I heard an ad on the radio this morning for Instant Justice. No, not the movie about the U.S. Marine in Spain, this was for San Diego's new program for people who "over-partied" this July 4th weekend to work off their citation through community service. Which got me thinking once again about our culture's never-ending obsession with instant, and what it means for us marketers.

We have long had instant coffee, instant noodles, and instant wrinkle removers. Now in the digital world, we have Google Instant to speed up searching by showing results as you type (Thank God! My last search took a whole .08 seconds!), Netflix's Instant Watching, and even instant love letters.

As marketers, we can take advantage of society's collective impatience (which only increases as technology speeds things up) by promising fast results from little effort. But this only works IF (and this is a big if) we can deliver on that promise. Or we can take the opposite tack, and slow things down. Convey that like fine wine, good things take time. And it's worth the wait to get it right. This suggests to customers that instant can mean rushing, which can mean suboptimal results. Which  makes non-instant the safer, lower risk bet.

Dictionary.com defines instant as "an infinitesimal or very short space of time; a moment." On the other hand, Einstein's theory of relativity (listen here) proved that time is relative- at least one's perception of time (read "instant") is relative. My man Dr. E. put it like this:

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."

 So how instant is "instant" in your space and for your target market? And think about it... is "instant" the right play for you?

P.S. Click here to instantly check out this blog post on a contrarian view of instant gratification... including the life-changing Stanford Marshmallow experiment! Wow!!

No, I don't mean MTV's award-winning series on musicians performing with acoustic (i.e. unplugged) instruments. I mean unplugging and taking a break from our cell phones, our texting, our computers, our iPads, our tweets, and of course our Facebook. And yes, blogging. (Which - good news - will make you feel, well, groovy, according to my friends Paul and Art!).

As a society, we have without awareness slipped into a new social norm; one with expectations of always being “on," instantly accessible, having your whereabouts and activities known to all, and finding out anything and everything immediately. Underneath it all is our dubious societal addiction to instant gratification.

Most marketers feed the notion that instant gratification is a good thing. We promise faster and faster, which we imply is better and better. There is however longstanding research that proves otherwise. Here's Wikipedia's summary of the classic Stanford Marshmallow study:

To test the theory of a person’s ability to delay gratification, the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (1972), conducted by Prof. Walter Mischel, at Stanford University, California, studied a group of four-year-old children, each of whom was given one marshmallow, but promised two on condition that he or she wait twenty minutes, before eating the first marshmallow. Some children were able to wait the twenty minutes, and some were unable to wait. Furthermore, the university researchers then studied the developmental progress of each participant child into adolescence, and reported that children able to delay gratification (wait) were psychologically better adjusted, more dependable persons, and, as high school students, scored significantly greater grades in the collegiate Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Delaying gratification as a four year old is linked with happiness and better grades ten years later... amazing!

Can you pitch delayed gratification or slowing down as a good thing that results from your product or service? If so, think "benefits segmentation." Determine what segment of your market would value or perceive benefit from unplugging. It may be way more folks than you think!

P.S. Check out the new nonprofit Sabbath Manifesto and their 10 Principles. They have an app (no irony here) too to support people unplugging. And it is purely a happy coincidence that the first National Day of Unplugging started on my birthday!