CONVENIENCE IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Katie Thomas

Convenience has become the main attraction of modern retail marketing. The problem is that while everybody talks about it, nobody bothers to define it — especially in the variety of ways consumers do — and that can cost dearly. It’s time “convenience” — perhaps retailing’s most sacred cow — was quietly led away to the slaughterhouse of cliched ideas, along with the rest of the herd of buzzwords and marketing myths that separate our idea of an abstract consumer from the real-life people who buy our products and services.

It’s not that convenience doesn’t exist, or that it isn’t important. It’s more that we’ve never attempted to define it from a consumer point of view. Too often, we talk about convenience exclusively in branding terms — a nebulous abstraction somehow tied to an undefined mixture of ease of purchase and speed of location, transaction, and delivery.

In an attempt to find a more satisfactory (and accurate) definition, the Kearney Consumer Institute polled consumers to see how they defined convenience. What we found was that considering convenience in isolation, rather than as part of the full brand experience as lived by a unique individual consumer at a specific time, is a common and potentially fatal mistake.

The truth is consumers are more than willing to go out of their way for their favorite products. In fact, they regularly do just that.

Consumers are clearly willing to be inconvenienced, as long as it’s on their terms. This is true even in the case of “everyday” products, where we often make the mistake of thinking that time-strapped consumers are more willing to trade off a convenient purchase for time. For example, 30% of respondents said they were willing go out of their way for food groceries. As one respondent told us, “I have a store preference that is cleaner and has better selections than ones that are closest to me. Their prices are also better.” Another shopper said, “I want the freshest vegetables I can get and I’ll drive to the store for them.” On a personal note, I can attest to driving an extra ten minutes for my favorite snacks.

Beyond everyday purchases, 50% of our survey respondents prefer physical stores when shopping for their favorite clothing brands, despite the common assumption that consumers see online shopping as easier. And 30% of respondents are willing to wait for an order of a specific furniture item, or marble countertop, if it’s more in line with their aesthetic, rather than buying what’s in stock.

It turns out consumers have a far more elastic sense of time than we generally give them credit for. Consider that waiting 20 minutes to order fast food is generally unacceptable, while waiting the same 20 minutes to sit down in a four-star restaurant is perceived as no wait at all. There’s actually science to support and explain this. MIT Professor Richard Larsen developed two models — the Queue Inference Engine and the Hypercube Queuing Model — to explain what makes line times so elastic.

Larsen, also known as “Dr. Q,” believes the key to making time elastic — and therefore reducing frustration and what he calls “queue rage” — is that consumers need to be able to believe their patience in putting up with a delay will pay off. Time trade-offs become easier when there are signs of hope — specific reminders that the extra time required to complete a task won’t go on forever. To consumers, time is adaptable to their perception, a principle Disney exploited in its cutback-style rope lines, which make consumers think they are closer to entering a ride or exhibit than they actually are.

Survey participants clearly thought of convenience as much more than speed or geographic proximity, including behaviors we might typically view as “service” or simply getting the help they needed. Consider what one survey respondent shared with us:

“I realized my shopping cart was too small. I proceeded to look for a larger cart but was not successful. While shifting my purchased products in the cart, an associate saw my dilemma and brought a larger cart. She then placed my merchandise from the small cart to the larger one. At checkout, one of the items was priced higher than advertised on the shelf. The associate notified a manager, who promptly adjusted the price to what was shelf-advertised. Upon placing purchased items in my car, I was pleasantly surprised to see the associate approaching me to retrieve the cart. I consider this experience to epitomize shopping convenience.”

This sense of consumers’ time elasticity reorganizes convenience around three principles:

• Access: Sellers have to have what consumers want, offered in a way they can get it.

• Interface: The simpler, more intuitive, and frictionless a seller can make a transaction, the better.

• Expectations: Offerings should be clearly differentiated and of high value in the consumer’s mind.