Time is money: The effect of time of day on product purchase
A product, say a cup of tea or a croissant at a bakery, is often given a unique name to describe the product category, imply certain product attributes, and differentiate it from the competition. According to self-congruity theory, consumers either buy products congruent with their self-image or purchase products to supplement qualities that they lack. Thus, unique product names can be used to convey specific benefits of a product. For example, Boost Juice offers creatively named smoothies such as “Weekend Warrior” and the “Energiser Blend” to imply vigour and improved vitality.
Businesses that adopt this naming tactic often assume a constant effect and rarely consider contextual factors like the time of day or the hour of purchase, which may impact how customers respond to the product’s name. Moreover, a lack of research has focused on such contextual factors and specifically the interaction between product names and time of day.
This study seeks to examine (1) how contextual factors like the time of day may impact consumers’ preferences for products with names that imply specific human-like qualities; (2) whether businesses can alter their communication practices regarding time of day to better match products with consumers; and (3) underlying mechanism driving varied consumer preferences over the course of the day. It draws on regulatory mode theory to consider the regulatory mode orientations of product names, for instance, locomotion qualities associated with vitality and movement in Boost Juice’s “Weekend Warrior”. Specifically, it is predicted that in the morning consumers purchase relatively more products with names that have high locomotion qualities and that such preference for locomotion product names in the morning are stronger as the season shifts towards summer.
Method and sample
This study used 162 days of consecutive point-of-sale data comprising 8212 transactions from a bakery located in England. The sales data included the date, time of transaction, and the names of products sold in each transaction for the period. Additional historical data consisting of the time of the sunrise were matched with the dates in the transaction data to compute how many hours after sunrise each transaction occurred. This variable allowed for hypothesis testing, because as the season shifts towards summer, transactions occur more (rather than fewer) hours after sunrise.
To infer the locomotion qualities of products included in each transaction, a crowdsourced sample of 325 English consumers from Clickworker rated all 83 products sold at the bakery using a simplified locomotion two item, six-point scale. The average locomotion score of each transaction was then calculated and integrated to the point-of-sale dataset.
Key findings and recommendations
Overall, the findings highlight how the time of day influences consumer preferences for products with names that reflect locomotion qualities. First, the preference of consumers for products with locomotion qualities was high in the morning and low in the evening. For marketers, it is recommended that digital advertising displays in-store are used to match consumer preferences with the products displayed at different times of the day to encourage purchasing. Also, digital campaigns through loyalty applications, social media, and other forms of collateral can be timed to match product names with consumer preferences.
Second, it was found that this preference for locomotion qualities in product names gets stronger as the season shifts towards summer when the sun rises earlier. In the increasingly flexible marketing environment, collateral can be adjusted seasonally to take advantage of the seasonal shift in consumer preference.
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The research article is also available on eprints.