Ben Franklin, the source of so many famous quotations, is commonly attributed with first saying that “time is money.” Although I freely admit I had never read Franklin's “Advice to a Young Tradesman” before preparing to write this book, I discovered the phrase in that piece. Specifically, Franklin wrote: “… Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, tho’ he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent or rather thrown away five shillings besides …”¹

Franklin was reminding this unnamed tradesman that time spent not working is time spent not earning. It's good advice for certain, as it emphasizes the importance of hard work, of focus, and of output. Many sources highlight that this phrase actually goes back to the time of the Greek philosophers, but the essence of the phrase rings true, whether we are talking about the time of Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, the time of Franklin in the eighteenth century, or the modern millennium in the twenty‐first century. However, like all great concepts and philosophies, the idea has evolved and morphed to adapt to the reality of today. Today, the focus isn't on spending time working, but instead on being more efficient with time. I refer to this as collapsing time.

COLLAPSING TIME

The advent of digital introduced a new concept that has taken hold and become a critical value – the idea of collapsing time. As members of the modern society, we often talk about how there aren't enough hours in the day, how we never have time for desired activities, how we don't have time to think. This need to be more efficient, to fit in more activity, and ultimately to generate more output, in the same number of hours has been the primary driver of innovation. Products that are truly invisible to us today – the telephone, the automobile, the washing machine, the microwave, the fax machine – are all examples of innovations designed to give time back to the individual by allowing tasks to be performed faster and with less effort. The market positioning may have been convenience, but convenience is primarily a function of time.

Every digital tool has been designed to collapse time in some form, even if it's not the primary value proposition. When Google was first introduced, it saved the time of hunting and pecking for websites. Certainly, it opened up access to sites that otherwise would not have been found, but faster identification and access was a key proposition of web search. Even today, Google proudly displays the time taken to complete the search – when I searched for “Who first said time is the new currency” just now, the top of the results in Google said “About 774,000,000 results (0.63 seconds).” That certainly was much faster than having to drive to the local library, find the encyclopedias, look up the phrase, discover that the phrase isn't in the encyclopedia, and then drive home in frustration, only to open the browser and ultimately find the answer on Google.

As an aside, I likely would have discovered that the last version of the Encyclopedia Britannica was printed in 2010, which very well may have been before this turn of phrase was first coined.

Coming back to the topic, I still don't know who first coined the phrase “time is the new currency,” because despite the 774 million results returned by Google, I didn't find an answer to that question. Don't get me wrong; there are many publications and posts that use the phrase. It's just that there's not a single attribution the way that “time is money” is attributed to Ben Franklin (with a nod to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). I love the phrase, and have incorporated it into my daily discussion with clients, because it's a pithy way of explaining the value of convenience and acceleration in today's world. Consumers and business customers alike will pay a premium to gain back time, whether that premium be in hard currency or in loyalty to the brand.

As outlined earlier the first example of collapsing time in the Internet era was definitely the web search. Setting aside Yahoo!'s initial directory, the ability to enter a phrase and have a system return relevant results was transformative in the mid‐1990s, and remains transformative today. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, built one of the largest businesses in history on this foundation, and while they've diversified their offerings significantly, the foundation of search, and the advertising revenue it generates, remains the primary source of income and growth.

Website design equally focused on the principles of simplicity and intuitive design, finding ways to streamline navigation and guide the individual to find the information, transactional functionality, and other capabilities as quickly and efficiently as possible. A new discipline, digital information architecture, emerged in the early 2000s that was exclusively focused on the art and science of collapsing time. These specialists studied techniques for organizing menus and content that map to the natural thinking of the individual, which allowed people to find what they were looking for more quickly. Efficiency and speed became a measurement of the early websites, and studies were completed demonstrating that if a site wasn't intuitive and quick to navigate, the visitor would quickly abandon it and find another site. The realization that the competition was suddenly a click away took hold, and the race to collapse time while online reached full speed.

Naturally, this quickly led to an evolution in the application of search functionality. Digital designers and architects recognized that search could be as broad as Google or Wikipedia, but it could equally be as specific as searching for words on a website or content on a mobile application. Any functioning digital experience now offers a robust search function, regardless of whether that experience is accessed by a browser, a native app, a gesture, or a person's voice. Further, well‐designed digital experiences no longer only present static menus, they now ask the question of “How can I help you today?” using technology known as natural language processing. This saves the time of having to interpret and evaluate a menu and, instead, routes the individual immediately to the function or information required. These few precious seconds make an outsized difference in perception.

