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Brick No144: The Kudos Of Queues
By Matt Weston, Thursday 12 May 2005 The Kudos Of Queues If I asked you if you liked standing in queues, you'd say No, right? Not so long ago, an academic spent four years and thousand of pounds in grants proving that Britons don't like queues. In search of this obvious enough conclusion, the stupidly named David Stewart-David spent 92 days standing in 2,000 queues. Wait a minute. Even if the average Brit can't hack more than three or four minutes queuing to buy a train ticket, does that mean queues are always bad, bad, bad for sales? David Stewart-David's 92-day research doesn't out the fact that, even if people don't like queues, queues can give kudos. (I say Can.) If you run a bank, a supermarket, a passport office, or a political party, queues can't give kudos. And most of DS-D's time seems to have been spent standing around these places. He dutifully waited 26-hours in a passport office for instance. If nothing else matters to your customer except a short queue, give it to them. (In fact, in these industries, a proven way to score points is to ridicule the competition's queues. Even if the "poster of the century" was a clever fake, it's proof that queues sell ideas.) But for the rest of us, queues can give kudos. They can be positively great for sales. (Again: Can, Can.) David Stewart-David's study is an example of how it's not the research you do that really matters; it's how you interpret the results. Because we don't like queues, the easy conclusion is that they are bad for sales. But then how do you explain this? "It must be good, there's a 30-month waiting list" In fact, the more and more we don't like queues, the more and more powerful the message the queue sends out. (If you simply "need" a product, the message is always negative. If you "want" it, it can be positive.) Some collected thoughts and links below: (1) Fakery doesn't work. (Unless you're Saatchi and Saatchi.) The estate agent who says it's a buyers market to sellers, and a sellers market to buyers is getting his comeuppance. Link. Instead of lying about a queue, make what you do have visible: how would you react, for instance, if an estate agent gave you a list of buyers, and written-down proof that 87% of her houses sold at asking price or higher? (2) Queues are newsworthy. IKEA Edmonton's opening day "chavalanche" made all the front pages. And people talk about how the Birkenstock shop in Covent Garden only lets a dozen people in the shop at a time. (3) A photo of a queue says more about the product than the product itself. (4) From Seth's Blog: "people don't remember how long it took them to get service. They remember what the wait was like." (5) There's strength in numbers. Skype has 110,056,724 downloads and has served 8,506,967,981 minutes of fr*e telephony. Our very own Brickies Directory includes Garden Designers (2), Business Advisers (20), Web Designers (15) and Writers (3). If you see real numbers of other people buying, it takes the weight off your decision. (6) . . . But don't treat people like a number. See Brick No138 AKA "You Are Number 9,453". Remember to sign up: back to top |
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