If you’ve visited any online store this season, you’ve probably seen prominent areas for “Gifts under $50” and similar budget-driven sections. Since the web lets retailers organize the same products in many different ways, it’s a no-brainer to help people shop based on their budget. But could the same approach work for retailers with physical stores?

Unlike online stores, traditional retail locations can’t put the same physical item in more than one place. Well, they could, but they’d have to split up the display items and the inventory they keep on the sales floor. And that’s not very practical.

Here’s a hybrid approach to consider. Make the “Under $50” table the primary location for items that mainly appeal to budget-conscious shoppers. Leave everything else — even if it costs less than $50 — in its normal location in the store. Then, put up some prominent signage in the “Under $50” area that tells customers all the other items available in that price range, and where they can find those items in the store.

While this strategy isn’t quite as elegant as merchandising on the web, it’s better than just hiding those items in relative obscurity elsewhere on your sales floor.

In most parts of the country, temperatures tend to be on the colder side during the peak of holiday shopping. And if what I saw last weekend was any indication, highs in the mid-20s won’t do much to deter people from getting their shopping done. Yet besides turning on the heat, most stores aren’t doing enough to thank people for braving the cold and coming through their doors.

I’m not talking about discounts or coupons here. Rather, I’m referring to simple things like having hot coffee or light snacks available for weary shoppers during the winter. Sure, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s always have coffee on hand, but they’re also interested in getting you to buy that same coffee on the next aisle. For non-grocery retailers, the trick is to show that something like hot coffee translates to longer shopping trips and more sales.

Wouldn’t this be hard to prove? Not really. Just set up a split test where half of the test stores have hot coffee available, and the other half don’t offer anything of the sort. And make sure the entire test group is evenly matched, e.g. every store is in a northern state if you believe that cold weather is a key factor. Though I can’t speak for any actual data, my guess is that a simple and cheap enhancement like free coffee in the winter would pay for itself many times over.

I’ve often heard that giving shoppers too much structure can reduce impulse buys. True or not, the idea is that if people know exactly where to find what they want, they’ll be less likely to randomly encounter other things to buy. And judging by how haphazardly some stores are organized during the holidays, I have to wonder if the lack of logical merchandising is actually a planned event.

Let’s assume that a store purposely puts the most sought-after items in the back, or on an upper floor. Customers who come in looking for those items will therefore have to walk past a lot of other things on their way to the desired products. Given the philosophy I mentioned above, perhaps this is a smart approach. But there’s often one thing missing: a suitable traffic flow that lets customers see the impulse items along the way.

Thinking about one store in particular, customers would stream in the door and then get stuck in the middle. If they tried to go around the sides, they would run into a snaking checkout line that had overflowed from the usual location. The end result was a slow and laborious movement through the aisles, without much opportunity to see and experience those coveted impulse buys.

For any retailer that wants to expose customers to new products, the takeaway is rather obvious. People aren’t going to buy an item if they can’t see and get to that item. So whether you tackle this problem with directional signage or even roping off certain areas, make sure that customers have a reasonably open path to walk through the key areas of your store.

I’ve been getting a lot more email spam lately, and almost all of it is holiday themed. While this obviously isn’t a scientific sample, I have to wonder if spammers do in fact step up their efforts during the holiday season. This behavior would make sense, as people are out shopping for bargains and may be feeling more charitable, too. Taken together, these factors might make them more likely to fall for bargain-priced product scams and fraudulent requests for charitable assistance.

To help combat these clever spammers, I would like to see a coordinated effort among online retailers and other popular websites to help remind consumers about the dangers of opening and responding to spam. Sure, you can find those warnings on sites that focus on security, but they’re generally absent from mainstream web properties.

Would the warnings scare customers a bit? Perhaps. But if a few big sites agreed to promote the same message, it would quickly become a trusted advisory and maybe even get people to take action. In the case of spam, that means deleting those spam emails immediately. On the balance, this would mean less monetary fraud, identity theft, and other bad things that nobody wants to fall victim to — especially in what should be the most festive time of the year.

While walking past a hotel on Sunday, I noticed a very odd setup at one of their entrances. This particular entrance was closed, and there was a roped-off area in front of the doors. To any logical person, the barricade made it pretty clear that you had to use another entrance. But despite this, there was a big sign on the doors which bluntly said “These doors aren’t open.” Why, I wondered, did they have to repeat such an obvious fact?

