent variety of products, they don't seem to want to recommend certain one's to you. They seem to recommend the same main products to everyone, their best sellers. Does this mean the other products don't actually work for most people? 

For this site I actually took the test about 10 times trying to get a particular product that I wanted to test out because after reading about it in their shop it sounded like it may be a better fit for me than what was recommended. Each time I took the test my products recommended only varied by 1-2 despite me changing multiple answers and even purposely selecting completely different answers each time. Yet they kept recommending the same 3 products to me. I even did this from several different devices and using different emails in case they track your IP to prevent people from changing their answers. It made no difference. Its either broken and unreliable or rigged to push you toward particular products.

My conclusion is that the quiz is a neat little sales device that can help you find which product to get, much like the salespeople of olden days would help you pick which product line is right for you, however they aren't as customized as the quiz makes it seem and the product doesn't necessarily solve all the issues the quiz would make you beleive. I will be open to trying cheaper products that may work just as well even if they don't have a quiz that makes them feel cusotmized to me.