I’ve started Stopwatch Marketing, a look at how to get the attention of consumers when they’re actually in the market to buy something. The book is timely, because the combination of tight credit and recession (or fear of such) should dampen buying here, so catching consumers in those reduced windows in which they’re shopping suddenly matters (see, for instance, Economy Fitful, Americans Start to Pay as They Go.)
The authors, marketing consultants John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano, argue that marketers should no longer market to consumers, but market to consumption. Consumers are simply too hard to define for marketers to be able to pull their strings and make them consume. But companies can predict why their products or services will be consumed, and shift their marketing so that when someone wants to consume it, they’ll be drawn to their product, rather than a competitor’s.
It’s a clever argument they’re making. Plus, consumption may the hot new emerging economic measure – this past Sunday in the New York Times, two Federal Reserve Bank economists made their case for why income was the wrong way to gauge wealth. Instead, consumption was the way to measure it. See You Are What You Spend.
This book is off to a promising start. Marketing is the most contrived area of business and thus the area I find least interesting, but I’m interested in this book’s arguments. More soon.
Update: For all three parts of the review and my Big Think Breakdown, see Summing Up Stopwatch Marketing.
