The Science behind customer decision-making process

Feels kind of weird that I’m here talking about shopping. I didn’t really ever expect to be a student of shopping. I don’t really like shopping, actually, there’s probably some of you who relate to that, not like my mom who goes to the mall on the weekend to unwind. That’s not me, but that’s also a narrow way of thinking about what shopping is.

What I’d like to propose for this article is that shopping is really about customer decision-making process, and so when we think about shopping, rather than think about it as the person who goes and does the grocery shopping, or maybe your sister who likes to go and buy clothes, or my mom who likes to go to the mall, I’d like to propose we think about it as this idea of decision-making.

So if shopping is decision-making, then so many of the things that we do each day could be encompassed in that. It could be where to go to school, what classes to take, what to do with our financial future, what kind of insurance to sign up for, an elective medical procedure we might do, should I get braces etc. So if that is if all of those things are shopping, then what we wanted to understand is what does it take to get someone to say “Yes!”, and if you think about all the moments in your life, where you have this journey where you’ve got to go from undecided to decided, what are the information sources that you include to sort of get you to a place where you feel comfortable and say “Yes”, whether it’s a trip to Europe, whether it’s to go out on a date with someone, What’s the inputs that you use?

If you think about the inputs that we used to have let’s say if we were to have bought an appliance 10 or 15 years ago what you’ve done? Could have asked your father-in-law for information? Could you have gone to the store? I suppose you could have ordered a CD-rom at some point? What was that customer decision-making process? Today if we’re going to buy an appliance we can spend months if we choose reading reviews, talking to other shoppers online. We can ask for input on Facebook and we might get, depending on the category we’re looking at dozens or hundreds of emphatic responses. How do all of those sources go into our brain and help us get to a place where we say:

“Yep! I’m going to go ahead and purchase!”

So, if you are familiar with marketing, have worked in marketing, have worked for brands or a retailer, you might have heard of this thing called “The purchase funnel”. Fortunately, most of us haven’t heard of that, which if you haven’t just leave it that way. The concept here is that when we’re making a decision to purchase, to hand over that money, we go through this sort of process, right? We learn about something and get an awareness going, then we sort of become educated and then eventually we cross the finish line and we do what those marketers want us to do and if they could just expose us to enough ads, certainly we would get over that finish line.

We have a hypothesis that this was actually an outmoded way of thinking about customer decision-making, particularly in a world in which we have so many different inputs coming in from all of these places. We’ve got our mobile phones, our apps, social media, video games. We felt like this idea of decision-making being linear was really not the case anymore, it didn’t seem like decision-making has ever been really a logical process and it didn’t seem like we were kind of moved bumping along, just in a sort of straight path. We felt that it was actually more like a heat map or like a neuron firing in the brain, that’s what maybe decision-making might look like. This is actually real data that we use to create this idea of where people were going for information, how long were they thinking about their decisions, where were they going for information, what sources of information were most influential.

Several years back we were talking to brands and retailers all the time who asked us again and again: “Should I build an app and is that going to move more product? Should I get a Facebook campaign going? What should I do?” We didn’t really have an answer. We were like: “Well, you should definitely do this neat stuff”, but we didn’t have any proof to say if it was actually influencing people to buy.

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