The 24-Hour Customer
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Interesting new book from Adrian Ott, called The 24-Hour Customer, basically underlining how important time and attention are to consumers.
Her basic point is very simple but easy to overlook: if you are competing for somebody’s time and attention, you are not competing inside some nice neat product category such as ‘carbonated soft drinks’ or ‘variable rate mortgages’ – you are competing against all other alternative uses of that person’s time and attention.
Given that we only have 24 hours in a day, and have lots to do in that day, it’s simply not possible for most brands to win this war for consumer time and attention, so what should they do?
When in doubt, use a four-box matrix. Ott’s matric breaks markets into the four quadrants of high/low time and attention:
• ‘Time magnets’ where people positively want to invest more time and more attention
• Situations when we are prepared to focus some attention, especially if it’s going to save us time – basically, all convenience markets
• Processes where we can’t help investing a significant amount of time, but devote as little attention to them as possible – habits and chores, in other words
• Things we have to do, but would ideally like to reduce our time and attention investment as far as possible.
Most marketers, as died-in-the-wool brand narcissists, naturally focus their attention on the ‘time magnet’ quadrant. But as Ott points out, few brands live there and even fewer brands manage to stay there consistently. There are, however, huge opportunities for products and services that help people improve their time/attention trade-offs elsewhere. For example: “If you can save me time and attention by ‘simply do nothing and your subscription will renew automatically’, sure, you may be exploiting inertia but guess what, I’m happy to go along with it”.
Ott’s time/attention quadrants show just how product-centric our thinking still is. We still tend to define markets in terms of product attributes, but it’s possible to redefine markets in terms of the ROI consumers earn on their investments of personal assets. These include time, money and attention but also energy (how much physical energy it takes), information and expertise (invested or gained), plus (of course) emotions positive and negative.
Helping individuals maximise their ‘ROI’ in personal assets can be a useful way of taking a fresh look at value. I’ll expand on this theme next time round.
Posted: May 25th, 2010 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Customer Champions | | Leave a Comment »
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