What do you think of when someone says they are “at work”? An office building? A typical work day (9am -5pm or 8am-6pm)? A typical the work week (Monday-Friday)? How about the workplace (an office with a desk and a computer)? We still hold on to these perceptions of work, despite research and our intuition telling us that this is no longer true. Management workers are increasingly working outside the office and spending more time in that capacity - 16% of the work week on average.
These “knowledge workers,” as Peter Drucker coined them, are also increasing the time they work at home. 38% of managers, information workers, and professionals spending some portion of their time at home during the workday, and 34% spend time on the weekend working (an average of 3.75 hrs).
The workplace, office hours, and work week are changing and will continue to change, so as marketers how should we be thinking about this change? I recently spoke with the head of a customer analytics company who mentioned that one of his clients discovered that targeting customers at their home address was more effective than reaching them at their office location.
Knowledge workers are also more likely to be business decision makers. In addition to logging time from their home, they are also the ones who are most likely to be mobile. As a result, they are heavy technology users: 93% saying that mobile technology makes them more productive. So is that the answer? Do we try to reach these business buyers on their smart phones and shift to mobile advertising?
Not so, according to Nielson in a McKinsey Quarterly report that found that it would take “a technology breakthrough to make mobile screens a more inviting environment for direct marketing and wireless commerce.”
Although technology will need to evolve, and it will, we should recognize that we are in middle of a significant change. The mobile movement is on, but it hasn’t reached critical mass yet. Behaviors are changing, but it isn’t a majority. The era of Business-to-Person (B2P) is evolving, but it’s also being viewed as a distraction.
As these technologies and work habits continue to evolve, what is certain is that businesses will continue to lose control over the message, the channel, the engagement, and the timeframe.
Customers can and do, decide on what and where they want to consume information. Americans now consume five times the information they did in 1980, averaging 11.8 hours a day. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article we’re now able to pack in, thanks to multitasking, 12 hours of media usage into 9 hours (think watching TV and surfing the net at the same time).
Our world is changing. The concept of “work” is no longer defined by a physical location, title or time, but rather it is a state of mind. Businesses are no longer an entity, but rather, a trusted individual. Legacy thinking is the idea of a business targeting a business buyer (by a title), at a business address, during “business hours.”
In this new world, sophisticated marketers have to embrace this change by understanding how to identify unique behavior segments of decision makers and influencers, where they congregate and how they want to consumer information, and that includes who they want it from, and when.
