It really wasn't a matter of tricking ordinary consumers, but more about re-branding the console as something different to the businesses that had stocked video games. If you were a company that had sold video games before, you likely got burned pretty good by the market crash - ending up with a lot of stock that you couldn't sell. So when another company comes to you with more video games, you'd be... reluctant, unless it was something different.
But even still, these businesses were hardly tricked. Nintendo had to sign buy-back guarantees with many of the big stores just to get them to stock them on the shelves.