As a rule, if the vast majority of your customers need to accomplish a certain task with your product, they shouldn’t have to use anything labeled as an “advanced” feature when doing so. In other words, popular tasks should be streamlined and easy to complete, reserving the “advanced” or custom features for customers who have more specific and unusual requirements. This seems like an obvious approach, but you’d be surprised at how often a software vendor expects you to jump through insane hoops to enable “advanced” features and customizations, just to get the darn thing working in the most basic capacity. Needless to say, this makes things a lot harder on customers. And it certainly can’t be good for the vendor’s margins. After all, if your implementation procedures are overly complex, you’ll be spending a lot more on tech support starting at the moment a customer signs up.

In downtown Chicago, buildings spend some serious money on holiday decorations. My apartment building has a big Christmas tree in the lobby, but it’s nothing compared to what I’ve seen in the office buildings nearby. Those places put up trees that must be 15 or 20 feet high, along with wreaths the size of a small car. It’s like an arms race for holiday cheer.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to see the buildings that take a slightly different approach. I still remember the display that one oddball building used last year. Along with the usual tree, they installed a diorama featuring a life-sized polar bear and some sort of leopard or bobcat. It was funny, whimsical, and more than a little bit bizarre. And despite all the giant trees I saw elsewhere, the diorama building was the most memorable.

What’s the takeaway here? If everyone else is competing to be the biggest, loudest, or brightest, you can win mindshare by being different. Sure, you’ll still need to do something exceptional to achieve a lasting benefit. But competing on a unique dimension or attribute may be a lot cheaper and more effective than an arms race with the other guys. Meanwhile, back in the world of office Christmas trees, I’m quite curious what the polar bear diorama folks will cook up this year.

While dining out last weekend, I noticed something that I’ve probably seen dozens of times before, but never really thought about. Namely, some restaurants purposely design their menus to stand up on the table, rather than laying them flat. In my case, this treatment was reserved for the dessert menu. The server brought it out with an easel, and left it facing us on the table.

I wonder how much math is behind this approach. Do stand-up menus only work for certain types of food and drink? Are they more effective for desserts versus appetizers and beverages? I have no idea. But even after recognizing that the dessert menu easel was probably a clever marketing trick — that I was getting the silent equivalent of a hard sell — I ordered a dessert anyway.

If I had to guess, the stand-up menu outperforms its regular counterpart — but only when used in moderation. Overdo it, and it loses its novelty and the ability to focus the customer on what you’re offering. If my theory is correct, then putting every menu on an easel or other standing display is no better than just laying them on the table the usual way. But pick one course to display in stand-up form and keep the other menus the same, and sales of the easel-bound items should increase considerably.

When a box weighs a lot, it typically comes with some type of text or graphic to warn you about its weight. For instance, the side of the box might say “Heavy – use caution when lifting”, or display a picture of two stick figures lifting the box together. Do these warnings work? I’m sure they’re better than nothing. But there’s an easy way to make them even more effective.

In short, if the box is heavy enough to justify a warning on the side, then tell people how much it weighs, too. This doesn’t have to be exact. For example, you could say “This box weighs 50-75 pounds” or “Weight: At least 50 pounds”. By including real, tangible numbers in the messaging, I bet a lot more people would actually pay attention to the warnings.

It’s been years since I owned a car, and I couldn’t be happier about it. The endless saga of buying, cleaning and repairing the car really eats away at you — not to mention accidents, vandalism, and other stuff that’s beyond your control. I certainly have less stress living a car-free lifestyle in the city, and less stress is generally considered to be good for your health. Driving is also quite dangerous statistically, meaning that those who drive to work are probably more likely to die in an accident versus those who walk or take public transit.

This makes me wonder: do certain possessions actually change your life expectancy? If I had to guess, the answer is a resounding “Yes”. In particular, people who eliminate high-stress, high-maintenance products from their lives are probably happier and healthier than average, while avoiding high-risk behaviors like driving on highways during rush hour. It’s not limited to cars, either. For instance, I bet people who buy a high-rise condo are less stressed out and probably live longer than those who are enslaved to caring for their house, yard, deck, garage… well, you get the idea.

Do I have any hard evidence for this? Nope. But I’d love to see someone run a study showing what the relationships actually look like. If people could see how certain possessions are actually taking away years from their life, I bet they’d think twice about some of their purchase decisions.

In a large residential or office building, it’s not uncommon for the building management to sign exclusive deals with vendors. For instance, there may only be one cable or satellite TV company that has the right to provide service to the apartments or offices inside a given building.

Whether this is good or bad for consumers is a topic for another post. I’m actually more interested in the impact these exclusive deals have on advertising and marketing. In particular, how much advertising money is wasted on customers who can’t possibly buy the service, due to exclusive deals that are beyond their control?

This problem isn’t limited to telecommunications services, either. A doctor may be advertising to people who use an insurance plan that they don’t accept. A restaurant might send menus to people who live outside their delivery area. The list goes on and on.

