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Timing is Everything

Kelli Muwumba
Feb 15, 2018
2 min read

This year, as I was watching the Super Bowl pre-game show I was so annoyed with the amount of Pizza Hut commercials that I decided to make a game of it. I sent out a poll to my Facebook friends asking if I should do bench presses or sit ups every time there was a commercial for them during the game. I thought I was going to be super buff/sore by the end of the game.... however, although before the game there were an insane amount of repetitive commercials encouraging the purchase of a pizza, during the game, there was only one and I was fascinated!

The psychology behind advertising is so interesting to me, I think of when I was in college and Kohl's had yet to open in ABQ, they marketed on our local stations like crazy even before we knew they were set to open stores here. It peaked interest and brand awareness so that when the stores did come, the ABQ public was itching to shop there. I even did a project on this in school I thought it was such an effective model.

Now, back to the Pizza Hut commercials, I was so curious as to why they only had one commercial during the game and the obvious answer took me much longer to realize than I would like to admit: the pizza delivery purchases are far more likely to be purchased prior to the game than during it. Why would any company spend millions of dollars on advertising during a game that would only give minimal returns? It was simple genius.

I feel like as small business owners, we can learn a great deal from these national and international businesses. Why do we spend so much money and time on attempts to reach our customers at the less than ideal times. We feel we need to check the box and/or throw something at our customers and see what sticks not taking into account that at certain times they would be far more receptive to our ads if we executed them at a different time.

We hear the term "market research" and I'll be honest, it's even daunting to think about the time that it can take to learn as much as possible about your customers and their needs, but that time and energy can have exponential returns if done correctly. I could do a whole post on market research, but this is more of a shout out to the big fish that can show us little fish how it's done.