Over the past year or so, it’s been interesting to watch the methods that my local CVS has chosen to market their in-store coupon dispensing kiosk. Here’s what they’ve tried:

– Printed signage around the kiosk
– Light-up signage above the kiosk
– Signage on the floor in the shape of footprints, leading from the entry door to the kiosk

Despite all this, I’ve never seen anyone else use the kiosk besides me. This makes me think that customers aren’t noticing the messaging, or assume it’s not meant for them.

When you’re trying to draw attention to an in-store service, and putting up signage and other beacons around it doesn’t help, it’s probably time to look at conveying the message through other mediums that customers already pay attention to. For instance, you could promote the kiosk on store receipts, in the weekly flyer, or on the website. In each case, you should emphasize the benefits of using it, and provide a picture of what the device looks like so customers recognize it when they’re in the store. Otherwise, continuing to add bigger and brighter signage around the device just gets annoying, and does little to convince customers of why they should bother to pay attention to it at all.

I like my coffee strong, so I’ve always purchased dark roast beans or grounds. However, it amazes me to see how many light and medium roasts are available at retail. Since these cost just about the same per ounce as the dark stuff, why don’t people just buy dark roast and use fewer scoops? This would seem to achieve the same result as buying a light roast, with the benefit of being a lot cheaper per cup of coffee that you’re brewing.

Perhaps people who like lighter coffee think that dark roasts are for type A personalities or hardcore coffee addicts, so they don’t even consider dark roast as an option. Or maybe the coffee industry has achieved something similar to the “rinse, lather, repeat” messaging that helped shampoo companies increase their sales over the years. In other words, the directive to use one scoop of coffee per cup of water is so powerful that people don’t even consider the option of buying a stronger coffee and reducing the amount they use.

Whatever the cause, the ability of marketers to target different types of coffee to different groups of consumers is an impressive example of product positioning at work. As for me, I switched a while ago from french roast to espresso roast, and I’m using even fewer scoops per pot. I guess that puts me in the tiny subset of coffee drinkers who even think about the math behind it, while everyone else continues to buy the type of coffee that marketers tell them to. That’s a little sad, but certainly attests to the influence that marketing can have on people’s purchasing choices.

For some odd reason, I found myself reading the “Cooking Guide” label on my microwave oven. Here’s what appears in the list of foods that a few clever minds think you might want to cook:

– Rice
– Fresh vegetables
– Frozen vegetables
– Canned vegetables
– Bacon

Rice, vegetables and… bacon? Lately, bacon seems to be the hottest food trend around. But my microwave is almost ten years old, so the manufacturer surely couldn’t have anticipated the sudden surge in bacon’s popularity over the last decade. Unless they had a time machine, how did they know that bacon would be such a popular microwave meal?

Perhaps the list was organized to contain popular, healthy items first, and they threw in bacon as a guilty pleasure at the end. Maybe all of these items are frequently cooked at the wrong power and duration. Or perhaps they did a survey of customers and asked them which foods they cook most often, so it’s entirely a popularity contest. Either way, I find the selection of microwave-friendly foods to be quite interesting, and I’d love to see the criteria that appliance vendors use when deciding which foods earn the scarce space on their products.

Virtually every grocery store flyer includes the name, picture and price for each advertised product. Assuming you have the room and the inclination, does increasing the level of detail help to drive more sales of these products? Here are some of the things you might include in the flyer when pursuing such an approach:

– A map of where each of the featured products can be found in the local store
– A copy of the nutrition facts panel that you’d find on the product package
– A short list of similar products in the store that are healthier, cheaper, or otherwise a bit different than the advertised item

There’s no simple answer to this question. Consider the following scenario: just the other day, I had a tough time locating a product I saw in the store flyer. But once I found it, I ended up rejecting it because the nutritional content was rather questionable. If I knew the location ahead of time, I would have found the product right away. But if I had already seen the nutritional info, I would never have bothered looking for it in the first place.

In all, giving customers access to relevant details early in the decision process will tend to increase the conversion rate. However, you don’t want to intimidate them with too much, too soon. With this in mind, I’d be very curious to see the results of a split test between a classic store flyer that focuses on the product name, picture and price, versus a more detail-heavy flyer that includes some of the extra data points I described above.

Phone and cable companies love to advertise ultra-low prices, only to raise rates considerably after the first 6 months or so. Apparently, some consumers are starting to catch on to these tricks, because I saw an AT&T commercial the other day that proclaimed their prices are “guaranteed for 12 months”.

It’s nice that AT&T is acknowledging the issue and trying to beat the cable providers, many of whom probably limit their promo pricing to the initial 6 months of service. But there’s a downside to this approach: when you focus on how long prices are good for, and it’s not a very long time at all, you’re encouraging customers to think about what happens after the initial promo period. In most cases, that means calling attention to price increases that are going to hit right afterwards.

In a perfect world, customers would be guaranteed fixed pricing for as long as their contract lasts. (Indeed, many cell phone contracts let you cancel without penalty if the carrier changes the pricing.) But if you aren’t willing to commit to consistent pricing for a reasonable period of time, like keeping prices the same for the first 24 months or limiting increases to 5% per year, it’s probably better not to focus on that issue in your advertising. The typical consumer probably keeps their phone service a lot longer than 6-12 months. Thus, promising them that rates won’t change for a year doesn’t sound like a particularly great deal to me.

