SUCCESS

You can learn a great deal about customers by studying the broader context in which they use your product or service. To do this, ask what your customer is doing three minutes immediately before and three minutes after they use your product or service. In applying this rule one company found that one of their products provided investment analysts with financial earnings data. The result was an almost immediate and very significant uplift in sales.

The three-minute rule also helps highlight unique cross-selling opportunities. Many years ago, a research company discovered new mums are also snap-happy mums. As a result, the supermarket put inexpensive disposable cameras close to nappies in their shop aisles. A purchase pattern that would otherwise not have been identified.

One final retail example described by Paco Underhill, a shopping-pattern guru. In his book, Why We Buy, he describes how shoppers who do not have a shopping basket or shopping cart go quickly to the checkout when their arms get full. Okay... so what? A savvier approach might be to interview people in a checkout line with an armful of goods to ask where they were three minutes earlier and if they would have considered buying anything else if it hadn't been so difficult to carry so many items. Underhill concludes that more establishments should consider putting shopping baskets in the middle of the store to keep customers in shopping mode longer (since research showed that few would go back to the front of the store to get a cart once engaged with shopping). Have you seen baskets in the middle of any of the stores you visit?

The three-minute rule reminds us that rearranging the context of a shopping experience to better meet customer patterns can be extremely effective. The three-minute rule is a forcing mechanism to see the bigger picture and adjacent opportunities.

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