Are you selling via time or money argumentation?

It is always interesting to see how companies are trying to sell their products and services with advertisements referring to two essential factors: time and money. Most of their marketeers can imagine the impact and effect of them on customers. The proof was often missing (also for me). After some years of searching, I found a study that states a relevant difference in which way companies are persuading customers to buy their products and services using these arguments to explain them the benefitial features.

A team at Stanford Graduate School of Business did some experiments offering lemonade in a park. They advertised the lemonade with two different creatives and switched them every ten minutes. One ad mentioned the time benefit “Spend a little time and enjoy C & D’s lemonade” and the other the money benefit “Spend a little money and enjoy C & D’s lemonade”.

What happened? The time offer got twice as many people buying the lemonade with the time benefit compared to the money one. And there is even more impact in the time factor. All people were allowed to pay whatever they wanted for the drinks. It showed that people with the time benefit bought more drinks and paid 80 cents more for the lemonade.

In order to test whether this is just valid for cheap products like FMCG goods- another test was set up with the sample principle for iPads. And surprisingly enough, the results were largely similar. The customers felt more engaged with products offering positive time benefits than money features.

Spot On!
Mentioning time-positive features rather than money benefits in ad campaigns can make products more valuable and interesting to customers. And researchers claim that there is no difference whether you persuade your customers offline or online with these features. There is one exception when you are selling “prestigious” products. If people are materialistic, this theory does not work.

If there is some other proof, let us know…