Alongside search, the idea of predictive experiences, based on personalization engines, rapidly gained traction across all digital experiences. If the experience recognizes who the individual is and is able to present content and functionality relevant to that individual's needs, wants, and history, the time spent on the current ask will be shorter. As data and analytics technology continue to evolve, now supported by modern artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools, the ability to create personalized and predictive site experiences continues to improve, and modern digital experiences are far more efficient than those designed just 20 years ago.

However, as with many advancements, this improvement has come with a cost in the form of increased privacy concerns and privacy regulations. As discussed in Chapter 2, The Dawn of Digital, the advancements in personalization and ad targeting ultimately backfired on companies and brands as the perception of invasiveness took hold. Governments have now passed regulatory statutes that limit what data can be captured and shared, and where that data can be stored. There's been quite a bit of press surrounding the “death of the cookie,” an initiative led by browser technology companies to block third‐party tracking, and sites are already required in major countries to publish their tracking policies. Individuals are demanding anonymity, but that works in reverse to the idea of collapsing time, as an anonymous experience is far less efficient. All this has forced experience teams to change their design paradigms, often encouraging immediate authentication of the visitor and, with that, permission to access their historical data. Once authenticated, brands have more opportunity, and an implied agreement with the customer, to gather relevant and value‐added information that allows for a personalized and predictive experience. As this authentication process itself becomes faster and easier, through facial, voice, and touch ID recognition, the value of authentication will again return the value of time.

The evolution of online commerce and fuel that's driven its exponential growth over the last 20 years is the impact of all of the concepts outlined earlier. The idea that the consumer no longer needed to hunt and peck for a specific product was revolutionary when first introduced in the 1990s. There was a novelty element to it in the early days – a brand differentiation we'll explore in Chapter 7, Finding a Novel Approach to Solving a Market Need – but more than that was a time‐collapsing element. Prior to online commerce, finding a specific product, whether it was an article of clothing, a popular gift idea, or a replacement part for my car, required that I grab the yellow pages, pick up the phone, and call store after store to find it in stock. That assumes that I'm searching during the days and hours that the store is open, which was limiting in its own right. I then needed to hop in the car, drive to the store, navigate to where the product was being held or on the shelf, buy the product, and drive back home. At that point, I may discover that I got the wrong product – wrong size, wrong color, wrong configuration – and then I needed to start the journey all over again. As we reflect on this history, it sounds absolutely barbaric. If nothing else, it was definitely inefficient. The evolution of commerce, be it the purchase of a physical product, subscription to a service, or engagement for a specific purpose, has now become a fully automated and seamless experience, with functional elements such as transparency, proactive notifications, preemptive processing, and location‐based decisioning all helping to collapse time and benefit the customer.

That said, we don't want to exclusively focus on digital. The world and the customer continue to engage across a range of channels. So while the preceding historical review of innovation is exclusively focused on the digital revolution, that does not assume that the only impact is in the digital channel. To the contrary, there are significant opportunities to collapse time during physical engagement, whether it is in person, in store, or on the phone. The data, insights, and automation functionality of digital, in the hands of an employee, partner, or the customer themselves, can increase efficiency and collapse time during a physical interaction. Employee tools can provide data, insights, transactional functionality, and other value‐added capabilities in the palms of their hands, delivered via their smart phone, their tablet, or their computer. This physical‐digital fusion is accelerating in the post‐digital transformation era, and there's quite a bit to learn from forward‐thinking companies that are investing across all channels.

This leads us to the brands worthy of study in this chapter: Amazon and Panera Bread. Both have embraced the idea of giving time back to the customer, both have focused on digital transformation and physical‐digital multichannel optimization, and both have realized enormous returns as a result.

TIME‐SAVING CONVENIENCES

Needless to say, there's quite a bit to learn from Amazon's story, including techniques to employ as you move your brand forward in the post‐digital transformation era. Amazon indisputably is the most successful growth story in the history of commerce. In fact, Amazon could be used as an example of a company embracing every recommendation outlined in this book, and through those recommendations it has realized global ubiquity, worldwide loyalty, and exponential growth across every measurable dimension.

