Interview Time: another frontier of value innovation Stan Abraham

Citation

Gorrell, C. (2012), "Interview Time: another frontier of value innovation Stan Abraham", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 40 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2012.26140daa.005

Interview Time: another frontier of value innovation Stan Abraham

Article Type: Quick takes From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 40, Issue 4

Adrian Ott is the author of The 24-hour Customer: New Rules for Winning in a Time-starved, Always-connected Economy (HarperBusiness, 2010).

S&L: Could you describe the model or concept that executives can use to understand how a customer values time?

Ott: Time has become so critical in today’s consumer decision-making that it needs to be called out and openly considered; it can’t be assumed anymore. People are constantly making Time-Value tradeoff decisions; they treat their time similarly to money and get extremely upset when it is wasted.

Time-Value Economics is a term I use to describe the hidden but powerful forces of time that drive people’s decisions and behavior in today’s hectic, connected economy. Psychologists and neuroscientists have found that 45 percent of our day is basically run on habits. In many categories, a new offering in the market needs to either find a way to insert itself into existing routines or provide exponential, not just incremental, value that would prompt a change in people’s routine. Yet, few executives ever think about habit change in their offering design or launch plans. Companies who don’t adopt a time-centric mindset toward customers continue to make major missteps. (Four types of loser company tactics are cited.)

S&L: Can you describe the how-to steps for implementing your concept? What are the pitfalls?

Ott: Because customers’ time and attention are both in short supply, they prioritize their choices of goods and services every day – as measured by four quadrants: time magnets, time on autopilot, time savers, or time minimized.

The first step is to understand where your offering fits in your customers’ time and attention priorities using the Timeographics Framework (Exhibit 2). That gives you clues as to what types of initiative are likely to have the most impact. For instance, if your product or service lends itself to creating or piggybacking on a habit, there’s not much value to major feature innovation – in fact, it could hurt you substantially by making your customers “wake up” and consider alternatives.

Challenging? Yes. The great “blue ocean” opportunity, ironically, is not trying to capture time and attention, but capitalizing on inattention through habits and automated background tasks. You could say that we are seeing a rise in an “inattention economy.”