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 o