Stopwatch Marketing:

Take Charge of the Time When Your Customer Decides to Buy
By John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano, Marketing Consulting Associates, LLC
(To be Published by Portfoilio, an imprint of the Penguin Group in February 2008)

Summary

Sometimes shopping takes minutes, but is still too long; sometimes shopping takes months, and the shopper is sad to see it end.

In more than twenty-five years of helping clients persuade consumers to purchase everything from organic fruit juice to health insurance, John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano, Executive Directors of MCAworks, one of America’s most prestigious marketing consultancies, have learned that time isn’t money; it’s much more important than that. Understanding how much time and energy consumers are willing to spend shopping for a particular purchase – their shopping strategies – is the single most important (and overlooked) thing you need to know in order to succeed in selling your product or service to them.

In STOPWATCH MARKETING, Rosen and Turano identify four basic shopping strategies – impatient, reluctant, painstaking, and recreational – and show how to analyze, evaluate, and exploit the time that represents every shopper’s most important resource; how to understand and measure the length of time your customer will spend searching for your product or service; and how to make absolutely certain that your product or service is close to the front of your customer’s queue.

Many of America’s best-known and most successful companies are using the principles of MCAworks’ Shopping Stopwatch™ every day to achieve spectacular growth in both margin and market share. STOPWATCH MARKETING not only shares their stories, but offers step-by-step guidelines for building an entire marketing strategy around Stopwatch principles. Each of the guidelines is presented in two versions: a basic approach appropriate for small business owners and entrepreneurs (gross revenues as small as a few thousand dollars a week), and a comprehensive approach that could be put to work by businesses with marketing budgets of any size.

The biggest marketing challenge today is to align the content and timing of your messages to the amount of time buyers have allocated for hearing them. STOPWATCH MARKETING shows how to stop the consumer’s shopping clock.

John Rosen is an Executive Director of Marketing Consulting Associates, a strategic marketing consulting firm based in Westport, CT, that advises Fortune 500 companies on developing growth strategies. He is directly responsible for overall direction of client engagements involving demand creation, new product development, and channel management. Working with domestic clients including Citibank, Sara Lee, United Technologies, Payless ShoeSource, Gillette, CNBC, and Cardinal Health, as well as several European and Japanese companies, his demand creation and new product development engagements have resulted in over $1 billion in added revenue for client firms while measurably improving customer loyalty and brand image.

He is a frequent speaker at marketing conferences for consumer marketers and retail bankers in both the U. S. and Europe, including the annual BAI Retail Delivery Forum, The World Council of Credit Unions, International Banking Technology’s Annual Banking Trends Conference, and the VIP Forum’s Marketing To The Affluent Conference. He has been published in Banking Strategies Magazine.

Before his consulting career, Mr. Rosen had served as an executive in various industries, including consumer packaged goods, publishing, consumer durables and electronics, beverages and computer software / video games, serving companies as diverse as Quaker Oats, Coors Beer, Mattel Toys, and Simon & Schuster Publishing.