I’ve just read a really interesting article from those learned folk over at McKinsey’s about the Consumer Decision Journey and thought it well worth sharing:
Click above to read the McKinsey article
McKinsey’s have also posted a nifty 5 min video that takes you through their thinking here: http://tr.im/pIzL
They’ve been out speaking to consumers and doing some qual research looking into how the modern shopper goes about purchasing stuff. What they’ve found is that the traditional purchase funnel (Awareness -> Familiarity -> Consideration -> Purchase -> Loyalty) is not as linear as we once thought. There are no major surprises here, but the more interesting point that they have made is that consumers tend to go from a repertoire of a small number of brands in any given category (there’s some research suggesting this is as low as 3/4 per category, but I can’t find the source – post a comment if you have any ideas!) to a much larger repertoire as they do more research on their purchase.
Whilst it’s obviously important to try and be a part of a consumer’s initial, small repertoire of brands, this also supports the idea that it’s just as important to be visible when consumers are researching your category as well. And where best to be when consumers are researching? Our favourite fact-finding tool: Search.
For a challenger brand that finds it difficult to break into the top 3/4 brands in their category this could be a valuable learning. Running an ongoing, consistent search campaign that adds them to a consumer’s consideration set is a much more cost-efficient and lower risk strategy for gaining market share than trying to directly compete with the big boys. Let them do the heavy-lifting of getting consumers into the category and then mop consumers up whilst they’re doing their research. It’s a given that this will work much better in some categories than others (high interest vs. low interest categories), but is definitely something worth bearing in mind for some of our clients in 2010.
Let us know your thoughts below…
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