I've been obsessed lately with the frequency and duration of leap moments.
This is a term of my own making, and I'm referring to those moments when whatever it is you're doing is put on hold, paused, or there's otherwise a few minutes that don't seem to belong to anyone.
Like when the line gets longer than a few people at the Starbucks or fast food counter. Or when you're waiting for your order to be fulfilled. Sitting on an airplane within a stone's throw of the gate, but you can't get off for 10 minutes because nobody's there to open it. An elevator trip that makes a dozen stops via slow-moving doors. You know, exceptions. Interludes. Leap moments.
They usually occur when something that's supposed to occur doesn't, or doesn't happen fast enough. They also usually involve a group of people, aggregated in physical space, and often arise because of their presence (i.e. too many people trying to do something at the same time). Leap moments are somewhat predictable, and a fairly regular fixture in our supposedly hyper-paced lives. They're like extra time, or moments out of time.
So, thinking as any good marketer should, I wonder how we could exploit them?
There's not much happening on this front so far. When people wait on the telephone ("we're experiencing unusually high call volume..."), it's common practice to throw advertising at them, since they're quite literally captives. But waiting on hold is a solitary experience, and there are far better ways to engage with folks than subjecting them to recorded ads via IVR. This approach is the most common tool used when folks are similarly held captive in geophyscial real space, too.
I choose to define the marketing opportunity differently, and focus on the qualities of those moments that people share, even as they do their best to ignore one another (iPod volume, anyone?).
I wonder...
- Would people want to play a game of some sort?
- How about some activity that earned them benefits that could be used moments later (i.e. could waiting be so incetivized that folks would look forward to them).
- Maybe these impromptu aggregations of consumers could be focus groups, or information-sharing experiences? I mean, isn’t standing in line a de facto social activity...or could be?
- Why not simply (and basically) use them as opportunities to communicate with people on substance or some other quality (other than throwing ads at them that they didn't ask to see or hear)?
Again, right now, these moments are exceptions -- almost as if businesses don't know what to do with people -- and yet they are common enough that they should get incorporated into the overall brand planning. I'm not thinking logos and marketing, though, but rather working to figure out what might your consumers want to do with a few found leap moments?
There's another possible approach, of course: stop making us wait?
