My wife does the craziest things (especially in car parks)

I wouldn't say my wife's mad, but she certainly does some weird stuff from time to time.

Take last week for example.....

Her car was at the dealership having a warranty repair carried out.

And because the part they needed had to be ordered in from Germany, she'd already been without the car for over a week and had been driving a hire car instead....

... this black MG5 estate:

Anyway, on Friday my wife (let's call her Jane, because that's her name) drove down to our local Sainsbury's to get just two items - icing sugar and food colouring to make a cake for our son's birthday.

But once she got into the shop, her ADHD brain started spotting loads of other useful things.

So by the time she left the shop, she had two bags overflowing with everything from dog food through to prawns, wine and cleaning products.

She'd got so much stuff that the handles on the so-called bag-for-life were about to break.

(Here's a thought.... If your bag-for-life suffers a catastrophic failure and dies, is that a sign that your own days are numbered?)

Anyway, just as Jane was wondering how she was going to squeeze round the back of the car and open the boot without losing all the shopping onto the car park floor, she noticed that there was now an empty parking space to the left of her car.

Result!

So she simply pressed the unlock button on the key fob, opened the passenger door, and popped the bags in the front footwell.

It was at this point that she decided to nip over the road to the high street and get a couple of things in M&S.

You only get 30 minutes free parking at Sainsbury's, but you can stay longer if you buy a ticket. And the ticket machines are those ones where you have to enter the registration number of your car to stop you passing the ticket onto someone else after you've finished with it.

So Jane checked what the reg of the hire car was and then headed over to the ticket machine.

A few moments later she returned to the car, opened the door, popped the ticket on the dashboard, and shut the door.

As she turned away from the car ready to walk over to the town centre, she pressed the lock button on the key fob. But nothing happened.

So she turned back, pressed the unlock button and then the lock button again. And this time, although she didn't see the indicators flash, she definitely heard the car relock itself.

Job done. Or so she thought....

About half an hour later, after a leisurely wander round M&S, Jane returned to the Sainsbury's car park.

As she approached her hire car she was aware of two teenage girls peering into the car next to hers and looking a bit puzzled. At the same time, a man (presumably their dad) was approaching their car with a trolley load of shopping.

Thinking nothing more of it, Jane opened the door of her car and saw to her horror that.....

....her shopping had gone!

The panic lasted only for a few seconds, though....

.... after which, she realised what had happened.

"Excuse me," she said, turning to the man and his daughters and putting on her most polite voice that she used to use back in the days when she ran a branch of Jaeger.

"I think I may have put my shopping in your car by mistake. Would you mind if I took it back?"

Yes, that's right.

When she'd come out of the supermarket half an hour previously, Jane had managed to put her shopping in the wrong car.

This was despite the fact that this neighbouring car was.....

.... 11 years older than Jane's hire car.....

.... was considerably dirtier inside and out....

.... was petrol rather than electric and so had a traditional gearstick instead of a selector knob on the centre console....

.... and was a different make!

In fact, the only thing the two cars had in common was that they were both black!

Of course this still leaves two questions.....

Firstly, how had Jane managed to unlock and lock this man's car with her own key fob?

Well, the answer is that she hadn't.

As the man said.....

"I hadn't locked the car. My wife's always telling me off for leaving it unlocked.... but that's because she thinks people will steal things rather than try to give me their shopping!"

And the second question is....

.... how did this mix up occur? After all, it's not like there weren't plenty of red flags that could have alerted Jane to what was going on.

Well, the problem is that our brains crave familiarity.

And so, even when something unusual happens, we seek to rationalise it rather than acknowledge it. Or we use it to reinforce and justify the things that we want to believe are true.

For example, when Jane pressed the button to lock the car after she'd put the shopping in it, she didn't see the indicators flash.

That should have alerted her to the fact something was wrong.

But instead her brain latched onto the sound of her own car unlocking and locking in the next parking bay.

Why? Because that sound aligned nicely with what she expected to happen.

Similarly, she remembers seeing the Ford badge on the car she put the shopping in when she was looking at its registration plate.

And even though the hire car she was driving was an MG, she accepted the presence of the Ford badge because her own car - the one that was being mended - is a Ford (albeit a Ford with a fancy Mustang badge).

Even after that, there was at least one more opportunity for Jane to realise her mistake.

When she started typing the registration number of the other person's car into the ticket machine, the machine did what it always does and auto suggested the rest of the registration after she'd typed in the first few characters.

Jane should have thought - that's odd... how does it know my registration when I've never been here in that hire car before?

But, because it's normal for the machine to auto suggest the number plate (when she's there in her own car), Jane's brain took this as confirmation that she was entering the correct details on this occasion too.

Now when Jane came home and told me this story my first thought was - isn't it lucky everyone involved arrived back at their cars at the same time.

But you can bet your bag-for-life that this was very quickly followed by another thought....

There's an email in that!

And if you've got this far then I wasn't wrong, was I?

So what is the marketing lesson to be pulled out of this tale of car park ditziness?

Well, I think there are two.

Firstly, when you're designing web sites or landing pages, keep in mind what I said just now about the fact that we humans crave familiarity.

So give people what they expect and what they are used to in terms of design and usability.

For example, keep your menu at the top of the page rather than (like I saw on someone's site the other day) putting it down the right hand side of the screen.

Secondly, be aware that our brains are very good at ignoring or filtering out all the things we don't want to see.

And this is especially true when it comes to adverts.

You see, whether they're looking at something online or reading a printed newspaper, people are very good at automatically ignoring anything that looks like an ad (there's even a name for this - it's called banner blindness).

So if you're going to run ads on Facebook or other social platforms you need to do everything you can to make them look like normal posts rather than ads.

Don't believe me?

Well, right now I'm helping one of my clients run some ads on Facebook. The ads are designed to get people to download a free guide about his coaching services.

We've got one ad that shows a picture of the free guide, and we've got one which shows my client standing in front of a famous landmark.

The first one looks like an ad. The second looks like a holiday snap.

And guess which one generates more leads at a lower cost per lead? (Clue: it's not the one that looks like an ad)

So there we have it. Two important marketing lessons from a simple mix up in a car park.

And further proof (if any were needed) that even a simple shopping trip can give you some great content for your emails if you marry the right kind of person. 😀

Have you ever noticed something "hiding in plain sight" in your business that others were missing? Or have you spotted banner blindness affecting your own marketing? Hit reply and let me know - I love hearing these stories.

Bye for now,
David.

PS - as well as it being lucky that we didn't lose all our shopping, it's also lucky that no parking warden had been round while my wife was at M&S and found her car parked at Sainsbury's without a ticket. Because, to paraphrase the comedian Joe Lycett, I suspect the excuse that Jane had bought a ticket for the car next to hers wouldn't have buttered any parsnips.