Transaction or Interaction?

Have you heard somebody say “if I had a quarter for every time X happened, I’d be rich”? Well, if you had a quarter for every separate interaction that you have with your clients, you’d be even richer!

The point is that in business, our customers interact with us a whole lot more than they transact with us. That is, they spend much more time visiting our store, browsing our website, talking to our sales people, and researching our products/services than they do actually buying. The point-of-sale itself, is just a brief moment by comparison. Yet, when it comes to marketing, that’s really what we spend at least 90% of our energy on – trying to drive and stimulate that all-important transaction. Some research suggests that consumers spend an average of 3 days comparison-shopping and researching prior to making an actual purchase. And the amount of time spent prior to purchase increases for higher-ticket items. We’ll do our homework carefully before buying a car, a house, even a nice jacket. But for a candy bar or pair of jeans, we’ll spend much less time in the pre-purchase phase.

So, here’s the dilemma. Why are marketers spending all of their time and focus on the customer transaction, if that represents only 5-10% of the time that the customer is spending with their brands? Because that’s when the money changes hands, that’s our livelihood, our bread-and-butter. But shouldn’t we care as well in all of that up-front planning, pre-purchase research, and comparison-shopping as the buying customer is? We should. It’s really the incubation period of a new customer relationship. It’s when you are top-of-mind, squarely within the customer’s consideration set, and are best positioned to “close the deal.”