Timing Is Everything
It's no secret that time is at a premium these days, on both sides of the customer/company equation. Most consumers feel they're operating with an ever-lengthening "to-do" list, and companies' patience for new products to establish themselves -- as well as for making quarterly targets -- seems to be growing ever shorter.
A new book, Stopwatch Marketing: Take Charge of the Time When Your Customer Decides to Buy (Portfolio), takes an in-depth look at this phenomenon, delineating what authors John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano say are four basic types of shopping styles and suggesting how best to serve each of them.
"When we decided to write a book, we thought about what our clients struggle with again and again," explains Turano, who with Rosen is co-executive director at Marketing Consulting Associates, a Connecticut-based firm whose clients have included MasterCard, Johnson & Johnson, and PepsiCo. "The answer was customer centricity. Everyone wants to embrace that as a concept, but many have difficulty doing so at the right time and the right place. It's all about timing."
Stopwatch Marketing holds that for every purchasing decision there's a different time/energy (stopwatch) that a consumer is willing to put into buying the product or service. Shoppers are divided into "Impatient," "Reluctant," "Painstaking," and "Recreational," and while Turano admits that in some situations it's hard to slow an Impatient down enough to become a Recreational -- one who takes his time and enjoys the experience, ideally to the degree that he makes more purchases than he originally intended -- it's not impossible.
The anecdote-filled book takes as an example the grocery-shopping experience, one which most consumers dread. Turano and Rosen cite Whole Foods' revolutionary approach (including in-store dining areas and massage studios) that have worked to slow down the process, encouraging consumers to linger and making the store more of an engaging experience.
It's not always about slowing things down, however. "Sometimes you want to speed the shopping experience up," she says. "Someone who really just wants to get in and pick up a decent $10 bottle of wine doesn't want to have to search throughout your inventory."
Filled with strategies to stretch and condense time where most desirable, Stopwatch Marketing is well worth the ... well, you know.
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