Playing with Time:
Appealing to the Unconscious Mind
Last week, my mobile phone provider didn't send me a SIM card they had promised. In my conversation with
the call centre I explained that visiting their store wasn't a good use of my time; something they might have
guessed from my initial decision to have them post the card to me.
They said they couldn't get it to me by the promised date any more (the following day).
I was cross.
The call centre person decided that it would be a good idea to recap on exactly what she and I had done up to
that point.
I politely interrupted her and pointed out that, I was getting the impression I valued my time quite a lot more
highly than the phone company. I didn't want a potted history of my (bad) recent experience, I wanted a
solution.
Oblivious to this and presumably because of some awful training, the lady decided to press on with the recap
anyway.
I got crosser.
I interrupted her again, somewhat exasperated. I asked to speak to a supervisor.
She asked why.
I referred back to the fact that, since the whole transaction had been conducted by me on the basis of my
valuation of the best use of my time, telling her what I was going to tell someone else wasn't going to make me any
happier.
She put me on hold.
I was left to stew in my thoughts of escalating crossness, perhaps only for a couple of minutes. During this
time I rehearsed my (angry) argument and, as is the nature of such mental rehearsal, dug myself an angry trench
from which to launch my attack.
In customer service situations like this, relatively short delays feel enormous to the customer (and make an
initial problem much worse). Call centre's should have a clock that runs at twice the usual speed if they want to
understand how a customer feels. A rational analysis of hold times is meaningless: what matters is how the customer
is feeling during that delay.
It's been believed for some time that perceptions of time are linked to consumer evaluations: it even affects
purchase decisions. If people perceive that they'll spend a lot of time with a product or service they're more
inclined to purchase it. Studies have also shown that focusing marketing messages on time (rather than price) can
have a positive impact (seeYour Money or
Your Time).
Recently researchers set about exploring whether perceptions of time could be influenced: could the same event
be perceived as more pleasurable by creating more focus on the time involved?
They discovered that when people focused on an event that was described as pleasant, breaking down the
experience into subcomponents increased the amount of pleasure they anticipated.
On the other hand, when people thought about an unpleasant event, breaking it down in the same way increased the
anticipated displeasure.
Whilst more work is needed to understand where the boundaries are, the broad implications of this research can
be incorporated into marketing activity.
When the focus of a company's product or service is something engagingly positive, breaking down the elements
involved will increase the desirability of what you have on offer.
When the focus is something that is likely to be perceived less positively, for example a financial services
product that people know they should get on and
sought out but usually put off, you should do the opposite. Summarise the product or service into as few component
parts as possible.
And, of course, if you're in customer services and something bad has happened to a customer, don't review every
step of that negative experience with the customer, particularly if he's already told you he's thinking about the
time he is wasting because of your error.
Source: Claire I. Tsai and Min Zhao. Predicting Consumption Time: The Role of Event Valence and
Unpacking. Journal of Consumer Research, October
2011
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