Looking at the same facts from a new point of view can create a new understanding

By Mark Helfen

Sometimes looking at the same facts from a new point of view can create a new understanding, a new marketing strategy, even a new way of designing a product.

At the November 8 SDForum MarketingSIG meeting, Adrian Ott, CEO of Exponential Edge, presented some new ways of thinking of time, and how it effects your products. If you were there, you would have heard phrases like:

- Time-onomics
- Attention bottleneck
- Inattention economy
- Time value innovation

The basic idea is to factor your customer's time, or more specifically the lack of time, into the design and marketing of your products.

The latest technology funnels huge amounts of data into our brains. The result is that we have to triage our attention.

"Time is driving so many of our decisions," said Ott, factored into everything. It isn't just price that is the basis of a purchase. Decisions are made by comparing value to price, plus the time that needs to be invested in buying or using a product or service.