Summer is almost here, and in Chicago that means an endless series of excessively loud concerts and festivals. These events are so loud, in fact, that you can hear them thirty or forty floors off the ground. And who funds these wonderful events? Judging by the signage and advertising, it seems like corporate sponsors make it all happen.

When companies plunk down the money to associate their names with concerts and other noisy affairs, they’re probably thinking mainly about the branding value it has for the people who attend the events. But perhaps they should also consider the highly detrimental effect that these same events have on people living or working nearby. If those people see your corporate name associated with something that really pisses them off, you might end up losing more customers from that relatively small group than you gain from the rest of the campaign.

Against my better judgement, I went to Sears on Saturday to pick up a few random things that Amazon doesn’t carry. The store looked like a cheap flea market, with products stacked up all over the place, but that’s not what I’m writing about today. Instead, I want to talk about the excessive number of documents that came along with my receipt.

Besides the receipt itself, I received an invitation to fill out a customer survey, followed by three separate coupons. I understand the purpose and value of each of the documents, but the sheer volume of paper can easily get out of hand. Looking at one of the coupons, the actual discount offer takes up five lines of text. But then they follow it up with more than two dozen lines of disclaimers and restrictions. Is this really the best approach?

As it stands, the coupons and other attachments come off as sloppy and cheap — while showing that the store has no problem wasting tons of paper. When you think about it, they could easily correct this problem without having to change the messages they’re delivering. How? Just print the most important part of the message on the receipt paper, and refer customers to a website, phone number, or in-store signage for the full set of disclaimers and restrictions.

Sure, this approach might lead to a few confused customers here and there. But it’s really no different than presenting a promotion within an ad, and then directing people elsewhere for the full details. Plus, I bet that reducing the amount of paper would make customers pay more attention to the actual promotions, leading to better redemption rates and increased sales.

When you’re shopping in a local store, it’s easy to find the unit price of virtually any item. Most stores print it right on the price tag, e.g. “$0.02 per square foot”. But when you’re shopping online, unit costs are much harder to locate. Sure, dedicated grocers like Peapod have this info, but other sites — including Amazon — don’t seem to provide it.

Given all the metadata that retailers like Amazon collect for a typical product, calculating and displaying the unit cost seems like a trivial task. By doing so, online retailers could probably entice more people to compare online grocery costs with their local store. They could even run a promotion challenging customers to print out a pre-formatted page with the unit costs of popular products, and then bring it with them to the grocery store. Sure, some things will be a better value locally, but it can’t hurt to pick up more sales on the items that are vastly cheaper online.

Just as I was walking out the door of a museum on Saturday, a huge group of school children walked in. There had to be 50-60 of them, plus the inept chaperones. Since when do schools have field trips on the weekend? That mystery aside, I was very glad that I went to the museum exactly when I did, rather than an hour later.

Whenever I have encountered or read about large groups visiting a museum, aquarium, or other attraction, the result is always bad for the regular visitors. The big group is loud and obnoxious, and somehow manages to seep into every inch of the facility within minutes. Normal visitors who are unlucky enough to be there at the same time get a vastly worse experience, yet still pay full price. This clearly isn’t right.

To correct the imbalance, venues that sell big group packages need to post a schedule of these group visits in advance. Let the other patrons decide if they want to be there during that time, rather than being ambushed. I doubt that overall ticket sales would change, but more people would choose to go during non-group times. Sure, these periods would be more crowded than before. However, visitors would be surrounded by their peers, rather than fighting for air within a giant horde of school children.

While passing through one of the Orange Line stations in downtown Chicago, I saw a billboard promoting the state of Montana. More specifically, the ad featured a striking mountain shot, a few words of text, and a web address. The last item caught my eye, with the URL visitmt.com.

The web address is short, which tends to make it easier to remember. But the use of a relatively unfamiliar abbreviation — “mt” for Montana — will probably hurt recall. Ultimately, this makes the resulting short address less effective than a longer one. And what would the longer one be? It seems like visitmontana.com is the obvious choice.

Generally, it’s best to avoid using unfamiliar abbreviations or acronyms in your marketing and products. Unless an abbreviation is very popular, then expecting people to remember the short version reduces the chance that they’ll reach your website or complete the desired task with your product. Returning to the tourism example, this means that unless you’re doing the marketing for NY or LA, you should probably use full names and ditch the abbreviations.

It’s common practice to show a confirmation message once a customer completes a task. But what about when they abandon the task? Normally, no separate message is needed: if nothing changed, there’s little to report. But I think there’s one important exception: starting and then cancelling a high-stakes task.

What do I mean by high-stakes? Perhaps the user began the process for changing an existing airline ticket, selling a share of stock, or ordering an expensive product. If they decide to stop along the way, they’ll want to know where things stand afterwards. This helps the user feel confident and in control. But if pressing the Cancel button just takes them back to the beginning of the process or to another generic page, they’re left in limbo.

For these situations, a better approach is to say something like this: “Your transaction has been cancelled, and no changes were made. To view your existing travel itinerary, click here.” How do you tell if a particular process deserves its own confirmation when the user chooses to cancel? Easy: just think about how important the confirmation or receipt would be if they went through with it. If it’s the sort of thing that a typical customer would always print and save the receipt for, then there’s a good chance they’ll want a clear and direct confirmation message if they have to abandon the transaction, too.

So I’m watching last week’s episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and I get to a scene that looks like an obvious product placement. A character drives up in his shiny Mercedes, and the camera frames the front of the car right around the logo. However, the logo is gone: the familiar three-pointed star has either been yanked off the car, or removed in post-production.

Why would they do that? I have no idea. Maybe Mercedes abruptly cancelled their sponsorship. Or perhaps they were never a sponsor at all, and another sponsor had some issue with the Mercedes logo. Either way, I’ll be on the lookout for more situations where product names and logos are removed from TV programming. Aside from shows like Lost where generic goods are part of the story (i.e. Dharma’s private label products), I’m curious how many shows go out of their way to keep brand names out of the picture.

Through pure luck, I recently discovered that one of our competitors is operating more than one website for essentially the same product of theirs. The positioning of the two websites is slightly different, but the product is the same. In fact, they even use a very similar name for the second “company”, which is little more than a front they created for marketing reasons.

I know that consumer product companies have done this for years. To better capture market share, they’ll regularly create two or three brands that are essentially the same product. As the logic goes, the more shelf space they take up, the more likely consumers are to pick up an item from their extended product family.

But there’s one big difference between these two scenarios. In the case of consumer product makers, the company info on the package or ad or website clearly indicates who the parent company is. A curious buyer can easily tell who makes what. But in the case of our competitor, they’ve gone to great lengths to obscure the common ownership. There’s no actual corporation listed in the contact page of the second website, it’s using a private domain name registration, and the names of their key people are nowhere to be found.

To me, this is bordering on fraud, and it’s probably against the guidelines of third parties like the Better Business Bureau too. It’s also a warning sign to potential customers: here’s a company that wants you to pay thousands of dollars for their products — through an e-commerce site, in fact. Yet they’re afraid to let you know their actual company name, lest you figure out that they sell the product under other brand names, too. This seems like a basic violation of the customer’s trust and an insult to their intelligence. I can only hope the market feels the same way.