[LUM#10] Are you polychronic or monochronic?
Do you ever feel like you can't see the end of it or that there aren't enough hours in the day? Do you tend to get distracted or, on the contrary, to focus? What if we just learned to live at our own pace? Marketing researcher Andréa Gourmelen analyzes the influence of our relationship with time on our daily behaviors.
"Today, our relationship with time is a key variable," explains Andréa Gourmelen, a researcher at the Montpellier Management Research Laboratory (MRM). " At one time, we were told to move quickly. Now, with the slow life trend, we are told to slow down, but no one is encouraging us to follow our own pace." The researcher does not hesitate to compare this individual pace to "a personality trait, a subjective relationship that each individual has with time."
A personality trait
Andréa Gourmelen describes two typical personality profiles: polychronic and monochronic. "The first type likes to do a thousand things at once and is very efficient that way. The second type prefers to finish one thing before starting the next. Neither method is better than the other; you just have to follow the one that suits you best."
Except that at a time when magazines, blogs, and other coaches are all offering their little tips on how to better manage our time, it's not so easy to understand and respect our true nature. To conduct their studies and establish our profiles, marketers work with scales. Respondents are given items to rate according to their level of agreement. "On a scale of 1, when they completely agree, to 5 when they completely disagree. For example: I prefer to work on several projects each day, rather than finishing one and then moving on to the next," explains the researcher.
At the end of the test, the number of points accumulated points to one profile or the other. "It's perfectly possible to agree with only three or four items out of six," explains Andréa Gourmelen, "the idea being to define a general personality trait based on the degree of polychronicity."
Time and consumption
A relationship with time that modern societies tend to question in terms of task planning or productivity, but which ultimately shapes much of our behavior and actions, as the researcher explains: "Our relationship with time is as individual as a personality trait, but it is also multifaceted. It influences how we shop, how we exercise, what we eat, and even how we use digital applications."
These are all situations and approaches in which the "time variable" can prove relevant or revealing, and which have been of interest to marketing researchers for more than 25 years. "There is a wealth of literature on this subject in our discipline," explains Andréa Gourmelen. She and her colleague at the University of La Rochelle, Jeanne Lallement, wanted to make this literature more accessible by publishing " a summary of 198 articles studying the influence of this variable on our consumer behavior" in the journal Research Applications in Marketing . Enough to keep you busy for a while .
Read also:
Slow down... or find your rhythm?, 2018, in The Conversation
The time remaining
How does the perception of remaining life expectancy influence retirees' commitment to volunteering? It was with this original approach that Andréa Gourmelen, then working on her thesis, began to introduce the time variable into her research. A social marketing study aimed at improving the quality of volunteering in associations. "It is often mistakenly believed that retirees volunteer because they have a lot of time to give, when in fact they often feel that they lack time in their daily lives."
Three years and some 700 questionnaires later, she highlights the relationship between volunteering and what she describes as "the relationship to the time remaining to live among older people." A relationship to time and its acceleration that is again perceived in a very individual and subjective way. "For some, the awareness of death will plunge them into regret and nostalgia for all the things they haven't done, while for others it will spur them on to do lots of things because they feel they don't have much time left and want to make the most of it. It's really very personal," concludes the researcher.
Find UM podcasts now available on your favorite platform (Spotify, Deezer, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, etc.).