There are several elevator screens that I see on a regular basis, and these screens are mainly used to show upcoming meeting schedules, pictures from the local area, and such. Somewhere along the way, the people who control the content decided to include a weather forecast on there. However, instead of using a modern approach where the weather info is pulled down live, they’re just taking a snapshot of the forecast once or twice a week, and then leaving the info up there for days.

It’s not hard to see the problem here. If you put up the week’s weather forecast on Monday, things may look a whole lot different by Thursday or Friday. In fact, the last time I saw the screen, it showed that the current day’s weather was about 15 degrees different than the actual temperature.

Granted, I’m guessing that these particular digital signs are rather old and lack any sort of real-time or even periodic connection to the web. But in cases like this, does putting up a weather forecast really add value for the viewer? Probably not. People are accustomed to seeing real-time data for weather, news and sports. So if you don’t have any way to update this info at least once a day, you should just leave it out of your content strategy. You can still show news-style messaging, like a weekly featured story or entertainment update. But don’t tease viewers with content they expect to be up-to-date when it’s likely to be stale by the time they see it.

While renewing a subscription for an online service, I came across a strange paradox. The service was configured for automatic renewal, but the provider sent an email saying that auto-renewal was turned off. Well, I checked the account and it showed that the feature was turned on and the credit card on file was correct. I did some more digging, and finally located the problem: apparently, there’s a separate screen where you have to manually associate the credit card with each service that you’re subscribed to. If you skip this step, the auto-renewal fails.

Why the website doesn’t do this automatically is beyond me. Clearly, if the customer entered a credit card number for the initial purchase and selected the auto-renewal option, they expect you to charge that same card every month, year, or whatever the interval may be. Requiring people to go through another hidden step to actually make the feature work is just plain dumb, and probably leads to a lot of failed renewals and other problems.

The solution is obvious: when a customer chooses auto-renewal and enters a credit card, you should use that credit card to process the renewal at the appropriate time. Don’t make people go through extra steps — whether during the initial purchase or at renewal time — to get things working properly. By removing needless friction from the process, you’ll reduce the headaches for your customers, while ensuring that revenues continue to flow properly from your recurring orders.

Way back when, the prices for cell phone service varied a lot from state to state. If I recall correctly, Sprint was the first carrier to introduce nationwide pricing, which eventually caught on with all the cell phone providers. Today, you’d probably be hard pressed to find much difference between the calling plans offered from one state to another.

Sure, there is still a bewildering array of calling plans and bundles, even if you’re focusing on a single carrier. But these options seem to be quite consistent across the country. With this in mind, why do the cell phone companies still insist that you enter your zipcode before you can view plans and pricing? This is a needless roadblock in the evaluation and purchasing process.

A better approach is to get rid of the “Enter your zipcode” screens, and just show people the plans that are the same nationwide. If you happen to offer some regional specials or certain plans don’t exist in selected areas, then provide secondary options to let interested customers view more details. By making it easier for people to get a ballpark idea of what’s available, you’ll build trust early in the relationship, and increase the likelihood that your prospects will become paying customers.

I saw a store flyer the other day that featured a few products from a brand called “Freshlike”. Apparently, it’s a brand of frozen vegetables that are supposed to taste just like fresh ones. However, that’s definitely not what I associated with the product name when I first noticed it. Instead, I thought of things like:

– Sort of fresh
– Not quite fresh
– Seems fresh, but really isn’t

The problem here is including the word “like” in the name. To most people, “like” sends the message that two things are similar but not identical. When trying to say that food is fresh, you don’t want to leave any doubt in the customer’s mind about it. If you invite people to consider how fresh something is, and then use words that convey that it’s not really fresh, you’re going to scare a lot of potential buyers away.

What’s the solution here? Pick your comparisons and phrasings wisely, and be careful of statements that may have negative connotations from the customer’s point of view.

During a recent trip, I stayed on what was supposed to be the 31st floor of a hotel. However, as I quickly found out, floor 31 doesn’t necessarily mean you’re 31 floors off the ground. To be fair, many buildings skip the 13th floor, so it’s no surprise if the actual floor varies a bit from how it’s numbered. But in my case, the 31st floor was actually closer to floor 25, with a seemingly random series of floors skipped along the way.

My hotel experience was great overall, but I do feel a bit sour about the whole floor numbering situation. When you book a room on the 31st floor, you expect it to be about 30 or 31 stories off the ground. Is floor 25 all that different? Probably not. But what if my reservation was for floor 50, and the hotel skipped 20 floors along the way, making the actual height closer to floor 30? That’s certainly a big disconnect, and I think most people would feel cheated in that scenario.

What’s the solution? Provide better disclosure of actual floor locations when a lot of floors are missing from a given building. Whether it’s a hotel, condo, or office space, skipping anything more than one or two floors could cause problems once customers see that the actual location isn’t as advertised.

In these situations, the best approach is to provide some sort of footnote in your advertising, reservation form, etc. to explain which floor numbers have been skipped and where the actual unit is located relative to the ground level. Sure, a few people might get turned off by this knowledge. But those are precisely the people who would be even more angry if they arrived at the property and found that the location and view weren’t quite what they expected.