Interestingly, Amazon's brand was not always synonymous with online commerce. In fact Amazon's origins were quite humble. This wasn't due to a lack of vision – Bezos's vision was massive and revolutionary from the beginning. However, when he bought the Amazon.com domain and incorporated the company in 1994, no one believed that that his online bookseller would become the largest retailer in the world outside of China.² (For those who are curious, the largest retailer in the world as of 2021 is Alibaba, given their dominance in China.) In fact, Amazon wasn't even the first online retailer of books; according to Britannica, Computer Literacy, a Silicon Valley bookstore, began selling books from its inventory to its technically astute customers in 1991.³ Amazon's vision, however, was unique at the time, as Bezos declared that his new company would ship any title to any reader anywhere in the world.

It was a brilliant ambition, but it does beg the question of why this was even a need or a value proposition. Again, the need and the value proposition, at least partially, comes back to time. While common titles at the time, including those of bestselling 1994 authors such as Mary Higgins Clark or John Grisham, could be found quite easily at brick and mortar stores, more obscure texts and titles were difficult to find. While many bibliophiles and bookworms enjoyed the process of browsing shelves of books in the local bookstore, for many others it was a hassle, and the effort required to find a specific title by a specific author within a massive Barnes & Nobles or Borders bookstore became a painful chore.

From the beginning, Bezos recognized the importance of convenience and the criticality of collapsing time. In a letter to shareholders in 1997, Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying, “Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery.”⁴ Given that he was quoted as saying this a year before Google came into commercial existence, it does show that he truly was a digital visionary setting the precedence of the age.

Early screen shots of the Amazon.com experience show content that emphasizes the value of Amazon's personal notifications. Why be forced to constantly log onto your computer to confirm whether the new publication has been released or a new product is available, when the website can do it on your behalf? Amazon.com was also one of the first sites to incorporate product search into the home page, so that all you needed to do was type in a title or an author and you'd get a short list of options that likely included what you were looking for. That was revolutionary technology at the time. These early conveniences were clear contributors to the realization of Bezos's strategy to “get big fast” in the 1990s. According to Britannica, “Amazon.com did grow fast, reaching 180,000 customer accounts by December 1996, after its first full year in operation, and less than a year later, in October 1997, it had 1,000,000 customer accounts. Its revenues jumped from $15.7 million in 1996 to $148 million in 1997, followed by $610 million in 1998. Amazon.com's success propelled its founder to become Time magazine's 1999 Person of the Year.”⁵

Bezos's vision extended far beyond books, remaining grounded on the idea of convenience and time savings in these early days. Amazon launched their Associates program – what we today refer to as an online marketplace – in 1996, which allowed other retailers to market and sell their products on Amazon.com, increasing the level of convenience by modeling Amazon as an online superstore, similar to the approach that made physical megaretailers like Walmart, Target, and the multistore suburban mall footprint dominant in the previous decades. This was an instant success, and by 1998 over 350,000 retailers had signed on to the Associates program. Just as these physical models allowed the customer to make one trip in the car to find multiple products, Amazon's Associates program allowed people to search one URL and find multiple products beyond books. First it was music and videos, both shipped to the home on CD/DVDs, and eventually a full range of products.

Amazon was relentless in its focus on saving time and introducing conveniences. In 1999 they introduced the idea of one‐click purchasing, allowing customers to enter and save their shipping and payment information for future purchases. This, together with the Amazon account data collected during account creation, allowed Amazon to start collecting browsing and purchasing habits, using that data to create a more personalized, convenient, and streamlined shopping experience. They set the standard for every other commerce experience, and differentiated their brand by collapsing time.