Perhaps without the sign, some people still tried to get under the ropes and go into the hotel that way. Even if only 1% of guests couldn’t take the hint and tried to enter through those doors, the resulting confusion may have caused a lot of hassle for the hotel staff. So, they put up a seemingly redundant sign to help that small group of people understand the situation.

Is this approach redundant? Yes. But is it overkill? That depends on whether the sign or other messaging helps encourage the desired behavior. In cases like I described above, the undesired behavior may be quite costly for the venue or the customer. If a simple modification can cut down on those incidents, then a little bit of redundancy is a small price to pay for making everyone better off.

Maybe it’s just the shows I watch, but it seems like every prime-time slot is filled with those new Sprint commercials. You know, the ones where the CEO walks along the street and tells you why Sprint’s service and pricing are so great. Something always bothered me about this campaign, but I couldn’t put a finger on it. Until now, that is.

The way I see it, Sprint is trying to take an otherwise unremarkable personality and shoehorn it into their marketing and product positioning. This isn’t a knock on their new CEO — maybe he’s a great leader and innovator. Maybe he writes a great blog and interacts well with the media. But as far as the public immediately relating to him and admiring him in a TV commercial, I don’t see the connection.

In contrast, Verizon has gotten incredible mileage from their fictional “Can you hear me now?” guy. He’s presumably just a well-chosen actor who embodies their commitment to reliable service. At no point did they try to force their CEO or any other executive into this role when there wasn’t an obvious fit.

Looking outside the wireless market, companies that have well-known CEOs (such as Apple) almost never make them the centerpiece of the ad campaign. The product, either by itself or embodied by a tightly-defined yet fictional character, is the core of the message.

So if you ever feel inclined to make your CEO the key spokesperson in your marketing campaign, think about the sort of club you’ll be joining. Most of the time, it’s better to re-focus your message on the product itself and why customers would want it. Although the people behind the product are important, I’m pretty sure your CEO isn’t included with every unit you ship.

Every few months, I get a flyer in the mail that advertises a new store opening. Typically, these are from major supermarket or pharmacy retailers. To some extent, these mailings are spam, since they’re addressed to “Current Resident”. However, the right address is on there, so they clearly know where the recipient lives. Why, then, do they insist on sending these to people who live nowhere near the new store?

In the most recent example, I got a grand opening flyer for a store that is at least a 30 minute walk from my apartment. Even if you took the train, you’d be hard pressed to get there in less than 30 minutes. Plus, there are several closer locations of the exact same store. Since the coupons in the mailer were only valid at the far-flung location, it’s a totally useless promotion for me and for the retailer.

A simple rule of thumb can prevent all this wasted effort. When sending out flyers and coupons, be sure that the recipient’s closest store is reflected in the messaging. And if you’re mailing grand opening notices, don’t bother to include customers who live much closer to an existing store in your chain. There’s simply no reason why they should be asked to travel further when they’re already shopping at the most convenient location for their needs.

A few weeks ago, I received a coupon in the mail for a restaurant that I haven’t been to in years. It was a pretty decent offer, so I kept it around in case I decided to go there. But after looking at the expiration date, I noticed that it expires in mid-December, which is not even two months after I received it. Since I don’t plan to eat there in the next couple of weeks, the coupon will shortly end up in the trash.

I can certainly understand why the coupon might not be valid during the peak times around Christmas and New Year’s. But what about January, when people have returned home and restaurants are probably a lot slower? This would be an ideal time to get local customers back in the door with an enticing offer. Yet unless I somehow receive another coupon that’s valid for that period, the restaurant is missing an opportunity here.

There are several ways to correct this. First, they could just make the coupon valid for a longer period, say November 15 – January 31, but have exclusions for the busiest holiday dates during that span. Second, they could keep the original expiration date, but let the recipient go online to request another coupon if they know they can’t use the first one in time.

Either way, encouraging greater coupon redemption will drive up sales, while also providing more accurate data on the effectiveness of the direct mail coupons. Otherwise, the results may be compromised because customers who wanted to use the coupon simply couldn’t do so in time — and an otherwise successful campaign could be declared a bust.