Editor’s note: J. Kevin Bokeno is president of Keynote Consulting, an Advance, N.C., research consulting firm.

It’s 6:30 Wednesday evening and a home owner, we’ll call him John, needs to mow his lawn. The problem is that John’s lawn mower is broken and he hasn’t had the time to try to fix it. So, he leaves work and drives to the nearest mall that has a department store that carries such things and, after flicking through two or three informational brochures and staring at a couple of "looks like they could do the job" candidates, he flags down a clerk, points out his choice, whips out a credit card, and is on his way. Total transaction time: 22 minutes.

"So what?" you say. You like a man who knows what he wants.

The problem is that John didn’t know what he wanted. What he did know, however, was that he needed to buy a lawn mower and get his lawn mowed that night. If he didn’t do it, it could very well be a couple of weeks before he had another opening. So, John made a $324 purchase decision in about 22 minutes.

We’ve heard of another couple who bought a brand new van in slightly over an hour. Did they comparison shop on the Net? Collect sell sheets to pinpoint the desired and required features prior to the purchase? Nope. They needed the van and had from 9:00 to 11:00 on Saturday morning open before another weekend crammed with soccer, dance, and alas, work spillover from the week before.

Did they get a good deal? Probably not. Did they get all the features they wanted? Doubtful.

However, this couple made a very conscious, and increasingly very typical, tradeoff. Even in this traditionally high-involvement purchase, they were willing to risk making a sub-optimal purchase decision in order to "get it over and done with and get on with our lives."

Impulse-buying behavior is not only increasing in traditionally high-involvement categories, but in day-to-day purchases as well. POPAI’s (the Point of Purchase Advertising Institute) Consumer Buying Habits Study indicates that in-store decision-making behavior for packaged goods has risen over the last decade and that brand switching rates are also going up. Unlike the deliberate purchase decision process that characterized our parents’ generation, we Boomers are increasingly shunning deliberation for efficiency.

For my father, buying a lawn mower was a saga. It would entail no fewer than four retail outlets, stacks of information about engine size, blade width, etc., untold phone calls to neighbors and other men in the family, and even after a mower was selected, post-purchase dissonance that would last two to three summers.

But that was in the ’60s, when product differentiation was re-emerging as an integral part of the selling process, a natural and predictable reaction to the "you make it, we’ll buy it" demand curve of the post-WW II era.

The recession-burdened and angst-filled ’70s put the emphasis on price as the key driver in purchase decisions (generics) and the ’80s shifted it to the other side of the value equation by emphasizing brand names -- the more conspicuous, the better.

If each generation has its buying experience label, the tightening of time constraints is certainly the dominant theme of the ’90s.

Although somewhere in the back of our minds, we Boomers recognize that we should do our buying homework (and it’s even easier given the availability of information), an increasing number of us simply want to fit the process into the allotted time.

Another reason we are willing to squeeze our buying decision process into a few in-store seconds is our relative affluence. Our haste does not allow us to critically evaluate the value/price equation, but we willingly acknowledge this shortcoming going in; and, more importantly, we know that if we make a mistake, we have the resources to cover it later.

As important as this trend would seem to be to marketers and marketing researchers, our traditional marketing and marketing research techniques haven’t shifted to accommodate it. Our training is in building brands and there is no doubt that brand building will become even more important as this trend continues; however, how we build them may need re-examining in that the accepted "Hierarchy of Effects" model that describes the decision process from awareness to behavior may need to be retumbled. (See Fig. 1)

Our research clearly suggests that an increasing number of consumers are willing to shorten the purchase decision time and act without the facts. For more and more of us, if a true need exists, behavior occurs after a very minimum level of product familiarity and actually before attitude formation. We call this the "microwave process" because there is a willingness to risk getting a less than optimal product to get it quicker. (See Fig. 2)

It is fairly easy to see how this trend will affect our traditional marketing practices. Intuitively, packaging, point of sale, and shelf placement will continue to gain in importance, as consumers make more and more of their purchase decisions in-store. Logically, we could predict that store brands, getting preferred in-store treatment, will likely gain share as this trend becomes the norm. Also, existing brands with heavy equity should thrive in this environment as time-constrained consumers look for the "mark of quality" that established brand names and icons convey. What will fall by the wayside are those brands with marginal equity; and logically, spending behind new brand introductions will continue to shift to the trade. Product delivery will be held at an even higher premium, as attitudes and belief formation will occur following product experience and be less encumbered by image-building advertising messages.

From a marketing research perspective, we are solidly behind this curve. While we continue to evaluate discrete components of the mix, we have not done a good job of understanding the integration of these components into the gestalt of the decision process; moreover, when attempts are made, they are with respect to the more traditional persuasion hierarchy model and not a reflection of today’s consumer. Perhaps that is why we struggle to define motivation behind purchases in terms of product attributes and their benefits, when the real reason may be more related to being in the right place at the right time.

Our firm is working with clients to understand the whole decision-making process for their category and how it’s impacting them. For example, we urge our clients to reexamine the role of advertising in this paradigm. Is it to inform and educate or to reinforce a decision already made? Does more attention need to be paid to packaging and point of sale? Will the importance of relationship marketing increase with this new trend?

These are just some of the issues we are addressing with our clients. As it turns out, "Just Dew It!" is more than a cute pun. It reflects, in fact, the common approach to purchase decisions in the ’90s, and, while it may have always been the norm for soda pop, it represents a real paradigm shift for those marketers used to (counting on?) prospective buyers actively seeking out product information before making their purchase decision.