In short, even with a compelling message and great creative, virtually every ad campaign is going to waste some number of impressions on people who can’t buy the product — no matter how much they might want to. You can reduce the magnitude of the problem with tighter targeting, but it will never go away entirely. That’s OK, though. Just keep these unreachable customers in mind when you look at your conversion rates and similar metrics. Otherwise, you may be blaming a low conversion rate on your message and offer, when the real culprit is an audience that simply can’t buy anything from you due to other factors.

Whenever I try a new brand of wine, I pay attention to the type of cork they use. I’m certainly no wine expert, so my interest in the cork is purely a functional one. In particular, synthetic corks are a pain to get a corkscrew into, and can be nearly impossible to remove from the bottle. Sure, natural corks may crumble a bit, but they’re certainly better than the manufactured alternative.

If I had to guess, most wine buyers do prefer natural corks. However, I’ve never seen a wine bottle that tells you which type of cork is included. And since most of the bottles I see in the store have foil or another wrapping over the top, there’s no way to tell what you’re getting.

This seems like an obvious oversight on the marketing side of things. If many consumers prefer natural corks, and your wine brand uses them, then you should advertise that right on the label. For those people trying to avoid synthetic corks — and I bet there are a lot of us — the extra information will increase the chance they pick your wine over the others. And for consumers who don’t care either way, they’ll just ignore the details about the cork, without any impact on your sales to that group.

If I ran a vineyard that used natural corks, I’d order up a bunch of stickers that show a picture of the cork along with some text like “We use natural corks”. Slap those stickers onto a few cases in select markets, and watch what happens. Once the sales results are in, I suspect that you’d quickly find it worthwhile to include cork info on the label of every wine you sell.

The weather is getting colder, which means that everyday tasks — like going to the grocery store — will soon become a lot more challenging. Armed with vivid memories of trudging through the snow last year with shopping bags in tow, my wife and I decided to stock up on food before it gets really chilly outside. So, we’ve been purchasing a lot of non-perishable items at once, which has elicited some interesting reactions from people who work at the store.

In general, retail staff are puzzled about why we would want to buy so much stuff at once. Even after explaining that winter is coming soon and we live almost a mile from the store and we don’t have a car, I still have to spell out the rationale for our behavior. Namely, it’s a lot easier to stock up on food while the weather is mild, so you’re never forced to walk to the store when the weather is seriously crappy. Even after getting the full explanation, I’m sure they still think we’re weird. After all, I’ve never seen anybody else in the store buying such large quantities of food.

There’s probably a larger social construct at work here. In general, Americans are pretty bad at saving money, whether it’s keeping extra cash on hand for emergencies, or saving up for a large purchase or retirement. As a culture, we tend to focus on our needs right now, at the expense of planning for the future. Granted, there’s no huge commitment involved in buying a few months’ worth of food at once. You’d be spending that money over the next few months anyway, so you just need to allocate the time and effort to buy the food beforehand. Yet almost nobody does it.

This whole discussion makes me wonder: if we somehow educated people on the benefits of planning ahead for non-financial matters — like buying food before the winter — would they make smarter decisions about their financial futures as well?

One of the things I love about my local CVS is how open and airy the store feels. If I recall correctly, it’s part of the group of newer CVS stores that have lower aisle heights, brighter navigational signage, and generally less clutter than the old stores. Unfortunately, all of that changed when the holiday decorations went up a few days ago.

The low and airy aisles are now topped off and crammed with cheesy holiday signs and cheap gift ideas. The walls are covered with yet more holiday products. In all, the place looks just like your typical Walgreen’s or an older CVS, with the products from late-night infomercials seemingly dominating the merchandising strategy.

What went wrong? I’m guessing that CVS sends the same holiday decoration kit, and imposes the same merchandising plan, on all their stores — without regard for the differing store designs across the country. As a result, the generic holiday decorations overwhelm the store design in the newer and cleaner locations. That’s a shame, since it takes away the aesthetic and shopping enhancements that seemingly make the newer stores more enticing the shoppers. Hopefully someone from CVS will eventually take notice, and try something besides a one-size-fits-all approach in the future.

Say you walk into a restaurant and ask for a table. If you have a medium or large party, perhaps four people or more, there’s a good chance they’ll ask you a simple question: “Is your entire party here?” Answer “Yes”, and they’ll seat you promptly. Answer “No”, and they’ll instruct you to wait around and check back with them once everyone in your group has arrived.

It makes perfect sense why restaurants do this. The last thing they want is to seat a few people, and have them sit around for 15 or 30 or 45 minutes waiting for the others to arrive. Such a group would be consuming a scarce resource — table space — without contributing much in revenue during that time. Granted, they might order a few drinks or an appetizer, but I guess it’s not enough to make up for the regular, non-delayed party whose table they’d be taking up.

But there’s one kink in this approach: the math only works when the restaurant is nearly full. If there are plenty of tables to spare, why relegate the incomplete parties to a waiting area? Wouldn’t it be better to just seat them in a table where they can get settled and order a few things? The answer seems obvious to me.

If you think about it, virtually every restaurant has certain days and times when business is slow. During those times, asking “Is your entire party here?” is just silly. Try restricting the full-party question to busy periods only, and I bet customers will use that extra table time to spend more money.