The new market leaders know that the greatest constraint on today’s customers is time—more critical even than money. The broader choices, the constant stream of innovations, and the pace of contemporary life conspire to crowd people’s schedules. Whether you’re in the market for a CD player for home or a new supplier of components for your company, you don’t have time to evaluate every option, consider every shred of information, and explore every contingency—even though it would probably be useful to do so.
Time is a flexible commodity: We willingly spend more of it on some activities than on others. A busy manager for whom every minute counts will happily spend hours on thegolf course, but an easygoing person with time to chat will hang up angrily on a telemarketer who calls at dinnertime.
Yet time is also rigid: There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and allocating them is a zero-sum decision. Time spent on any activity takes away from time available for any other. The time you spend deciding what to buy and actually buying it could also be spent on a host of things: mowing the lawn, surfing the Internet, watching television, attending your child’s soccer game, reading a novel—name your favorite activity.
In general, the less time and effort it takes to get what we want routinely, the more time we have for complex situations that require choices. Thus, zipping through the no-brainer chore of buying pencils and stamps is prerequisite to, say, a romantic dinner at a great restaurant, since it buys time for checking out the restaurant critic’s review, choosing the right wine, and lingering over dessert. So what’s at work here is the customer’s personal priorities about using time.
Different people make different compromises. Even identical twins will not spend time in exactly the same manner. Moreover, any given person will allocate time differently from one situation to the next. Nearly everyone takes longer to consider a dinner menu than to pick up coffee and a muffin on the way to work. Even so, some will ponder the dinner menu longer than others, considering more possibilities, perhaps even trying something new—and that type of person, in the morning, may pause long enough to switch occasionally from a muffin to a cinnamon roll.
Customers making purchasing decisions are solving problems. Some are enjoyable (making vacation plans, looking for new golf clubs); some are not (having a tooth pulled); most fall somewhere in between. In general, the amount of time a person spends shopping for and buying a particular item is directly proportional to how weighty he or she considers that particular problem. What else has to be accomplished with the time is also a factor. For people with an active curiosity, hours of Web surfing may be well spent and pass quickly. For others, with more pressing problems, five minutes adrift in a gigantic Wal-Mart store may be monumentally irritating. Most people facing a major purchase problem—anything from buying a wedding dress to approving a new fighter plane—consider it eminently worthwhile to let it consume a significant block of time. Yet even in this position, some buyers prefer to solve the problem by getting advice and help from others rather than making the decision alone.
In the end, the intersection of abundant choices and limited time evokes two issues for customers—and two key insights for managers into their buying decisions. The first is how open to change the customers are: Are they willing to free up time to explore multiple alternatives, or will they try to limit their time and effort, and thus their choices? The second issue is how ready they are to leverage their time by relying on others: Do they prefer to be self-reliant, or will they call for advice and assistance?
From this view, all customers range along two variable lines— their willingness to change and their willingness to leverage others for help and advice. Each variable is an axis of a matrix that divides the customer universe into four quadrants.
For now, note that the quadrants don’t mark abrupt divisions: Each axis of the matrix is a continuum, so that eagerness to change shades gradually into unvarying routine, and self-reliance yields by degrees to acceptance of help and advice.
No individual consumer behaves consistently in all of his or her purchases; for instance, we might want automatic reliability in our newspaper delivery service but spend weeks deliberating which of two paintings to buy. Similarly, the customer who feels confident and secure in choosing her own automobile may want help and advice in buying stocks and bonds.
From a seller’s viewpoint, however, these individual inconsistencies hardly matter. Some businesses (newspaper delivery, for one) attract customers who, at least in that context, fit the bottom half of the matrix, and some (cutting-edge computer lessons, for instance) are for people in their change-ripe mode. Some products and services appeal to do-it-yourselfers (for example, gourmet cookbooks) and some to consumers who like to be pampered (luxury tours).
What every manager needs to know is what kind of customers she is serving, and thus how to meet those customers‘ needs and keep them coming back. There’s money to be made in every quadrant of the matrix—but only by those companies that thoroughly understand the vagaries of their markets.
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