TIME AND THE ATTENTION TO TIME

The Invisible Hand of Time

by Alex Hutchins

If there is a lone tree in a clearing and there are no animals or human beings around for thousands of miles in all directions and that tree falls, will there be a sound?

If a new product is launched and no one notices it, does it really exist?

According to Adrian Ott,

Thinking in terms of time and attention will quickly start to change the way you think about products and services, customer behavior, even business models. This is the great frontier for innovation for the next decade.  Companies that master time and attention innovation will find lots of market traction.

Mr. Ott believes that time is more valuable than money and goes on to say that

many executives he speaks to worry about the increasing competitive pressures and complexity—more competitors, more products, more business models, more channels.

What few of them appreciate, Adrian has come to believe, is that the same pressures and complexity are afflicting their customers—and that hose customers have even less ability to manage the demands on their time and attention. Consider that despite the huge increase in the number of products available to consumers, his research on U.S. statistics indicates that the amount of time spent shopping (not just buying, but also considering alternatives) has not changed at all in more than 30 years (see Figure 1). In addition, social media will create more data in the next few years than in the entire previous history of civilization. As there will never be more than 24 hours in a day the pressure on this attention bottleneck will continue to mount.

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In other words, we spend the same amount of time considering more alternatives placed before us than ever before.  As you let this notion sink in. . .   consider going to the movies in a shopping mall; if you are confronted with the same cinema complexes that we are in East Tennessee, then you have anywhere from 10-15 different movies from which to choose that are playing at the same time.  How does one movie grab your attention over another movie, unless you went there with a pre-disposition to buy a ticket and watch one particular movie.

Think of time and attention as separate commodities that customers choose to allocate, along the lines of Figure 2. I call this the Time-Value Framework (a.k.a. the Time-graphics Framework) because it, like other forms of demographic segmentation, helps to explain and understand customer behavior, and evaluate product and offering fit.

Figure 2: Time-Value Framework (reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers)

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The Motivation Quadrant is where customers willingly devote significant time and attention; in the Convenience Quadrant customers will devote attention but not time (but note this attention is usually devoted to saving time, not to the products or services being consumed); in the Habit Quadrant, customers devote time but not attention, as they do when buying the exact same products and brands at the grocery store this week as they did last week; and finally, there is the Value Quadrant, where customers devote neither time nor attention.

Too often, executives assume their product is in or can reach the Motivation Quadrant. Rarely the approach works, and when it does it does so spectacularly like the recent Old Spice campaign. More often the campaigns are expensive failures that aren’t noticed or become the object of ridicule, like Miracle Whip’s “We Will Not Tone It Down” campaign. Unfortunately the successes generate lots of copycat behavior that doesn’t appreciate that the key ingredient of success was novelty. No one will attract attention by copying Old Spice; the next success will have to be completely different.

A few years ago, the BBC launched a very successful series about time, entitled The Time Lords whose job it was to protect time; but, whether we look at the number of hours in a day or the number of hours in all of time, it is still a fixed amount with which we are dealing, so paying attention to time will forever be important or should be important to all of us.