• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, June 26, 2012

At the Lures of Retail event in Boston, New Balance's head of global digital brand marketing Stacey Howe compared the relationship between marketers and consumers to the "five second rule" whenever you drop food on the ground.

The rule: If you drop food on the ground, you have five seconds to decide if it's worth it to pick it up and eat it. Somewhere around the fifth second, the food becomes so contaminated that you can't eat it anymore.

Howe says that in any environment - retail, online, video, etc. - within five seconds of seeing a product, the consumer needs to be able to decide, "What is it? Is it valuable to me? Do I want to use it?" She says that it's up to the marketer to make the experience of encountering a product intuitive enough that a consumer can answer all of those questions within those five crucial seconds.