Stopwatch Marketing: Can It Set Your Sales Ticking?
I've now delved into Stopwatch Marketing. The first part defines what the stopwatch is â€" the time people actually have to spend shopping, which the authors argue has changed only marginally since the advent of television, while the amount of information they now have available before they make a decision to buy something has increased exponentially. So companies that sell to consumers are competing not so much for attention as for attention at the right time, and if they don't recognize just what kind of time potential customers might give them, it will hurt their sales.
After an awkward first few pages, I've found this book a good read, as well as topical (in recession you at least need to understand what part of the marketing budget to keep, and this book should help). The authors, AnnaMaria Turano and John Rosen, settle down into an informative look at some of the research that underpins modern marketing, from George Stigler to Michael Porter to Malcolm Gladwell.
They then introduce their quadrant of the four types of shoppers:
Impatient
Painstaking
Reluctant
Recreational
It's an important breakdown, because most companies will have products that appeal to one or the other of these four types of shoppers (and it's a reminder that all shoppers will vary their personalities by product).
As the authors note,
Everyone has figured out where to cut costs, to eliminate unnecessary links in the supply chain, to focus on competitive advantages. They have outsourced, re-engineered, and reinvented themselves. The easy fixes are gone. Even executives at Microsoft and Wal-Mart live in a state of chronic anxiety about market leadership, precisely becase they know how hard it is to maintain it. Like Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, they must run as fast as possible just to stay where they are.Turano and Rosen want to give companies a stopwatch to help them run faster. So the second part of the book goes through each type of shopper in detail, from the perspective of companies that have rejiggered their strategies to master each quadrant. While I might quibble with individual points (an aside on why ordinary citizens protest the opening of Wal-Marts shows a lack of comprehension of the issue, for instance), overall they do a good job of illustrating their concepts.
Their examples range widely through industrial sectors.
For Impatient shopping: Goodyear, MasterLock and RotoRooter.
For Recreational shopping: Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Apple's iTunes store and Charles Schwab.
For Reluctant shopping: Microsoft, Sprint and CommerceBank.
For Painstaking shopping: Tempur-Pedic, Lexus and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.
In each section, they mix in real world examples (some of these companies have been clients, some not) and some of the high profile research behind the concepts (the ideas of Nobel Economics winners Ronald Coase and Kahneman and Tversky are among those discussed).
The rest of the book is devoted to how your company can figure out who its consumers are and how to get them through your door when they start their shopping stopwatch. I will look at that in a coming post.
Update: For all three parts of the review and my Big Think Breakdown, see Summing Up Stopwatch Marketing.