DATA‐DRIVEN INNOVATIONS

Data became the foundation for Amazon's next stage in digital evolution, which changed the overall approach to engagement and experience. Amazon recognized early in the digital transformation era the importance of customer data in developing a personalized experience that will benefit the consumer. If the site can predict what the customer is looking for before the person arrives at the site, the quality of the experience will be far better. As Leah Retta so eloquently stated in her insightful e‐book, AMAZON: The Chronicles of a Personalization Giant, the “foresight and understanding of the correlation between a shopper's unique needs and the decision‐making process would later become critical to what we now know and refer to as the customer experience. A new competitive battleground for brands looking to forge meaningful relationships with customers who have more options available to them than ever before, Amazon has achieved what everyone in the personalization game has hoped to – the ability to create tailored, online experiences designed for specific users that not only reflect a customer's tastes and preferences, but also anticipates their needs.”⁶

The key concept here, in terms of the lessons of this chapter, is “anticipation.” Using data to profile behaviors and, in turn, using that insight to personalize the interface to anticipated needs, allows the consumer to complete their transaction more quickly, combining together that which they planned to purchase with, potentially, that which they hadn't planned to purchase. Patented in 2001 and rolled out in 2003, this recommendation engine was the ultimate in convenience, effectively putting products together on the virtual shelf, not forcing the consumer to manually search for every product.

The elegance of the recommendation engine, even in its earliest form, was impressive. Amazon used several elements when generating recommendations, ranging from recent purchases made (for known customers) to the geographic location of the browser to purchases other customers have made after buying the current product being viewed. Amazon was careful with their vocabulary, offering a level of transparency to show how they were generating recommendations, keeping the “creepiness factor” at bay while delivering the personalized experience. While there are many angles to explore and unpack in terms of the impact that personalization drove for Amazon, not the least of which is an increased cart size and increased share of customer wallet, for purposes of this discussion it also increased convenience, which drew customers to and kept customers on their site. Over time, this also increased loyalty. Why fight through clumsy, unpersonalized experienced on other sites when Amazon makes it so easy and quick? The more the individual engaged with Amazon, the more that Amazon reflected the unique and specific interests of that individual. The experience became easier and faster with each interaction, encouraging new interactions. It created a brilliant engagement cycle, and Amazon's meteoric rise continued.

By 2004, Amazon started to look like the site that we know today. They were selling a range of products including housewares, electronics, apparel, toys and games, and others. Most notably, they added their A9 search engine, which used keyword tags and other techniques to predict what the visitor was searching for and attempting to present products that most likely represent the search. In 2006, Prime memberships brought two‐day shipping, further collapsing the physical time necessary to receive the product but equally importantly, removing the step of having to evaluate different shipping providers, timetables, and costs. Suddenly, the buying process was a click or two less. Over time, that evolved into one‐day shipping and eventually same‐day shipping in certain markets, sometimes within the hour. Now the online experience could require less time to fulfill than the physical experience, which is truly revolutionary, and again created a superior experience that led shoppers to adopt Amazon.

Amazon continued to introduce data‐driven innovations, finding opportunities to exchange convenience and time for the right to collect information about the consumer's behaviors. The data would further improve the convenience, and it became a rapidly accelerating cycle. Amazon created a gift finder that reduces browsing time and helps select the ideal gift for a specific individual and occasion based on the individual and occasion itself. This is a data‐driven algorithm that gets smarter with each interaction. They introduced a product‐comparison widget that simplifies the process of comparison shopping, without forcing the consumer to run multiple searches to identify and explore competitive products. They added customer reviews that allow for instant validation of both benefits and concerns, which increases the credibility of each purchase decision while using analytics to strategically present the right reviews without falsely suppressing potentially negative ones. Once a product was purchased, Amazon equally simplified the tracking process – sending updates directly to the customer's e‐mail, phone, Echo device, or mobile application. The buyer didn't need to go through the steps of tracking a package or even pulling up the order. Instead, order status was sent to the individual. Finally, Amazon recognized that online purchasing would lead to returns, so they built integrated return merchandise authorization (RMA) processes into the site and the app, and buyers – particularly Prime Members – could quickly print return labels and easily return products that didn't meet their exact expectations. Returning on Amazon was a faster and easier experience than returning to a physical store, and the consumer wasn't forced to negotiate a return‐to‐form‐of‐payment versus store credit. All these innovations, empowered and improved by data and analytics, collapsed the amount of time required to browse, explore, inspire, evaluate, purchase, track, and return products.

Amazon didn't stop with the on‐site experience. They embedded the same functionality into their mobile applications so that Amazon shopping functionality was carried around in the consumer's pocket. This eliminated the need to write down and refer to a separate list. They introduced their Echo device, commercializing the conversational interface, and included a range of time‐saving features that were integrated into Amazon shopping, such as the ability to shout across the kitchen while looking in the refrigerator. This reduced the time, and increased the convenience, of the Amazon experience, which was extended when the Echo device began proactively offering to ship replacement products to the house once patterns of usage were detected. The consumer no longer needed to check if they were running low on paper towels, because Amazon began predicting that they needed a restock.

