Stopwatch Marketing: Take Charge of the Time When Your Customer Decides to Buy

Citation

Keating, B. (2010), "Stopwatch Marketing: Take Charge of the Time When Your Customer Decides to Buy", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 192-193. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363761011027295

Stopwatch Marketing is a book that promises a lot. The authors contend that marketers have failed to recognize the importance that time plays in consumers' decision‐making process. The central premise is that “purchase or consumption […] is subject to the ticking of the consumers' internal shopping stopwatches” (p. 4). The goal for marketers, therefore, is to slow down the ticking long enough to close the sale. Rosen and Turano suggest that marketers need to give their customers more than just the “Four‐Ps.” They assert that, to succeed, marketers need to do all of this at the right time.

The book is divided into three parts and consists of ten chapters. Part One comprises two chapters. Chapter One discusses the central theme of the book – that marketers need to understand that their customers operate according to an internal stopwatch and, most importantly, that successful marketers need to analyze, evaluate, and exploit the role that time plays in their customers' decision‐making process.

Chapter Two introduces the framework that is elaborated on in latter chapters. This framework, referred to as the “stopwatch matrix,” highlights that customers have different time considerations – a different stopwatch – for different purchase decisions, which reflect the time and energy that the customer is willing to invest in the consumption process. The authors use this framework to introduce four different types of consumption: impatient (pressed for time), reluctant (only purchase when they have to), painstaking (research as long as necessary to find the best), and recreational (slow and leisurely).

While clustering customers into segments is nothing new, the authors claim that their matrix model differs from traditional segmentation approaches by focusing on consumption rather than consumers. Rosen and Turano position the four different types of consumption in alternate quadrants of a two‐dimensional model. In particular, they focus first on the time consumers invest in the consumption process; and second, on matching the stopwatches associated with different purchasing situations to how often the consumer shops and how much he or she spends. The authors make use of this information to demonstrate how a broad sample of products and services can be classified (p. 16).

Part Two has a separate chapter for each of the four time‐based consumption segments. Chapter Three focuses on the impatient quadrant, providing some useful case studies to highlight how successful companies such as Master Lock, Goodyear, and Roto‐Rooter have approached the challenge of competing in a market dominated by impatient customers. Likewise, the fourth through sixth chapters provide further case studies to demonstrate how recreational shoppers, reluctant shoppers, and painstaking shoppers differ in their consumption patterns. Some notable firms featured in these latter chapters include Wal‐Mart, Apple Computers, Microsoft, and Lexus.

It was in this middle section that I found my two main concerns with the book. First, I felt that some of the examples used in support of the matrix waned under the pressure of cross‐examination. Put simply, I found it hard to believe that time was the main factor affecting the consumption process in some of the examples. Second, I thought the segmentation strategy was overly simplistic. While I can see why marketing practitioners would welcome a segmentation methodology that enabled them to classify their customers based on two or three variables, prior research would suggest that this oversimplifies the true complexity of consumption.

However, putting these concerns aside for a moment, the final four chapters of Part Three did much to redeem the book by providing a detailed and useful overview of how the principles of stopwatch marketing could be applied by marketers. Chapter Seven helps marketers to identify how their customers vary according to consumption patterns. Chapter Eight explains how data from the web can assist marketers in understanding how timing affects the different shopping and searching behaviors of customers. The ninth chapter provides some practical guidance on the distribution of marketing resources to best leverage the internal stopwatches of consumers and provide the greatest financial return to organizations. Finally, Chapter Ten assists marketers in operationalizing the principles of stopwatch marketing within their own strategic planning processes. In particular, the authors spend time discussing how these principles apply to firms of different sizes and, most importantly, the need to continually revisit and refine the stopwatch marketing plan as new data becomes available.

While the book provides many examples of how firms have struggled with the issue of time (some of which were actually very insightful), I felt that a real strength of the book was the appendix. In addition to providing an interesting and eclectic list of marketing and management titles for further reading, the appendix contains a detailed report demonstrating how stopwatch marketing principles can be applied to a “real‐world” business setting. Using a small US wine retailer as an example, Rosen and Turano take the reader through a step‐by‐step application of the strategy outlined in their book. And while I could get picky about some of their statistical interpretations, I believe that most practitioners will welcome the author's decision to open the “black‐box” of their method. In this way, the book successfully rises above many other books of this type.

In summary, this book highlights the challenge of marketing to customers with different time and informational needs. While the book is unashamedly oriented toward a practitioner audience, the book is well written and should contain enough substance to appeal to most academic readers. While I believe that the authors could have done a better job in the selection and explanation of some of the case studies used, Rosen and Turano have provided a simple and elegant method that represents a pleasant alternative to the complex and oft‐times conflicting models that have dominated the academic marketing literature in recent years. Definitely worth a read.