Every business would do well to look at the marketplace through the eyes of today’s consumers. Yes, a new type of consumer is rapidly emerging. Although when they first began to emerge in the marketplace new consumers were predominantly male, the increasing economic power of women both as wealth producers and consumer decision makers means they are now equally likely to be of either sex.
Women too, are purchasing not just the family groceries and the knitting wool, but cars, property, jewellery, furniture. And they have a big say when it comes to household goods. They know the type of fridge, cooker, vacuum cleaner, television and so on that best suits their lifestyle. They are becoming more and more informed about the products they need to purchase.
But there is one scarce resource nowadays. Time. We are constantly aware of this. And the new consumers will not readily forgive companies that hijack or squander their time.
There are several reasons for time becoming so scarce; we all have to run twice as fast in today’s highly paced global marketplace than ever before. The most obvious reason is that people simply have too much to do, or maybe want to do too much. Often there is no choice but circumstances prevail and they have to try to fit in a little bit of living in between working, whether at home or somewhere else.
In most companies there are pressures to keep down costs, increase profits and this in a background of intense competition, in a country where the market is small and businesses eating each other.
In the office, workers are facing time pressures from the ever increasing amount of information with which they have to deal. Papers, reports, letters, and they switch on the computer to find an avalanche of emails. Then there are the phones… ah, yes, those phones, necessary, but a constant source of interruption that eat away at more of our time.
Since time has to be found from somewhere to meet these additional demands, the one thing most usually sacrificed is sleep. The result is sleep debt. Most of us need to sleep longer. Most of us want to sleep longer but cannot find the time.
Margaret Thatcher is said to have been able to thrive on four hours sleep a night when she was prime minister. The famous architect Gio Ponti, too, is said to have slept just a few hours a night. But this must be a special gift most of us simply don’t have: to be highly productive with very little sleep.
Abroad, in a growing number of companies, team players are seen as those whose car is first in the car park each morning and last to leave at night. A friend in Britain told me: “In our company there is someone who walks around the car park at 7.30am and feels the radiator of every vehicle – those still warm earn a black mark on the personal file of their owner!”
No, we cannot afford to waste time – ours or the company’s. I invariably put a black mark in my mind next to those shops and companies which play havoc with my time. Those shops which make it a habit to never open on time and close early are most definitely listed in My Little Black Book. I take my custom elsewhere, where they stick to their opening and closing times.
More and more I tend to frequent those shops which do not close at lunchtime and have longer shopping hours, simply because it suits my lifestyle. As the years go by, more shops are staying open during lunchtime. They are wise.
Then there are cafés and restaurants and other eateries. I popped into a café in one of the villages some weeks ago. There wasn’t a free table in the one to which I had planned to go, so my friend and I opted for another café where there was an empty table. What a disaster it was. One of our cups hadn’t been washed properly and had lipstick on it. My toasted ham and cheese sandwich had almost no butter, the ham was stone cold, straight out of the fridge… and the cheese was a bright orange and tasted of plastic. They gave us a mean portion of milk to go with the tea. Into my Little Black Book they went.
Yes, time is a scarce commodity and our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Even a long email is quickly deleted. There isn’t enough time to waste on it unless it’s from Shakespeare. There are too many others gasping for attention.
But it is not just marketing their products or services; companies must keep the new consumers scarcity of time firmly in mind. The same applies to every aspect of the transaction from making contact with their organization in the first place; by having an easy to remember and well publicized telephone number; or by being listed in an obvious way in the telephone directory; by having a congenial voice answering the telephone, someone who understands them and is efficient.
As for call centres, the less said the better for everyone. I do so detest them. An utter waste of time to the customer; enough to drive you to drink.
Increasing commercial competition is going to push businesses of every sort into really sprucing up their act. Businesses and even the small corner shop which I would like to see survive, will have to embrace new ways of selling to clients. They are there to give a service to the client so they are going to have to look around and see what the clients’ needs are. And adapt accordingly. After all, Sicily beckons and there is always the allure of the internet if service becomes to unsatisfactory here.