How to Stopwatch Market

The third part of Stopwatch Marketing offers nuts, bolts and widgets, to businesses large and small. This is the section for acolytes of Rosen and Turano's concept of stopwatch marketing, and for marketing specialists to decide whether the idea is really any different from "occasion-based segmentation," as the authors claim. They show companies how to discover which of the four types of consumers are likely to buy from them, and how to rejigger their sales tactics accordingly.

There's some fun stuff here:

"You don't really think all those years of 'nobody every getting fired for buying IBM" was driven by a purely reational cost/benefit trade-off with eh company's interests held paramount, do you? Or, more recently, you don't think middle managers rationally spend up to three or four times th price of overnight mail to use FedEx when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight? Or that all those designers and artists (who were longhaired rebels in college and didn't take the GMATS) are buying Apple PowerBooks rather than Dells because the screen has a few more pixels?

For the most part, though, the last section offers a detailed discussion of marketing strategy based around the idea of stopwatch shopping. It's a free tutorial for smaller businesses â€" in fact, they base much of the section around how they helped a small wine retailer apply their ideas. They mix in a paean to Web analytics, which the authors say matters greatly because online shopping behavior reflects offline shopping behavior, as well. And they break down how to budget for stopwatch marketing, a useful and natural way to end the book.

Update: For all three parts of the review and my Big Think Breakdown, see Summing Up Stopwatch Marketing.