The Painfully Simple Over The Incredibly Complex

Marketing can be incredibly complex. It can also be painfully simple.

Take a stroll through the local big-chain bookstore. Looking at it through the lens of marketing it will be obvious to you that the best sellers are situated by the entrance. It’s a clear attempt to grab the attention of passers by and grab a few extra impulse buys.

But there are other less-obvious things that they are doing.

You might also notice that they aren’t as efficient with their shelve space the way that the local library is. Ever notice that some books are planted such that you can only see the spine of the book and that some are rotated to display the cover?

This is not an accident nor is it arbitrary.

This is the result of a deal struck between the book retailer and the publisher. Covers of books attract more attention than spines - and the book retailer charges for this privilege. Quite simply, the marketing strategy is to make the book slightly easier to notice than the volumes to the left and to the right.

Walk the aisles of the grocery store and you might note that the larger brands are often placed at (roughly) eye level. This doesn’t guarantee an individual will make the purchase, but over the tens of thousands of customers, the fact that it was slightly easier to see will make an impact.

Convenience stores like 7-11 strike another similar deal with their vendors. Certain brands of snacks not only pay for premium placement - they also physically place those products themselves. If you happen to be their at the right time, you might notice that it is not the store staff restocking those products, but actually the individual that delivered them to the store.

The product’s parent company wants the products placed in a particular way on the shelves. Sometimes a temporary cardboard stand will appear to profile some snacks further. You may also notice that these products will also be promoting an upcoming blockbuster movie or major sporting event. The vendor pays for ideal placement of their product in 7-11, and then sells that feature to other companies looking to purchase advertising.

Think about that. A customer looking for a snack walks into a store and is greeted by a prominently displaced bag of crunchy chips. They make the quick purchase, and are now walking around with a package promoting “Mission Impossible 82,” which might be just in time to answer that customer’s mental question “What am I going to do for fun on Friday night?”

The logistics of making this work on a national scale is complex, but the underlying idea is not. They are the smallest little nudges. On a big enough scale, making it a percentage of a percentage easier to pick up your product will result in meaningful improvements to the bottom line.

The simple marketing ideas work just as well as the complex ones - what’s an idea that’s “too simple” that you could try in your business?