Last night, I watched the season premier of Heroes. Sprint is one of the corporate sponsors, and they’ve paid for some product placements in the show itself. But at one point, they crossed the line into the ridiculous. While walking around in a remote part of Africa, one character asked another if he could use his cell phone. The second character said there was no service, and exclaimed that he “should have gotten Sprint”.

I find this to be exceedingly lame. It’s no secret that Sprint has horrible customer service and has been losing subscribers like crazy. They’re certainly not known for their coverage in distant places. In other words, Sprint bought a product placement that directly contradicts the popular perception of the brand. And since they don’t provide any evidence to support their claims, Sprint shines an even greater spotlight on the faults within their product.

Product placements can be an effective part of a multi-faceted marketing campaign, especially when they show off new or interesting aspects of a product, or reinforce what people may already be inclined to believe. But if you’re using them to reverse how people feel about the product, you’d better make sure the product placement scenario includes some serious evidence to back up what you’re saying.

Most car commercials contain footage of the car driving around in nice scenery. Recently, I noticed that the scenery seems to vary based on the geographic area where you’re watching the ad. This should come as no surprise — after all, winter driving scenes don’t make much sense in Florida. But I think there’s more to it than that. Specifically, I believe that some car companies put an aspirational spin on the geography of their ads.

Here’s an example: I live in downtown Chicago, which is one of the largest central business districts in the US. However, only a small percentage of Chicago’s total population actually lives in downtown, with the rest spread out across a seemingly endless number of suburbs. Despite this fact, many of the car commercials depict scenes from downtown, without even a glance of suburban scenes.

I believe this approach reflects a focus on aspiration. Sure, people might live in the suburbs, but they associate driving past downtown landmarks with leisure or vacation time. Given the choice of cruising around downtown with their friends or being stuck on the highway in a morning commute, it’s no secret which one they’d choose.

Long story short, the commercials depict customers using the product in an ideal place and for their ideal activities, even though this may only account for 5% of how it’s really used. And by helping people picture themselves in those optimal conditions, the commercials increase the chance that people will buy. Is this deceptive? Not really. But I would probably recommend avoiding those city scenes once the viewers are more than a few hours from downtown.

Lately, I’ve noticed that more and more blogs have stopped putting a date on their articles. It’s not on the top of the page, on the bottom of the page, or even in the URL itself. Why are they doing this? My best guess is to make the article look more “fresh” to people who find it through a web search or a social media site. Perhaps the logic goes, if new visitors think the content is old, they’ll leave without reading it.

No matter what the motivation for taking away the date, I think it’s a mistake. Dates help establish a chronology of thoughts and events, which can be essential to properly evaluating what you’re reading. Leave them out, and the content ends up in a limbo state between now and some time ago. Readers are forced to guess if it came out two days or two years ago.

So for those people who insist on taking dates away, I propose a compromise. Leave the date out of the article, but provide a link that serious readers can click on to view the posting date and any other info you’ve hidden. Since they’re already engaged with the site, people who follow that link would be unlikely to think any less of the content if it really is from — gasp — last year.

A few years ago, I started receiving a business magazine that I never subscribed to. It was free, so I didn’t think much of it. But once the “subscription” ran out, they started asking me to renew by filling out an information card. They didn’t want money, just more info about me. Since I never asked for the magazine in the first place, I ignored the request and hoped the magazine would just stop coming.

Boy was I wrong about that. Instead of cancelling my subscription, the magazine people kept sending new issues. Each copy was wrapped in a garish cover that said “This is your last issue!” This has been going on for at least six months now. Funny, I would have thought “last issue” means you won’t get any more copies after that.

In my estimation, magazines are desperate to pad their subscriber numbers so they can sell more ads. No big deal, right? Well, there’s a larger problem here: every “last issue” they send is an outright lie. It erodes the trust that subscribers place in the publisher, and cheapens the value of the magazine. If they’re willing to beg you to take the magazine for free and lie about what’s going on, why should you believe anything written on the pages? I wonder if the brilliant marketing people who designed their renewal strategy ever thought about that.