Eventually Amazon introduced grocery delivery, seven‐day delivery service, and Amazon Key service. The last offering was perhaps one of the most innovative time‐saving services, as it allows the Amazon delivery driver direct access to the consumer's door – either a house door or a garage door – so that the consumer doesn't need to be inconvenienced by waiting for a delivery or worrying about redirection options.

Amazon, perhaps most notably of all, had embraced a physical footprint. Through the acquisition of Whole Foods and through their private branded Amazon stores: Amazon Go Grocery, Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores, Amazon Pop Up themed kiosks, Amazon Books bookstores, Amazon 4‐star general merchandise stores, Amazon Fresh Pickup, and an Amazon‐branded grocery store planned for Los Angeles, they are clearly experimenting with combinations of physical and digital combinations that will expand both customer share‐of‐wallet and, equally, increase customer loyalty. Their timing of much of this was unfortunate – right before the COVID lockdowns in 2020 that led to a short‐term retail apocalypse – but Amazon had the capital to be able to experiment in any environment. What's most interesting about many of these formats is that they're designed for convenience along with access. For immediate gratification and fulfillment, the consumer could place the order on the application and then pick it up immediately at one of the stores. This has proven particularly popular for subjective selections such as fresh grocery items, where many consumers aren't comfortable with having a third‐party picking their fruits, vegetables, and meats. This is now setting a new standard for physical shopping convenience, and other retailers are working actively to catch up.

Amazon's continued use of data to personalize the experience and anticipate needs are truly notable and established a standard of expectation that has penetrated the consciousness of today's generations. If your brand sells products or services online and you haven't adopted the fundamental standards of personalization and anticipation to reduce the time necessary to complete a task, I'm not going to sugarcoat the reality: you're far behind the curve. Fortunately, most brands have adopted this capability, quite often by platforming their commerce on Amazon through their modern marketplace offering and many integrated partnerships.

What has been the impact of this innovation and focus on customer convenience? The end results speak for themselves. With a $1.7 trillion market capitalization as of 2021 and $386 billion in revenue reported at the close of 2020, Amazon would be the twelfth largest economy if ranked against sovereign GDPs. Much of this revenue can be attributed to product innovation, including the wildly popular Amazon Web Services and the extended Amazon Prime suite of services, which include Prime Video and Prime Music, but at their core, it’s Amazon's data driven, personalization‐centric time collapsing commerce experience that drives the core of its revenue.

MAKING QUICK SERVICE QUICKER

Now let's pivot to a slightly less scaled but equally innovative experience‐centric brand in Panera Bread. Panera Bread has always recognized the importance of experience in defining the brand proposition. As articulated by an eTail blog post (the author is not named), Panera adopted a strategy in 2010 they called Panera Warmth. This strategy was based on CEO Ron Shaich's recognition that the Panera Bread brand was being tarnished by the lunchtime line, which forced customers to wait during peak periods.⁷ Nothing is more frustrating than having to wait in line for a quick‐service experience, and it quickly creates a negative reflection on the brand.

For those readers who do not know the history of Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) operational models, the idea of speed – of collapsing time – certainly predates digital. With 75% of QSR orders consumed outside of the restaurant, there has long been a focus on how to improve the takeaway experience. This led McDonald's to introduce the first drive‐through window in 1975, near a military base in Arizona,⁸ and a long list of other innovations ever since. Even today, 70% of QSR orders are picked up and taken away, often but not exclusively through the drive‐through window. Given this, digital technology was an ideal solution for QSR efficiency, but, interestingly, many QSR brands were relatively slow to adopt digital. Panera Bread saw an opportunity to distinguish their brand.

