Snake Oil

There was a time when there was a lot of snake oil in the car care industry. If you were to visit the detailing enthusiast forums, you would see lots of scepticism.

This was helpful because if a salesman made a claim, he would need to back it up with not only with evidence that it works, but explanations of how it works.

We have entered a time when there are so many good companies about, making so many good products, that we have become a lot more trusting. And this is well deserved, there are more companies that I am willing to list that have built great reputations on quality and honesty.

It has now got to the point where, when I am asked to recommend a product, may answer is, "You can't really go wrong with any of the major brands".

However, there is some malarkey that still persists.

What is Snake Oil?

The traditional definition of snake oil is a product claimed to cure-all, which will actually cure nothing and has no real value at all.

In the car care products industry, this is rarely the case. The questionable product might actually be good, but claims are being made that it can do something it cannot or that it is better than it actually is. What this comes down to is dishonesty on the part of the manufacturer, their salesmen, marketing team or distributors and outlets.

Where to find snake oil?

The answer to this is where there is money to be made.

The most common examples are that problem that nobody really has a good answer to. The itch that everyone is trying to scratch. If there are thousands of people every day, typing the same problem into a search engine, there is the potential to make huge amounts of money if you could come up with a product which is the solution.

Unfortunately, if there isn't an easy solution, there are always people willing to sell you a bottle of snake oil.

After this, the most outrageous examples of Snake Oil are aimed at the enthusiast market. There is such a thing as a car detailing enthusiast, somebody who likes to spend all their spare time detailing cars. Thankfully, there is a cure, but it involves doing it as a full-time job. Meantime, those who are afflicted with this crippling addiction, are driven to strive for ever greater results, to earn the admiration of their peers by using the best and latest gear. Snake oil salesmen can appeal to their competitive streak and take advantage of tricks like the scarcity heuristic. 

Lastly, there is jumping on the bandwagon. When a new technology emerges, such as ceramic or graphene, and it's all a buzz or in great demand, then two things happen. Firstly, products which don't contain this technology will claim they do. Secondly, as that technology becomes available, it gets sprinkled into everything even if it is no benefit.

This doesn't have to even involve a new technology, and with clever marketing, it is quite possible to create a fad out of something old. For example, carnauba wax has been used in car waxes since the beginning, but around a decade ago, there was a buzz for waxes that contained exotic carnauba, extra pure, white carnauba, and only that harvested by the virgin daughters of tribal chiefs, on the beaches of the Rio Grande do Norte were good enough... or something like that. 

I have heard car care products described as cosmetics for men. I am sure many men have sat watching TV with the wife and seen adverts for shampoo or anti-ageing cream and said, "That's a load of cobblers". All the same marketing tricks that are used for hair care, cosmetics and household cleaners are present when marketing a bottle of polish to men. Generally, they are all pretty good products, they just use a little pizazz to make them stand out from the competition.

Scratch Removers

Because I look after the website, I do keyword research, and that's how I know there are huge numbers of people looking for ways to polish out scratches. Should I wish to take advantage of this knowledge, I could write a load on the subject and get a considerable amount of traffic to the website. This wouldn't help our business though because scratches are difficult to deal with. Some can be removed in a few minutes with a machine polisher, others will require the whole side of a car to be repainted. The majority of the enquiries we get, we refer to a bodyshop because they need the panel repainted. This whole issue is further complicated by the fact that you often can't tell from a photograph, and some you can't tell what results you will get until you actually attempt polishing it out.

With that in mind, it is easy to see that you are unlikely to get an answer in a bottle. But there is a huge market for a 'scratch remover'.

There really isn't any such thing as a 'scratch remover', it's like saying a 'hole remover', it is an oxymoron. The scratch is an area where paint has been removed, and so what you are really doing is using a product which is liquid sandpaper to remove more of the paint down to the same level.

I have a number of issues with scratch removal products, the first being the absurd marketing that many of them use. In case you are in any doubt, the example I have provided is photoshopped, and there is no way in the world you could every polish out scratches like that. That car would need to go to a bodyshop and have the bumper rubbed down, filled and repainted.

