Time Allocation and Marketing

Abstract

Marketing as a discipline is concerned with understanding exchange processes, normally those of goods and services for money. However, individuals also trade in time and the current marketing paradigm contains a number of tenets about time. Our objective is to identify the marketing paradigm by constructing a framework describing the process of individual time allocation. The paradigm has a number of weaknesses, particularly in its concern with the issue of how and why time is allocated by the individual. It is argued that future research could benefit by drawing on concepts of time from other academic disciplines so as to improve our understanding of the time allocation process and of personality factors in it. Alternatively, marketing theory may benefit from the development of a new paradigm where time is redefined as a more complex entity.