When a major marketing campaign is built around only a few words at a time, you can bet good money that those words were chosen with care.
The social human mind is full of fault lines, conceptual interfaces that represent the meeting of important forces. Successful marketers today work hard to find those pressure points and exploit them. There’s nothing necessarily manipulative in that – it’s just how effective communication works, and that’s the business that we are in. A single word matters.
One of the more interesting fault lines is where the value of time meets the value of money. Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase “time is money”. Psychological studies of recent years, however, suggest that this isn’t exactly true. We tend to value money and time very differently, and presenting value statements based on either money or time will produce different results.
In 2009, marketing professors Cassie Mogilner and Jennifer Aaker conducted a series of experiments designed to determine exactly how “priming” (leading an elicited opinion with either a statement or question) with time and money references affects consumer thinking. The full paper was published by the Journal of Consumer Research, and they turned up some very interesting findings.
Even mentioning money shifts mental focus to material possession. And that’s not necessarily good. There are some products and services – luxury and prestige purchases – that in themselves confer an ego boost to the possessor. Studies have found that for those items, a pitch that uses money-based words (money, cost, price, etc.) will shift consumer focus to possession, with an increase in favorable response.
However, those cases are in the minority. Most products are meant to be used, not simply possessed, and selling those with money imagery has the exact opposite effect. Favorability goes down, personal connection fades, and consumers are more likely to see this product as a simple commodity.
Reference to time, on the other hand, puts the message onto action and experience. The same study found a strong contrast when time references were used rather than money images. Consumers asked to respond to a time-based message were more likely to view the product or service as an experience, and its value as a result of being used. Time made it an action, and consumers who were more likely to value action and experience over possession had increased favorability responses.
The key values here are fungibility and ambiguity. As Einstein pointed out, time is relative. Money is concrete, however, and that difference accounts in a large way for the discrepancy in how we contrast the two. Money is generally a fungible commodity – meaning, it can be substituted at equal value with a comparable amount of money – but time is not. One man’s minute is another’s eternity, and money can be replaced. Time lost is time permanently lost, and so it hurts more to lose it.
Time is also more ambiguous than money. It is harder to measure, quantify and communicate. Because the value of time is much more ambiguous and elastic, many people would rather spend time than money on high risk, hedonic and high-experience goods.
In the large majority of cases, time appeals are more successful at creating a personal connection. As marketers, we all want our audiences to be more personally invested in what we are selling. We want to appeal to reason, of course, but we also want to win over their hearts. We want them to want it, not simply think that it’s a good idea. The 2009 study was unambiguous on at least one very important point: in the strong majority of available scenarios, using time references was far more likely to lead to personal investment and connection. Far more people value time emotionally than they do money.
In a 2007 study by Cambridge researcher Eric Levy, messaging in favor of charitable and philanthropic giving was analyzed for effectiveness and success results. Levy found that, particularly when the giver self-identifies as a moral person, they are much more likely to respond favorably to a request for their time than their money. Appeals for money were more likely to turn those people off.
What was even more interesting was that, when asked for their time, those people were more likely to give their time and money.
Scarcity is the whole game. Nothing is forever, and everything comes to an end at some point. We live in a finite world, where scarcity drives value in everything. The difference between time and money, however, is that the scarcity of time tends to elicit much stronger emotional reactions.
Composer Leonard Bernstein once said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” We are all running out of time, and each of us must constantly make hard decisions about how we plan to meaningfully spend the limited time we have available to us. More than any other point, the scarcity of time – and how it differs greatly from a simple lack of money – is the major driving point behind a time-based message.
Money can be replaced. Time cannot. And so we take the loss of time far more personally.
With an estimated 48% of advertising messages today based on time or money appeals, odds are that one of them will soon be yours. By calibrating your message carefully, you will be more successful at establishing a better expectation of value – and a more profound personal investment on the part of the consumers who will value what you offer.