Over the last few years, I have seen dozens of adverts like this all over social media, especially on websites like Pinterest where there are videos of Asian people hacking away at cars with meat cleavers, only to remove the scratch in seconds with a product on a sponge. I have to wonder is anyone actually falls for this camera trickery, but I suppose they must do, as somebody has been paying to run dozens of adverts for the last few years.

My second problem is that because there is money to be made here, and everyone is doing it, most of the major brands have jumped on board and sell a scratch remover product.

If I was responsible for a major brand of retail products, I just wouldn't sell one because in short, they are either too mild to be effective, or if they are harsh enough to be effective, they hold the potential to make things worse.

I have included a video here by Project Farm which compared many of the top brands to see how effective they are. He puts a very light scratch in the car's paintwork, the type of scratch which a professional would be able to remove fairly easily (unlike the majority of scratches people present us with), and yet only a couple of the products manage to do anything with it.

Those that do are rubbing compounds. That means liquid sandpaper. Some of the kits actually contain sandpaper, and the most effective product included a buffing pad that you attach to an electric drill.

The International Detailing Association says in their glossary that wet-sanding "should only be attempted by professionals" and for good reason. It is perhaps as much of an art as a skill, and if you manage it without going through the clearcoat, you then have to remove the holograms and buffer marks which will no doubt result from attempting to polish a car with an electric drill.

Never Wax Your Car Again!

Many years ago, I was shown a video on YouTube where somebody had put a polymer coating on a car and then, to demonstrate how tough it was, they poured petrol over the bonnet of the car and set fire to it.

The fella who showed me the video then told me that salesmen were doing that trick when he was a young man back in the 1960s. As long as you have any kind of wax on the car, so the petrol doesn't soak into the paint, the petrol doesn't ignite until it evaporates above the paintwork, the heat goes upwards, and it doesn't affect the car at all. It is a meaningless demonstration.

You may also see videos where people throw buckets of mud, or even gravel over a car, which isn't great for the car, even one with a coating.

The irony is that these are often excellent products. What is usually going on here is a business model of some kind of affiliate marketing. It is likely that somebody went to a manufacture, got a coating rebranded with their own logo, and bought 20,000 bottles. It is likely that it is no better or worse than other similar products, but they want to sell them quick, so they can move onto the next get-rich-quick scheme.

The ends set the middle

Using the ends to set the middle is an old marketing "trick" which is used in every industry from training shoes to washing machines. It works on the basis that nobody really wants the cheapest, and most people don't want the best, not for every-day items. So, you will choose the product which is in the middle.

For example, if you are buying a washing machine, you don't want the very cheapest basic model. You want some features like an eco-wash, maybe a timer.

You also don't want the most expensive model, you really don't need the ability to control it with your watch or sync it to your TV.  You don't need all that nonsense and don't want to pay extra for it. So, you will choose the model in the middle, or deliberate over a choice of models in the middle. By giving you a choice of more than one, another "trick" is being used. Instead of "Do you want to buy it, yes or no?", by giving a choice you have moved to "Which do you want to buy, yes or yes?".

So far, none of what I have said is underhanded, Some people will want to buy the cheapest most basic model, and some people will want to buy the best and most expensive. And the manufacturer will place a product in the middle which has what most people want at a price most people find reasonable.

The trickery comes when you use the ends to set the price of the middle, especially if you do this to move it a very long way. If I were to tell you that a basic pot of wax costs about £15, and the best one costs £25, then you would reasonably guess that the average price is about £20. And you would be right.

If however, I inform you that the top wax, the very best you can get is, £600, £1000, or £2000... then suddenly the middle of the range wax looks like an absolute bargain at only £60 or £100.

Of course, you have to convince people that the most expensive wax is actually worth that amount of money, and this is usually done by exploiting cognitive bias and judgemental heuristics.

Heuristics

Firstly, it's expensive, so it must be good, right? It is so expensive, it must be in a whole other league, and as we don't have any benchmarks on which to judge things by within this league, how else do we judge it other than on price?

But why is it so expensive? Because it contains organic honeysuckle oil and purest white carnauba, and is blended by hand!

It's a fact that if your brain has a question, it demands an answer, and it will be restless until it gets one. But given an answer, it will often accept it even if the answer makes no sense.

