Why is it important for a marketer to understand how a customer makes that final purchase decision?

Understanding how customers reach buying decisions helps marketers learn how to best position their brands at the exact moments leading up to those critical decisions. Learn how comparison marketing helps to achieve just that.

Everything we create, creates a journey for someone. When products are designed correctly, they are made with the customer in mind and the experience and journey they will have with the product. Successful websites are designed and developed with a focus on user experience, to ensure that all visitors know where they are and can find what they’re looking for.

Marketing and sales are no different, and a successful campaign will begin with a deep understanding of the customer journey and customers’ decision-making process.

Why Is the Customer Journey So Important?

Knowing the customer journey will help you create a better campaign that is customized to your target audience’s specific journey.

The problem with that answer is that it leads many to jump to conclusions and believe they already know the journey and how to create a relevant campaign. The customer visits your website, looks at the product, is interested, clicks the big green button, and voila!

The thing is, the customer journey and the decision-making process start long before they visit your site, or even heard of your brand name. Knowing all of the steps that they take (from searching Google for the service they need and discovering relevant brands, to comparing two brands that they aren’t sure about) will help you understand what you need to do to ensure that each step supports your brand and goal. As a marketer, you want to capitalize on those important moments in the decision-making process so that you can offer customers what they want at just the right time.

The Customer Journey: 3 Models for Decision Making Every Marketer Needs to Understand

There are three main models that are used to understand customer journeys.

The Five-Step Model

An oldie-but-goodie that breaks down the customers mindset while choosing and sticking to a brand.

Conceived in 1983 by Cox et al., this model is considered the most popular, despite its “advanced age" in our digital world. It breaks down the customers’ decision-making process when making a purchase into 5 basic steps:

1. Recognition of Need: The customer understands that they need a certain type of service or product.
2. Information Search: They search for products or services that could help them meet their need. This is done today mostly online, but offline methods are still being used, such as recommendations from personal and business connections.
3. Comparison of Alternatives: In the previous step, the customer will usually find a few options that seem to be relevant to what they’re looking for and will narrow it down to 2 or 3 options. At this point, they compare the ones they are interested in to see the pros and cons of each one before making a final decision.
4. Purchase: The best product from the available options is chosen and purchased, but that’s not where the process ends.
5. Post Purchase Evaluation: Often overlooked by companies, this is a very important step to consider in brand loyalty and customer retention. After purchasing, customers evaluate the product and decide if they are happy with it or not. This determines what they will say to others about the product (which is increasingly important in today’s digital age), and if they will purchase from the same company again in the future.

Howard Sheth Model

This model shows that the buyer’s decision-making journey is highly complex. It takes into account additional factors that include social, psychological and marketing influencers.

This one is actually older than the Five-Step Model, as it was created by John Howard and Jagdish Sheth in 1969. This model considers how the customer journey and decision-making process can be influenced by four main types of variables:

1. Input variables: The customer’s social environment, and the marketing activities they are exposed to.
2. Perceptual and learning constructs: How the customer obtains information, forms opinions, evaluates and compares products, etc.
3. Output variables: The consumer’s response to the environment, media, and other influences in making a decision. The “purchase consideration process” is in the following order: Attention, Comprehension, Attitude, Interruption, and Purchase Behavior.
4. External variables: These variables include the value the customer gets from the purchase, the customer’s character traits, what social group they are a part of, their financial status, and urgency.

The McKinsey Model

The go-to model for digital marketers, this model discusses how customers use technology to evaluate products and services, narrowing down their choices over time.

After examining the purchase decisions of nearly 20,000 consumers in five industries and three continents, McKinsey presents a model that is more suitable for today's digital consumer. Previous models looked at the customer journey as a linear process with a beginning and end. The customer goes from step 1 to step 5 and that’s it. McKinsey proposes that it is more of a circular process with four phases that are repeated:

1. Initial consideration: The customer considers an initial set of brands that are relevant.
2. Active evaluation: The customer filters out brands that he/she decides are not a good choice, and adds others. This is basically the process in which the customer collects information and processes it to narrow down all of the possible options.
3. Moment of purchase: One brand is selected from the list created in the previous step, and the customer makes a purchase.
4. Post-purchase experience: The customer evaluates the product and service, which create expectations that will influence the next decision journey.

…and back to step 1 again.

This model discusses the very interesting point of brand recognition. Popular brands or brands that the customer is exposed to in the media or from previous experiences are usually added to the first two steps. When looking for a product or service, customers will start by naming the first brands that come to mind, and those often make it through the process because brand awareness plays a huge role in this process. However, unpopular and new brands can beat their rivals and become a part of customers’ decision-making process by being present at the moment that customers are adding and removing brands from their list, i.e. the comparison stage.

Utilizing the Comparison Stage to Impact Customer’s Decision

The comparison stage, or evaluation stage, is one of the aspects all of these models have in common. Customers usually find themselves unsure which brands to choose and compare them to find the one that best suits their needs in terms of price, features, customer service, etc. By actively influencing this stage, companies can make sure that they are not only present at this stage, but that they are displayed correctly when compared to their competitors. The marketing activities aimed at superior positioning in relation to competing brands encompass what is called “comparison marketing”. Effective comparison marketing strategies take into account variations in customer motivations and behaviors and aim at adjusting the offering to the unique needs of particular users. While Customer A will choose the cheapest option, Customer B will prefer the one with better customer service or more comprehensive features. At Natural Intelligence, we specialize in comparison marketing and provide our clients with ways to be present at the perfect moment in the customer journey.

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