“I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed“…this classic line from Monty Python’s 4 Yorkshiremen sketch may be hinting at the direction of travel the marketing world is heading with the capacity for instant gratification pervading and allegedly improving our lives!
Having had my formative years in the ’70s and ’80s, it is fair to say that I wear the “old git” badge with honour. Having made the seamless transition from owning vinyl records to live streaming (via 8 track, cassettes, and CD’s) and seen profound benefits. It is fair to say that dispensing with the need to queue around the block the day your favourite artist or band releases their latest album is a major sign of progress. Now, of course, in the comfort of your surroundings, you can click, collect, and download the latest tunes in less than the time it took to write this sentence!
Instant gratification is an inevitable by-product that followed the emergence of the Internet. Consumers now expect responses to their questions, orders, demands and opinions with both alacrity and immediacy and the plethora of available social media platforms consistently deliver.
Due to these changes in customer expectations, it is important to revise your business strategy and marketing plan and, most critically, their timings. The days of creating an annual marketing plan with quarterly management milestones may soon be superseded by a bi-monthly marketing plan reviewed weekly! This, of course, is also dependant on emerging new channels to market, the latest influencer and fads associated with the market you are in. Sometimes, acting quickly on these short-term marketing opportunities can create incremental revenue as they invariably have a limited time-fuse. I had first-hand experience in this reversal of fortune with Business is Open following the first lockdown in early 2021.
Time-saving lies at the beating heart of Instant Gratification.
A survey by Visual Capitalist shows what happens in 60 seconds on the Internet, as shown in summary below. Perhaps the Zoom and Netflix figures have a Covid distortion due to worldwide constraints, but it is fair to say that given there are 3.8 million Google searches per minute across the Internet, our quest for instant gratification is not likely to wane in the immediate future.
What is equally interesting is that impatience is a feature pervading numerous industries, which in turn fuels the desire for the need for instant gratification:
- Internet users will not wait for more than 4 seconds for a website to load
- Getting your product delivered to your home in one day is the new benchmark for home delivery
- You have the facility to fast forward over commercials during a TV programme
- You can even get an instant date by swiping left or right. I have no idea on this one??
How can all this influence the future of marketing?
There is a clear shift away from targeting the needs of your target demographic and more emphasis on marketing to the needs of each individual within your target consumer group. Geo-location tools can be scheduled to send personalised messages to these customers at precisely the right time, whether that happens to be when they are physically in the vicinity of your brick-and-mortar location or right after they visit your website in the digital world.
Tools such as chatbots that immediately respond to common customer service requests or take orders are becoming more popular, and many companies are replacing the “add to cart” button with a “buy it now” option. Ease of transacting and consumption are key. Adding an image to your tweet can result in 150% more retweets than the corresponding tweet without an image. Worth mentioning, though, that videos under five minutes in length account for 55% of total video consumption time on smartphones and blog posts that are approximately 500 words in length perform better because they are a quick read that can be consumed while waiting in line at a store or during a subway ride. I may have failed on this one in this case!!
As you can appreciate, I grew up in an age where instant coffee was once the latest shiny thing (do not even get me started on teabags!) While I appreciate the marketing worlds’ quest for instant gratification, there need to be some curbs and controls. Although the consumer’s needs, habits and desires seem to fuel the marketers’ indulgence and provide them with the backdrop for fresh “rich me quick schemes!” it is unclear where this journey might end…who knows in the future neuroscientists might even be able to fulfill the Monty Python delivery dream!
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