Few will stop to ask what white carnauba actually is, but I did. I spoke to two manufacturers, one in the UK and one in California and asked them what the highest grade of carnauba wax was, and both said it was 'Type 1 yellow carnauba', as this purest and food grade. When I asked them what white carnauba was, they said they had no idea. So, there you have it, white carnauba is so rare and exclusive, even experts have never heard of it, so it must be valuable.

While mentioning these experts, they also said they blended their waxes by hand, in big metal buckets.

And then there is the authority heuristic (If you don't know about the Milgram Experiment, you really should). We tend to put more trust in people who we see as an authority, but I can assure you that nobody would see me as much of an authority just because I said, "Trust me, I'm a car detailer". You might, however, trust my authority if your friend told you that I was an expert knew what I was talking about and had been doing this for over 20 years.

Age confers authority, which is why some manufacturers boast that they have been using the same special formula for 80 years, which has been passed down from generation to generation, hinting that this lineage has its roots in some far off country famed for engineering excellence.

And of course, as unlikely as these tall-tails are, there are an exclusive bunch of people saying how these products are the best they have ever used, and well worth the £2000. Oh yes, we are in the age of the brand-ambassador and social influencer. Social proof and consensus are powerful magic.

Keyword Confusion

While this isn't strictly speaking snake oil, there has always been a certain amount of confusion over terminology. Even before the use of words like, "sealant" and "glaze", there was some confusion in the public's mind over the difference between a wax and a polish.

Strictly speaking, within the car industry, a polish is an abrasive which actually polishes by smoothing paintwork. While a wax, adds a shiny layer of wax, which is what creates the shine. The two are not the same thing, unless they are because some products can do both.

If this wasn't confusing enough, when many people think of a polish, they think of French Polishing or furniture polishing, which turns our definition on its head.

This is just one of those quirks of the English language that we have to deal with, and wasn't too much of a problem until we started getting imports from the far East. Because if we are confused about the English language, they sure were. The result was that you were never quite sure what you were going to get in the bottle. Chances are, the bottle of polish is actually a wax, but suddenly, it is possible that you could buy a bottle of wax which is actually a cutting oil.

This could be a problem when buying online, especially because in order to compete in a crowded marketplace, listings are sometimes crammed full of all related keywords. While the major search engines don't fall for these tactics, it still seems to work on the internal search engines of eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, etc.

Old Wives Tales, Home Remedies & Life-Hacks

Speaking of keywords, if you want to get your pages shown on Google, a simple way is to answer the question people type into search engines. Even with AI, unfortunately, the search engines don't know if those answers are actually of any use, and human editors wouldn't know either until they try them. But why should they care if they have adverts on their page and search engines keep sending them traffic?

People love being told what they want to hear. Why buy expensive products for fixing your problem when all you need is baking soda, peanut butter, WD-40 or white vinegar?

WD-40 has a lot of uses, but it won't remove the scratches from your paintwork, nor will peanut butter. What might happen is the oils in these products might hide it for a day or so, but it won't be the fix they promise.

To be fair, baking soda will remove odours, but not as well as something like Shake'n'Vac which has been especially formulated to remove odours and isn't much more expensive. But if your car stinks of cigarettes or dogs, neither are going to do the job even if they can help. It's a similar story with the many uses for white vinegar.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of useless and bad advice on places like Quora, Reddit and WikiHow (the most trusted how-to website on the internet). The infographics then get shared around places like Pinterest and Instagram and turned into video shorts, and spread even further around the web. They then get picked up by ChatGPT which will spread this disinformation when asked, especially when asked, "Write me 1000 advice pages for my car website".

This is why search engines and their AI are currently striving to find authoritative sources. Unfortunately, consensus is one of the metrics they pay attention to, so if bad advice has been spread far and wide for years, I could be facing an uphill battle.

It's also worth remembering that correct advice may not be the best advice. If I ask an expert for a recommendation on a good bottle of wine, if they answer "1923 Chateau Lafite Rothschild", then there is little doubt, that is a good wine. But there are many other good bottles of wine that are more befitting my salary.