Give Me a Sign, Please

When it comes to encouraging sales at the registers, it helps to give customers a sign. As retail guru Paco Underhill puts it in this article on BusinessWeek.com, "It's all about in-store marketing."

After observing as many shoppers as Underhill has, you learn a thing or two. What he's learned about recent shopper tendencies is this: people are spending more time in the aisles, but, as we all know, the extra time isn't always adding up to more money in the cash register. The reason? Buyer's remorse, trade offs, and what we'll call selection overload (yes, having too many options isn't always a good thing).

To negate the effects of these, Underhill suggests using thoughtful, well-placed signs in your retail environments. But to say that once you put up a sign you can expect the sales to roll in would be wrong. You need to be concerned with the "dropout rate, or the percentage of people who don't read through an important piece of information." Signs can be too wordy, too small, in the wrong place, and so on.

What may seem like the perfect sign could turn out to be completely useless. Just as with any marketing project, you need to test, test, test to make sure you're getting it right.