Consumers Don't Spend Any More Time Standing In ...

Consumers don’t spend any more time standing in line to examine your product than their grandparents did, but they have a lot more lines to choose from. So if one line isn’t moving at a speed they like, they move to another one. Today marketers have to give their customers more than the traditional "Four P's" (Price, Product, Promotion and Place); they have to reduce the length of the queue waiting to enter the consciousness of a potential customer. Consumer decision making is time dependent, and that time is always measured by the consumer, either implicitly or explicitly. On any given day, at any given life stage, in any given economic environment, individual consumers will behave differently than a backward looking model would suggest. The same consumer utilizes different stopwatches for different purchases on different days and in different states of mind, often without knowing it and certainly without calling it out. (Stopwatch Marketing, John Rosen & Anna Maria Turano, Penguin Group 2008)