While shopping for a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife, I started off in a nearby candy store that carries quite a selection of chocolate. Surely, I figured, they’d have a few boxes of dark chocolate, which she prefers to milk chocolate or (gasp) white chocolate. Well, I canvassed the whole store, and there was only one package of dark, amidst literally dozens of types of milk chocolate. It was like the old joke about Ford: you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black. Here, you could choose any size and assortment of chocolates, as long as you like the milk chocolate variety.

I left empty handed, and tried a different store down the street. They didn’t have any dark chocolate packages either, but they helped me assemble a custom box from the dozens of dark chocolate pieces in the display case. I was quite pleased with this second store, and rather disappointed in the first one. The question comes down to this: what good is a massive assortment of products when they’re all basically the same thing?

I don’t care if something like 80% of customers want milk chocolate. If you have the shelf space to carry 100 different kinds of milk chocolate, it makes sense to hedge your bets and swap out a few slots for a couple of dark chocolate and even white chocolate options. The milk chocolate majority will still have plenty to choose from, and you can expand your customer base to include those who want other kinds of chocolate. The same holds for any business: if your selection is large but not very diverse, try swapping out some of those products for ones that will appeal to new groups of customers. The results might surprise you.

After a particularly harsh snowfall, I read an article that talked about the difficulties of clearing sidewalks. Apparently, there are many situations where private businesses, rather than the city, are responsible for shoveling the snow away. But when a storefront is empty or an unused lot is neglected, the snow can pile up and create quite a challenge for pedestrians.

This made me wonder: why not let other firms pay for the snow clearing on those sidewalks? In exchange, they could put up signage to advertise their brand. Basically, it would be like the “Adopt a Highway” program that some states use to pay for litter control: each sponsor gets their own sign on the side of the road.

But why stop at snow clearing? You could take virtually any underfunded public service, and turn it into an alternative media buy for savvy advertisers. Sherwin-Williams could sponsor bridge refinishing projects. Windex could underwrite a program to repair and maintain the windows in vacant buildings. The potential pairings go on and on. In an economic climate where marketers are seeking more value for their money and cities are struggling to find new revenue streams, this type of creative thinking seems like a natural fit.

While I was researching a fairly mundane household product, I came across the manufacturer’s website. The site was nicely done, aside from a bit too much Flash, and I quickly reached the Find a Store page. I noticed that their products were carried by Amazon, so I went to Amazon to check it out.

Unfortunately, Amazon itself only carried a small and random selection of the larger product line. If you wanted the rest, you had to get them from the goofy Amazon partners who charge hefty shipping fees. I didn’t buy anything, and the experience left me a little bit confused. If the brand lists Amazon as a recommended place to get their products, shouldn’t Amazon carry the majority of those products?

From Amazon’s perspective, they’re probably applying the same rules as for any other products. Perhaps the items weren’t selling, so they replaced them with different ones from another manufacturer. In cases like this, the onus is really on the manufacturer to keep tabs on the stores they list as “recommended” or “authorized” retailers. Ideally, the brand would set up a periodic schedule to check up on their retail partners, e.g. once a month. They would make sure the right products are actually being offered for sale, with proper images and descriptions.

It might not be practical to do this sort of audit for many different sellers, but it should be worthwhile to run through the process for your top two or three retailers. Otherwise, you may see unexplained drops in sales due to problems on the retail side of things, as those retailers take the traffic you send them and push someone else’s products instead.

Last weekend, I tried to use a gift card at a local Italian restaurant. When I gave it to the waiter, he was rather puzzled, despite the card bearing the exact name of the restaurant on the front. Then, he asked me if there was enough money on the card to cover the meal, as if I was trying to trick them with it. Finally, he took the gift card away with the bill, and I assumed the issue was resolved.

I was wrong. A different waiter came back with our bill and the gift card. He explained that they could take the gift card to pay for the meal, but I had to pay the tip separately with cash or a credit card. I wasn’t in the mood to argue over it, so I complied with their idiotic policy. Later, I checked the fine print on the back of the card, and there was absolutely nothing about not being able to use the card for tip. So this policy wasn’t just stupid, but it was undocumented as well. Nice job, guys.

The right way to handle this is quite obvious. If you have special terms or restrictions regarding your coupons and gift cards, you need to make those clear right on the document or card itself. Otherwise, people will assume that your coupon or gift card works like everyone else’s, and that can lead to some seriously unhappy customers when it’s time to pay the bill.

Whether you’re designing a website, writing a press release, or coming up with text to appear on a digital signage screen, common sense dictates that you should use the same words that your audience does. Yet I continue to see digital signage that’s full of obscure terms. Have you ever asked your spouse to “turn up the HVAC”? I don’t think so — regular humans say “turn up the heat” or “turn down the air conditioning”. In short, if you fail to speak the same language as your audience, they may have trouble understanding the message or might just ignore it entirely.

When in doubt, read the message out loud, and get rid of any lesser-known words and acronyms. The goal is to achieve near-100% comprehension of your messaging, and that means using the same vocabulary as your viewers. Ideally, the digital signage system you select should make it easy to change messages without having to create new content from scratch. My company’s EasyStart product does just that, providing a simple, easy and affordable digital signage solution for smaller projects. While EasyStart can’t write the content for you, it certainly makes the task of updating and refining your messages a lot easier.

People naturally gravitate towards tasks that are easy and avoid ones that are hard. Accordingly, the odds that you’ll make the necessary improvements to your digital signage content are much greater when you have technology that allows for easy and hassle-free updates. Otherwise, you may become overly committed to a piece of content that’s clearly not optimal, and you’ll resist changing it simply because the process is a pain.