Why are Time, Place and Occasion the 3 New Pillars for Total Product Offering in Online to Offline Commerce?

It’s all about context (museums provide perspectives to context to the past as well as the future and so I used the image of the museum for this post) today when consumers are inundated with a myriad of products and services, when merchants struggle to match their product offerings to the tastes and preferences of consumers.

With mobile technologies, our daily lifestyles are both helped by and yet at times crippled by the lack of recommendations for products which are relevant at certain times of the day or week, around certain places we are located or preparing for certain special occasions like birthdays or end of year get-together with family and friends. Search on PC and Mobile helps with the first layer guide and then we, as consumers have to sieve through the second layer of pages of content from wikis, blog sites or lifestyle guides. Alternatively, we could draw inspirations from either mobile food and lifestyle apps or from our circle of friends from our Facebook or Instagram communities. Practically though, when it comes down to the decision point, you may end up asking your spouse or close friends (WOM, word-of-mouth) due to the urgency of the moment or lack of relevancy in the content you read to your context, tastes and preferences.

To get to the context for today’s mobile lifestyle consumers, merchants have to match the time, place and occasion parameters of the consumers with product offerings relevant to consumers’ tastes and preferences. And this will be an iterative testing, gathering and learning process.

With regards to time, merchants could think about the time of the day (breakfast, lunch, tea-time, dinner, supper?) or time in the week (weekdays, weekends?) or time in the year (school time, family holiday time?) and customize their product offerings in their communications to the right target segments.

With regards to place, merchants could think about the differences between customizing and offering their products in the central business districts, offices, industrial parks vis-à-vis the suburban residential neighbourhoods.

With regards to occasion, merchants could think about the nuances in product offerings to different cultures, festivals, or special moments for families and friends.

Again these are nothing new. Many merchants are trying to reach out to consumers from their brick and mortar stores or online presence and both traditional and digital marketing. However to capture today’s time-starved consumers’ mindshare, a merchant’s total product experience will need to go from today’s noisy practices of mass-communicating their product offerings and drive to more effective and targeted capture of consumers’ mindshare, by appealing to their lifestyle daily habits through testing constantly and providing hybrid curation of content and recommendations which strikes a chord with the consumers’ context in time, place, occasion.

What are your perspectives in the use of time, place and occasion to target today's and tomorrow's consumers?

Talk more in 2015. Happy new year!

Nelson Wee sending greetings from Singapore

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Photo credit: wallyg / iWoman / CC BY-NC-ND

Photo credit: h.koppdelaney / Foter / CC BY-ND

Photo credit: James Jardine / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

Photo credit: Graceful Cake Creations / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

Consumers are buying time

If there is one thing that the world is trending towards to these days, it would be this - "Consumers are buying time."

Do you get it?  Or perhaps, do the following ring a bell?


1. You have to get that gift for your special someone. But no, your office emails are piling up, the deadlines are looming, and you are totally fazed with the information overload.  You dig deep to manage the pressure (and there are ways to focus and get things done). You reach down to your nearest trusted deals app to grab an attractive offer.

2. You work your butt out more than 10, 11, 12 hours a day at the office.  Time flies by.  You look at your watch and feel you need to pack up to catch a warm dinner at home and catch some time with your kid before bed-time.  The dreaded Electronic Road Pricing system (the automated toll booth in Singapore) is still operational until 8pm every working weekday. But you decide to go home earlier, pay the toll because it's worth it.

3. You brave daily the crowded public transport (buses, trains), struggling to read the news on a daily from your smartphone, tablet (you missed getting hold of your newspapers from home or perhaps you have stopped subscription for the paper newspaper).  You had decided a while back to pay for your digital paper, your favourite eMagazine or even that odd eBook you had decided to pick up to make the most of your downtime waiting for your ride to the office or back home.






Are you able to associate to the above 3 scenarios?  While pretty local to Singaporeans, I dare say that these could be well linked to the lives of many urbanites all over the world.

With the sweeping wave of online and mobility trends all over the world and into Southeast Asia, ancillary revenue opportunities will open to different markets, abound via a mix of traditional and ancillary channels.  What are your observations? Are you riding the wave today?  I look forward to listen to your thoughts.

More discussions around the above topics in my later posts.

See you soon~
Nelson Wee
@nelsonwee

Kids nowadays multi-task more and more

Have you ever noticed kids these days? How they are able (claim to be able) to "multi-task" - TV switched on, using the laptop to browse the Internet or browse a book, toy cars in the other hand being moved here and there and all these happening whilst he is having his lunch. Well, this is the activity profile of my son, Elijah, 6 years of age this month, for the last 1.5 years or so.

The term "DIGITAL NATIVE" comes to mind. Wikipedia states that the term digital native, which was coined by Marc Prensky and also used by Gartner in their presentations, refers to a person who has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3 - it pertains to a new breed of student entering educational establishments. The term draws an analogy to a country's natives, for whom the local religion, language, and folkways are natural and indigenous, over against immigrants to a country who often are expected to adapt and assimilate to their newly adopted home. A number of parents or some grandparents are probably more akin to Digital Immigrants. I try to find comfort to be more associated to a "Digital Settler", being in the industry, immersing myself and keeping up to this new fast-paced, solution-driven, and attention-lacking mental model our kids (tweens, teens) are capable of and yet at the same time, be able to absorb information, and regurgitate when the need arises!

Marc Prensky's article also mentions the following from a student, "School didn't teach me to read—I learned from my games." Familiar? I see that in my son who talks about (and recognized off the road) Ferraris, Lombourginis, asks me about little geography like Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo - all these by playing the Game Asphalt in his portable gaming device.

I also hear from others that their children do not read newspapers any more - their teenagers claim that they are not out of touch; on the contrary, the teenagers get their own dose of news they find relevant to their lives from the Internet.

Used to the old adage from my parents (I am) on the need to focus on 1 thing at time (though nowdays I also tend to read a few books, magazines at a time, at times during the news on TV). What I am now trying to do, is to learn how to address my old mental model, adapt to the new trends in how kids today behave - these digital natives, who are so comfortable with technology and browsing multiple information at a go.

Most interested to hear (I would be) from the observations and learnings from all parents out there - do you observe the same in your children and how are you coping in your conversations and guidance to your children in their studies and everyday life with regards to this fast-track dizzying skimming from 1 activity to another syndrome. Do help comment to this post.


cheers,
Nelson

More notes on the term "Digital Native" can be found here in this link from Marc Prensky.