While getting a haircut today the owner told me an interesting happening where for some reason a lot of potential male customers would come in the store and ask if they cut men’s hair as well. She thought this was weird as she doesn’t advertise the store as women only and she even has prices for men’s haircut versus a women. We were then saying how stereotypically when you think of things like a salon you automatically think of it as a very feminine place such as painting one’s toe nails and such.

I was then mentioning too how the whole store had like model pictures of women too which further gave the impression that this was a female only place. As a result they tried to put a lot more signage to
specifically say they welcome male customers as well. They even went as far as placing a barber’s pole outside the store to hopefully attract more male customers.

Kind of shows you how important your store design can play when it comes to attracting customers huh? Imagine how many customers they loss where most people probably wouldn’t even bother to ask too.

I thought this was weird. Recently some of my friends were saying that they got e-mails from a retailer that was giving people about $100 worth of advertising credit for services such as Google Adwords. For those who don’t know, that is a service where people would pay to have people click onto their site as a means of generating visitors.

I was wondering how relevant this was to advertise such a service to an average consumer. It’s almost like giving a 10% off commercial air time rate coupon to just anyone who buys say a vacuum cleaner from an appliance store. Just seems kind of far fetched if the intent was to entice people who don’t normally use any type of advertising services where they will all of a sudden do so. Then again, for a lot of people as long as it is free they will try anything.