DVD menus contain some of the worst user interfaces you’re ever likely to see. Their designers always seem to place form before function, and even then, the resulting product looks cheesy and primitive. In this article, I’d like to examine what websites would look like if they were created like DVDs. Here are some examples:

– The website privacy policy would take up the whole screen every time you visit the site, with no way to bypass it.
– The body text would be overlayed on top of pictures and displayed at an angle, making it really hard to read.
– Navigation options that naturally go together, such as Previous and Next, would be placed far apart on the screen.
– After clicking a link, there would be a long delay while a pointless animation or visual effect plays.

Obviously, these scenarios sound ridiculous. Yet we’re forced to interact with this type of design whenever we watch a DVD. Sadly, I doubt this is going to change until someone outside the DVD authoring field gets in the business. Only then will the studios be able to see what their customers have been missing.

I’ve noticed something funny about printer-friendly pages. Whether they’re created with separate templates or simply generated on the fly with CSS, they don’t always print very smoothly. In fact, some of them crash my browser every time. This raises the question: why aren’t these problems being caught in the testing process?

Even if printable pages are being tested, they probably aren’t being tested the right way. To do this properly, you need to try several different options for each page:

– Print scaling: 100% vs. 80% (or smaller)
– Background images: On vs. off
– Color space: Full-color vs. black-and-white
– Destination: Physical printout vs. PDF file

Regardless of how you generate your printer-friendly pages, the extra testing will make things a lot smoother for customers. Remember, printing a receipt or confirmation page is often the last step in a transaction. Making that final experience a good one will help customers come away satisfied, rather than upset about why their computer keeps crashing.

Not too long ago, virtually every e-commerce site required you to register before making a purchase. Then, someone had the smart idea to allow “guest” transactions, so you could buy products or complete other tasks without fussing with the registration process. From what I understand, offering the guest option leads to happier customers and more sales.

Ok, so letting people buy without forced registration is a good idea. But what if an existing customer chooses the guest option, even though your records show they already have an account? Should you let them continue as a guest, or force them to remember their account information so they can act like a registered user?

I ran into this exact scenario with a travel site over the weekend. I haven’t used my account there in years, so I tried to select the guest option. The site refused to let me purchase the trip I had selected, insisting that I sign in to my account. I eventually retrieved my account info and completed the transaction. However, I’m sure that some percentage of people would have given up before that point.

The moral here is this: if you provide a guest checkout option, make sure anyone can use it. New customers, existing customers who forgot their password, existing customers who are in a rush — whatever. After all, a sale is a sale. If you put up a roadblock that keeps people from completing their transactions, it’s bound to hurt the bottom line.

A few days ago, Amazon notified me that my recurring order had been “cancelled successfully”. However, I never asked them to cancel the order. What they were really trying to say was quite different: they stopped carrying the product. In an unrelated incident, my credit card company notified me that the extra card on my account had been deactivated “at my request”. However, I never had such a card, let alone asked for it to be turned off.

Where did these strange explanations come from? I believe a default text message was programmed to appear whenever the real cause of the transaction didn’t make sense to the computer. In these situations, saying nothing at all, or just admitting the cause is unknown, would have led to much less confusion. This makes me wonder how many other programs have bizarre, overly specific messages programmed in — and how much it costs the companies in added customer service inquiries.

One of my favorite blogs structures their articles around a recurring set of topics, sort of like how newspapers have certain columns that repeat on a weekly basis. The blog even incorporates the day of the week into their post titles, e.g. “Fun Facts Monday”. This works great from the reader’s point of view, since you learn to expect and look forward to the same type of posts on certain days.

There’s just one problem, though. If the blog or certain authors take a break, the lack of posts is even more glaring. Not only is the blog quiet, but the stuff you expect to see every Monday, or Wednesday, or Friday isn’t there either. As a result, daily post naming can backfire and lead to higher unsubscribe rates during periods of low posting.

How do you fix this? Easy: just publish a stub post on the dates of the regularly scheduled columns. For example, “Fun Stuff Monday won’t be published this week, but we’ll return to our normal schedule next week.” That way, readers know that you’ve got your act together, and the missing post no longer works against their overall perception of your blog.

– Why don’t clothing stores have an express line?

– If a store only has baskets and no shopping carts, do people buy less each trip, but come back more often?

– If giving out free bags costs money, why don’t more stores sell reusable ones with their name on them?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. But perhaps it’s time to challenge the underlying strategies and assumptions that led to the current state of affairs in retail.