Marketing: when time is of the essence
05/23/2025
3 min
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When it comes to marketing, La Fontaine’s fable still applies: there’s no point in running, you have to start on time. But what is marketing’s relationship with time? Thomas LECLERCQ, professor of marketing at IÉSEG and a specialist in digital marketing and customer experience, explains.
From the life cycle of products to the question of the best time to launch them, not forgetting the need to innovate or capitalise on trends, marketing is intimately linked to the notion of time, opportunity and momentum. But what else?
The keys to “time to market”
In a nutshell, “time to market” can be summed up in one phrase: “fast, but not any time”, explains Thomas Leclercq. Launching the right product at the right time has always been one of the keys to marketing strategies. There’s an instinctive tendency to think that speed is of the essence, but that’s not always true. Some companies will tend to launch their new products quickly, while others will look at what already exists on the market to see if they can capitalise on what already exists. In the car industry, developing a revolutionary model is extremely expensive. A manufacturer may prefer to let a competitor develop it, even if it means offering a better-performing competitive model at a later date. The advantage of starting early is that it creates a competitive barrier: once you develop expertise that works, it becomes difficult to catch up’. But this can also lead to failure…
Read the full article in the latest edition of Change Magazine (“Time is indefinable”):
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