• Car Renting
  Car renting compnies can, for example, focus on a single car model (as Easy Car once did) and apply a simple and straightforward tariff. By doing so they target the bulk of the car rental market while not catering for specific requirements like sport cars,4-wheel drive, big limousines or vehicles at rock-bottom prices. This simplicity of the offering enables them to apply low prices which largely compensates, in the mind of the buyers, for the absence of choice in car models as proposed by other companies while it provides reliability of the reservation, availability of the cars and their overall good condition and reasonable price. This approach enables to skim the market by making the offer attractive for the "80 %" target segment. This supposes having no qualms leaving the the remaining 20 % to the competition that, inevitably, has to carry much higher unit costs and thereby becomes much less competitive.
• Restaurants
  Fast-food restaurants target the bulk of the market with easy-to-cook, fast-to-serve and highly standardized food. Their profitability has enabled them to grow fast, at least until food scandals raised consumers’ suspicion towards risks. Fast food might not be healthy, but their economic model is quite sound. They compensate the dullness of their food offering by [relatively] low price, fast and no-frills service, strong brand and strict hygiene controls (especially valuable in our era of food scandals). An alternative to offering “standard” tasteless and lifeless food would consist in drastically limiting the choice on the menu card. A restaurant, that would, for example, offer only one high-quality daily meal (different every day), would be as successful as the fastest growing fast-food restaurants. It has of course to compensate the lack of choice by fresh ingredients, good cooking, nice presentation, right scale, adequate situation and trendy environment. If 80 % of the perceived customer value comes from the combination of food quality and eating environment and the remaining 20 % comes from the choice on the menu card then there is no point increasing the operating cost and jeopardizing food quality by attempting to offer a wide and diversified choice.

Hereafter are a few counter-examples of what should not be done.

• Frequent Flyer Programs
  Bonus miles are distributed by airlines according to intricate and ever changing rules. It is illusory to believe that air travelers adjust in any way their flight behavior to take advantage of a given promotion campaign. No airline customer - eventhose with a PhD - ever bother to know, understand or compare frequent flyer programs. The system has some success because it is free and can offer some advantages (like upgrades or free travel) most of the time subordinated to numerous and intricate conditions. As far as influencing air travel behavior these programs are a complete failure. They should therefore limit themselves to being not more than straightforward fidelity gifts. There are plenty of good reasons to drastically simplify and freeze the Byzantine rules according to which bonus miles are granted. This simplification will not affect customers' behaviour but would reduce significantly their management cost.
• Telephony Tariffs
  Mobile operators have an aversion tocompete on price. They deploy every conceivable trick and means to make their offer not comparable with those of their competitors. In addition to constantly "shuffling their tariff cards" they try to lure new customers by promotion campaigns based on intricate tariff schemes. The net effect of opaque and ever changing tariff structure is that customers have given up on trying to follow or understand the respective benefits of each mobile operators. The purchase decision is often made in the store on the impulse of the moment. What one must keep in mind is the effect on cost of this tariff versatility and volatility. When complex and ever changing tariff is weighted against its impact on operating cost it looses all its attractiveness. If more than 80 % of the market [much more actually] does not care about intricate and constantly price structure why should operators continue to stick to that practice ?
• Fiscal and Social legislation
  Once again this is a matter of comparing the effect of highly variable and ever more complex rules against the benefits that these perpetual "refinements" provide. Fiscal and social laws become always more intricate in a vain attempt to fine-tune their impact and to fill in the loopholes left gaping by the previous waves of reform. If that growing complexity had as sole consequence to leave that area to specialists and experts that would not be too bad. But the cost of that complexity is out of proportion with its benefits. People willing to comply with the law tend to get lost in its Byzantine intricacy and people who want to fiddle with it get better protected by the fact that law enforcement officials get drown into the work overload caused by that complexity. Sometimes those rules become so intricate and ever changing that people rightfully do not even want to bother even if it is the law: depending on their temperament they undergo it passively or just bypass it. Everybody is supposed to know the law but the fact of the matter is that nobody does (as the divergence in interpretation between experts can attest).

  The end result is that the fiscal or social administration looses its grasp both on the result that they want to achieve and on law enforcement. Instead of a fine-tuned system they get an increasingly inefficient system. Well-thought, simple and straightforward laws are much more effective and easy to enforce than rules that are now growing like a cancer.