What’s on the consumer’s mind?

One fact that holds true in the marketspace whether online or offline, is that before marketers can effectively respond to consumer demand, they must first understand their consumers, but most importantly, their consumer’s behaviour.

A recent research by McKinsey states that consumers are moving ‘outside the purchasing funnel’ and changing their way of going about the selection and buying process. The way marketing has traditionally worked can be narrowed down in a few steps- awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase and loyalty. In other words, it’s a process that involves directing marketing at the consumer, in the meantime, the consumer is narrowing down his options and eventually choosing the one product that has captured his attention.

McKinsey recommends marketers revisit traditional models of consumer behaviour to find out if these principles are still valid in today’s Internet-oriented world. The firm conducted a study involving more than 20,000 consumers from three different continents across five different industries and discovered some significant changes in the consumer decision journey.

Because marketers are adopting new media strategies for their communication objectives ie: social networks, chats, forums, etc, to reach the potential customer, the shift towards a two-way conversation between marketers and consumers has become a key approach to gauge further interest in brands.

Also, and in contrast to the traditional buying process where consumers have limited amounts of information about the product of interest, today consumers are much more active in learning and finding out more whether it’s through blogs, forums, friends or surfing the net.

McKinsey has therefore redefined the purchase process into the following four stages:

• ongoing exposure- in which consumers continuously hear, see and learn about brands
• trigger- consumer moves ‘towards purchase’ and begins ‘initial consideration’ by first going through an ‘active evaluation’ of options
• moment of purchase- consumers have decided to purchase something, however, they’ve not decided what brand to buy. Decision is usually made in the store
• loyalty loop- is divided into two categories. Active loyalty are those individuals who don’t consider other brands and passive loyalty are those individuals who keep an open mind about other brands and don’t necessarily stick to the same one

McKinsey recommends marketers understand the consumer’s purchase process as to be able to ‘direct their spending and messaging to the moments of maximum influence, they stand a much greater chance of reaching consumers in the right place at the right time with the right message.’

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Other Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.