Regard­less of the for­mat, I did catch up with the author Jim Lecin­ski recently and we had a chance to chat about the ZMOT con­cept. Jim started by explain­ing what the ZMOT is:

“The tra­di­tional model of mar­ket­ing is stim­u­lus – you put out a great ad cam­paign to make peo­ple aware of your prod­uct – then you win the FMOT (a label coined by Proc­tor and Gam­ble), the moment of truth, the pur­chase point, the shelf. Then the tar­get takes home the prod­uct and hope­fully it will live up to its promises. It makes whites whiter, brights brighter, the pack­age actu­ally gets there by 10:30 the next morning –

What we came out with here in the book is this notion that there’s actu­ally a fourth node in the model – of equal impor­tance.  We gave the umbrella name to that new fourth moment that hap­pens in between stim­u­lus and shelf: if it’s prior to FMOT, one minus F is zero, ‘Zero Moment of Truth.’”

Google didn’t invent the ZMOT, just as Proc­tor and Gam­ble didn’t invent the FMOT. These are just labels applied to con­sumer behav­iors. But Google, and online in gen­eral, have had a pro­found effect on a consumer’s abil­ity to inter­act in the Zero Moment of Truth.

Lecin­ski: “There were always ele­ments of a zero moment of truth. It could hap­pen via word of mouth. And in cer­tain cat­e­gories of course –wash­ing machines, auto­mo­tive, cer­tain con­sumer elec­tron­ics – the zero moment of truth was won or lost in print pub­li­ca­tions like Con­sumer Reports or Zagat restau­rant guide or Mobil Travel Guide. But those things had obvi­ous lim­i­ta­tions. One: there was fric­tion – you had to actu­ally get in the car and go to the library. The sec­ond is time­li­ness –the last time they reviewed wash machines might have been 9 months ago – and then the third is accu­racy – “Well, the model that they reviewed 9 months ago isn’t exactly the one I saw on the com­mer­cial last night that’s on sale this hol­i­day week­end at Sears.”

The fric­tion, the time­li­ness and the sim­ple lack of infor­ma­tion all lead to an imbal­ance in the mar­ket place that was iden­ti­fied by econ­o­mist George Akerlof in 1970 as infor­ma­tion asym­me­try. In most cases, the seller knew more about the prod­uct than the buyer. But the web has dri­ven out this imbal­ance in many prod­uct categories.

Lecin­ski: “The means are avail­able to every­body to remove that sort of infor­ma­tion asym­me­try and move us into a post-Akerlof world of infor­ma­tion sym­me­try. I was on the ad agency side for a long time and we made the TV com­mer­cial assum­ing infor­ma­tion asym­me­try. We would say, “Ask your dealer to explain more about X, Y, and Z.” Well, now that kind of a call to action in a TV com­mer­cial sounds almost silly, because you go into the dealer and there’s peo­ple with all the print­outs and their smart­phones and every­thing like this, so they know this. So in many ways we are in a post-Akerlof world. Even his clas­sic exam­ple of lemons for cars, well, I can be stand­ing on the lot and pull up the CARFAX his­tory report off my iPhone right there in the car lot.”

Lecin­ski also believes that our cur­rent cash flow issues drive more intense con­sumer research.

“Forty seven per­cent of US house­holds say that they can­not come up with $2,000 in a 30-day period with­out hav­ing to sell some pos­ses­sions. This is how pay­cheque to pay­cheque life is.”

When money is tight, we’re more care­ful with how we part with it. That means we spend more time in the ZMOT.

Next week, I’ll con­tinue my con­ver­sa­tion with Jim, touch­ing on what the online ZMOT land­scape looks like, the chal­lenge ZMOT presents mar­keters and the 7 sug­ges­tions Jim offers about how to win the Zero Moment of Truth.


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.