The 24-Hour Customer Brings Out TIME as a Way to Squeeze Into Your Customer's World

The 24-Hour Customer:Time-onomics from Adrian Ott on Vimeo.

If you're part of a market research organization, you're probably acutely aware of the shifts that have been going on in Market Research.  Maybe they upset you.  But this is a good thing.  That's your brain's way of telling you that it's time to do something different.  And the good news is, the sooner you get to finding something different - the better for your bottom line. The 24-Hour Customer Gives Strategists Insight on Creating New Opportunities by Focusing On How Customers Spend Time In my latest book review on Small Business Trends, I looked at "The 24-Hour Customer" by Adrian Ott.  If you are reading this blog -- then you need to get this book.  If you're in marketing or a CEO or in any way responsible for identifying new niches -- you can't afford to miss this book. "The 24-Hour Customer" explains exactly how and why it is that people can waste hours on Facebook Farmville and yet not give your product the time of day.  Ott names exactly 111 companies as examples of how strategists were able to observe how customers prioritized time with relation to Habit, Motivation, Convenience and Value -- and then develop products and services that fit right into those crevices.  Here are just a few examples:

• Zipcar used a “Time Slicing” strategy that broke up car ownership into much smaller slices of time instead of years.


• Hulu and Netflix used time-shifting to movies on-demand.


• Nike and Apple co-created a mobile app that measured and reported on a runner’s progress on a Nike+ website.

There are many more examples and the data to support them.  Did I say you should read this book yet? Applying These Time Slicing and Time Shifting Strategies Means You Have to Love Your Customer Romi Mahajan talks about building deeper customer relationships in his latest article on Research Access.  He's not talking about social media, he's not talking about focus groups.  He's talking about participating in conversations that are going on around you. You've heard me talk about market research as becoming more of a "Listening" function.  And the combination of Romi's article and reading "The 24-hour Customer"  will inspire you and open your mind to other possibilities. Successful market research isn't going to come from having the best technology or running the best multi-variate regression.  It's going to come from possessing great listening and observation skills and then having the brains to quantify those inklings and intuitive insights. Who's up for the job?