In 2010, when CEO Ron Shaich first realized that Panera Bread had a challenge with the length of the lunch line and the associated wait time, Panera began investing in their digital experience and opportunities to reduce the amount of time required to patronize their restaurant and, ultimately, enjoy their meal. He used his personal experience to help define their strategy. According to Fortune magazine, Ron Shaich frequented Panera for both breakfast and lunch while shuttling his son to and from school. Given he was a busy CEO, he was often running behind schedule, so he would call the restaurant and pre‐order his meal. Schaich would drive up and have his son run in with the credit card, skipping the line, and getting them out in a couple minutes. “That was a lovely system except it only worked for the CEO,” Shaich said.”⁹

Recognizing this problem, Panera Bread implemented a new system that was innovative for the time. It was not exclusively digital, but actually a combined digital‐physical experience. Customers could order online, via the web or their mobile device, with full configuration capability available as if the order were placed at the counter. Customers could use the emergent GPS capabilities on the mobile device not just to order lunch but order lunch from the location most convenient to where they are at that moment in time. The order could be prescheduled, allowing the customer to define what time they want to pick it up. This meets the critical need of allowing the customer to control the experience and the timing. These digital advancements, which are relatively commonplace today, were bold steps forward at the time. They addressed Shaich's vision of giving the CEO convenience to every customer.

As mentioned earlier, the new system wasn't only focused on digital or order placement. Order transparency – order status updates – was available both online and in store. There was no need for the customer to take up valuable time inquiring about when their order would be ready. Once the order was prepared, it was put onto a shelf with a clearly printed tag that had the customer's name (or nickname), so the customer didn't even need to interact with an employee if they didn't desire. Further, the mobile application or website identified which shelf the order was placed on. It was the ultimate in real‐time convenience.

In full disclosure, I've used this feature countless times to grab‐and‐go lunch while on a conference call. I didn't even need to mute the conversation to speak with an employee; I could just grab the bag and run back to my office. I'm a personal example of the loyalty and repeat behavior that this system fostered.

This was not a static initiative for Panera Bread, either. Like Amazon, they recognized the opportunity to leverage customer data to improve the experience. Fortunately, they had access to a rich trove of customer information collected, voluntarily and openly, through their loyalty program. To appreciate this, it's important to understand that the QSR customer journey is a bit truncated, typically ending at the point of initial fulfillment. It's a rare occurrence that I'm going to begin an RMA process for my Big Mac or my chicken burrito. However, as with all customer journeys, loyalty remains a strategic goal, typically driven through incentives and, more recently, convenience. Panera Bread followed the pattern of other great loyalty‐centric brands such as Subway in providing incentives and earnings to encourage repeat visits, but also early on recognized the value of the loyalty program's inherent data collection and the opportunity to use that data to extend further conveniences to the customer. This new release was named Panera Bread Digital 2.0.

As Fortune magazine outlined in their article after Panera Bread's initial Digital 2.0 launch, the application and supporting ecosystem were all about timesaving convenience. Leveraging the MyPanera reward program data, the application would present previous orders and favorite products once the customer identifies themselves at the kiosk. Further, if the customer customizes their order in a new way, this change is captured and available the next time. The customer doesn't need to re‐input their unique order with each visit, saving time and building a sense of digital intimacy. Effectively, this new system became the digital equivalent of walking into your favorite diner and telling the waitress that you'll have the usual.¹⁰

However, it goes beyond the convenience of reorder. Shaich explained at the time that Panera 2.0 was an investment in both customer service and operational improvement. He recognized that while the time‐saving convenience of mobile payments and data‐driven personalization was notable and compelling to the Panera customer, the long‐term benefits were more wide ranging, reducing the wait times in the stores, improving order accuracy, and eliminating crowding around the order counter.¹¹ All these points align the experience with time and with convenience, while generally propelling the Panera Warmth brand proposition.

Panera didn't stop innovating with the introduction of Digital 2.0. They were also one of the first brands to adopt digital delivery,¹² in 2016, offering the service before it became dominated by delivery aggregation services. This took convenience to another level during a time that delivery was almost exclusively the domain of pizza and Chinese restaurant formats. This offered more insight into the customer, as patterns could be created based on geographies and order patterns to the office and to the home. It was a short‐lived program, replaced by agreements with the delivery aggregators in 2018, but it was notable in extending brand value and loyalty.

Finally, Panera extended the digital experience into the store, offering both impulse and augmentation offerings to increase the ticket size while still streamlining the customer journey. Customers didn't need to reestablish their order or even work to identify themselves. Instead, they simply needed to either swipe their MyPanera loyalty card or enter their phone number in the kiosk, and they could instantly modify their order if an impulse triggered them in the store.

