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

How long does it take to buy a loaf of bread? A pair of shoes? A car? 

These are trick questions. Imagine a hundred potential customers in the same store, each holding a stopwatch. Some of their stopwatches are ticking very fast (grabbing a bottle of wine before a party), some glacially slow (agonizing over the perfect bottle for a first date). Some, in fact, aren’t ticking at all. 

For today’s savvy marketers understanding how much time and energy consumers are willing to spend shopping for their product or service is the single most important (yet overlooked) factor in maximizing sales. 

After years of advising clients who sell everything from all-natural fruit juice to health insurance, John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano have learned that capturing a consumer’s attention at precisely the right time and holding it through the purchase decision requires a strategy that they call Stopwatch Marketing. It is the method of adjusting your marketing strategies to match the shopping styles of your customers. 

Stopwatch Marketing unveils a systematic way to capitalize on four different types of shopping styles—Recreational, Painstaking, Impatient, and Reluctant. Rosen and Turano also share the stories of how America’s top brands put the concept of Stopwatch Marketing to work for them. You’ll learn how:

• Goodyear turned Assurance with TripleTred tires into a billion-dollar success story built on a shopping cycle that takes less than an hour.
• Roto-Rooter became the only legitimate brand in its category by controlling the typical Yellow Pages users’ 50-second search pattern.
• Whole Foods reinvented the supermarket shopping experience to slow down their customers’ clocks.
• Microsoft exploits shoppers’ reluctance to spend time researching alternatives to their Office software.
• Lexus begins targeting customers up to a year before they set foot inside a dealer showroom. 

In a world where consumers are assaulted with thousands of different marketing messages every day, the biggest challenge is to align the content and timing of your messages to the amount of time buyers have for hearing them.Stopwatch Marketing shows how to do just that and increase your bottom line as a result.

John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano are executive directors at Marketing Consulting Associates, a strategic marketing consulting firm based in Westport, Connecticut. Their clients have included MasterCard, Johnson & Johnson, Gillette, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Payless ShoeSource, Goodyear, and many other major companies.