POST‐DIGITAL DATA AND LOYALTY

Like Amazon, Panera is an organization that doesn't stand still. They are already planning for the post‐digital transformation era with their latest “store of the future” concept, integrating the digital and physical experiences to marry together their brand proposition of quality food products and the ultimate in customer convenience. As Eduardo Luz, Chief Brand and Concept Officer for Panera Bread, said to Hospitality Technology in 2021, “Innovation is core to who we are and with our new next‐generation Panera concept, we are doing what we've always done – keeping a personalized experience for the guest at the heart of everything we do.”¹³ This bears all the elements of Panera's next‐gen store focus on making the customer experience more convenient, reducing the time of each transaction, even if only by seconds. Panera is introducing dual drive‐through lanes with a dedicated rapid pick‐up lane, dedicating space in the drive‐through to digital ordering and furthering the physical‐digital fusion. They are enhancing their digital experience with contactless dine‐in and delivery, a top priority during the COVID pandemic but very likely a continued priority moving forward. The experience will include full contactless ordering via the mobile device either in store, for rapid pick‐up, or from the drive‐through lane, and then contactless through the preparation process, with notifications, receipts, and all other information being provided via the individual's mobile device. The customer doesn't have to interact with or touch anything touched by another person, which is becoming a critical component of the physical experience coming out of the COVID pandemic. This is being provided to address an acute customer need, but it's being designed with the recognition that time is currency. Panera doesn't need to discount their menu to entice the customer in; Panera makes it easy to order and pick up with the confidence of contactless delivery.

Panera's next‐generation strategy maintains focus on data and loyalty as well. As Luz outlines to Hospitality Technology, they used restaurant foot traffic data to create a design that simplified the guest journey while keeping it compelling. The sights and smells of the bakery were an important part of the restaurant experience, the ordering process was made simple and intuitive, regardless of whether the order was placed at the counter or via a digital kiosk, and the location of food pickup was clearly labeled and located in an area where congregating was comfortable and possible.¹⁴ This is a clever use of data to improve the experience. It subtly enables the customer to navigate the restaurant more quickly, while also helping them move about more comfortably, creating an even more satisfying experience. At the same time, it can also be used to improve in‐store operations, creating conveniences that improve the guest experience. That said, Panera continues to use data to directly improve the customer experience and customer convenience, with the next‐generation strategy including digital improvement that further integrates loyalty‐program data and functionality, allowing customers to save favorites, earn and track rewards, and receive one‐to‐one content that is customized based on their visit and buying patterns.

This strategy has generated enormous returns over the years. From 1987 to 2017, at which point Panera was sold to JAB Holding Company and taken private, Panera Bread was the highest‐performance stock in the restaurant sector. They successfully navigated the COVID pandemic, maintaining their brand image and revenues during the most difficult period for the industry, and they maintained the loyalty of a fan base throughout the many shifts and challenges of the last two decades, ranging from digital threats to new formats to changing customer behaviors. If you're looking for me, there's a good chance that I'll be running through a Panera Bread store picking up my contactless order while participating in a conference call.

FOUR TIME‐BASED LESSONS

So what can you learn from Amazon and Panera Bread as you consider your brand experience strategy for the post‐digital transformation era? Ultimately, there are four critical lessons tied to the theme of this chapter.

The first lesson is to continuously recognize and explore the opportunities to collapse time. Amazon and Panera Bread's stories show that the real value is generated when you think more innovatively about how to collapse time at every stage of the customer journey. Break it down, as both Amazon and Panera Bread have, to the specific stages of engagement, which will be unique to your individual brand. For example, if customers engage with your brand to sign up for a service, think about the opportunities to reduce the amount of time necessary to find, to explore, to compare, and ultimately to commit to your service. If your brand provides multiple options, present options based on similar visitors – where they are, how they got there, what they've looked at before. Data and analytics can and will open up new opportunities for improvement, decompose every stage in the customer journey, from initial awareness through to loyalty, and evaluate how data can be used to personalize and streamline the experience. Think creatively, and don't be afraid to experiment. As digital has moved from a differentiator to an expectation, experimentation is even more tolerated, and if an approach isn't generating the results that you expect for your brand, tear it down and try another approach. The only thing to avoid is doing nothing. In the post‐digital transformation era, the moment your brand stops innovating is the moment that your brand starts declining.

Second, be transparent with the use of data. Both of these brand stories clearly demonstrate the value of first‐party data, and with the death of the cookie, there's a sudden focus on first‐party data collection. This data can be powerful, particularly when filtered through an analytics engine and used to anticipate needs or generate insights. While you need to collect and leverage it, don't hide the fact that, as a brand, you're leveraging data to improve the experience. Establish a value construct with the customer, using time as a key component of value, which encourages customers to agree to share their information. This was part of both Panera's and Amazon's strategy and core to their collective success. The cleverness of their algorithms extended too far from time to time – there's a prevailing and erroneous belief that Amazon's Echo devices listen to conversations and that Amazon uses that data to suggest products, for example – but overall Amazon has been very effective in their transparency, and they haven't been painted by the media or the masses with the conspiratorial brush that has plagued the other FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) companies. Instead, Amazon embraced transparency, embedding data‐driven capabilities into their experience messaging with labels such as “Customers who looked at this product also bought” and “Based on your purchasing history, you may also like.” Amazon doesn't hide the fact that they profile using data, but the transparency strips away the creepiness factor of interacting with a site that knows so much about you and your shopping habits. This drives the perfect balance that today's Millennials and Generation Z are demanding of privacy and personalization, ultimately culminating in seamless convenience.

Third, extend the convenience to omnichannel, if physical experiences are part of your customer journey. As we have moved from the digital to the post‐digital transformation era, customers – both B2C and B2B – are rediscovering the value of physical interaction and physical engagement. Whether it is driven by the desire for social interaction that was highlighted during the years of the COVID pandemic lockdowns – the need to see, smell, and touch the products being evaluated, or the desire to have a complex, multidimensional evaluative conversation with an expert – generations are rediscovering the physical world, but they're doing it in different ways than before. Panera's approach to physical–digital fusion is notable and pronounced, reflecting the criticality of physical experience in the restaurant industry but, equally, it reflects the shift in behavior by the consumer back to the physical. Amazon's rollout of physical stores is at least in part in response to consumer's need for multisensory evaluation, direct selection, and immediate gratification. Consumers aren't returning to the pre‐digital dark age; they are expecting that the physical experience will build off of their digital interactions. They expect to step into the clothing retailer and have their selected items set aside and staged in a dressing room so that they can quickly try them on and assess the fit on their body. They expect that the automotive seller has the vehicle ready for them to complete their test drive. They expect the financial institution to pick up the transaction from the specific point that the customer stopped engaging digitally, and they expect the healthcare provider to have immediate access to the biometric data collected by the wearable that first noted an issue or anomaly. Consumers expect to check in online to their flight, their hotel, and even to their restaurant. This extends to B2B transactions as well; the B2B salesperson hasn't disappeared, but the purchasing customer expects the salesperson to have full awareness of all evaluation activity and configuration data that was completed on digital platforms and to pick up from that point. Again, it's all about time – having to repeat steps, having to backtrack, having to complete tasks that were previously initiated online – this is no longer tolerated and will lead to immediate defection. It's critical to look across every stage of the journey and ensure that complete convenience optimization is incorporated.

Finally, don't hesitate to trade time for money. This is the essence of the phrase “time is the new currency,” and the modern interpretation of Ben Franklin's original adage. The convenience of collapsed time within the brand experience drives more than just engagement and loyalty; people are willing to spend more to gain time back. Panera isn't fighting the competitive battle on the pricing front the way that many QSR brands do with dollar menus and upsizing bundles, but instead holds to a premium price construct for quality products served via a convenient experience. Amazon has proved this quite often with commodities that could be purchased elsewhere. Rather than having to click off of Amazon.com and engage with a different site, including but certainly not limited to the equally impressive and scaled Walmart.com, to save a certain percentage, they will remain on the Amazon site and pay the premium. The savings in cost does not justify the additional time investment. This has been proven with inexpensive commodity items but equally with more expensive items, particularly as the consumer considers the entirety of the journey including convenience of fulfillment, convenience of service, and convenience of returns. Amazon has continuously used this principle to drive both revenue and margin on products, and it's an advantage for your brand as well. As we move further into the 2020 decade, the value of time is set to increase further, and savvy brands will cash in on this trend.