The evolution of consumer behavior in the extremity age
3 better shifts in marketing paradigms in the 21st C and where we are going next
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the side by side two years and underestimation the change that will occur in the next ten." -Bill Bill Gates
One of the best examples of how we both overestimate and underestimate changes in the future is the evolution of consumer behavior throughout this century.
Take a minute and imagine the world we were in 10 long time ago (it's hard to consider 2007 was 10 years past). Facebook was relieve competing with MySpace for dealings, Amazon was primarily known for merchandising books, and the iPhone was just released.
Back in those years, the way we shopped for products was drastically different from the way we grass today. Most of us still trusted brick-and-mortar stores, we didn't have Mary Leontyne Pric comparison services, and we were at the mercy of biggish corporations for discounts.
How did we go from that "noncivilized" world of shopping to the consumer experience we induce today in the digital age? More importantly, where are we going?
That wish comprise the topic of this article.
Today, we will examine three primary paradigm shifts in the merchandising world in the last 10 years due to the issue of digital technologies and platforms so much as Facebook, Virago, and smartphones.
More specifically, we volition talk about how, in just 10 years, we went from a simple, retail-focused model (the "first import of truth"), to today's iterative, digital-centric model of client demeanour (the "accelerated customer determination journeying").
But the goal of this clause is not merely to explore the history of marketing frameworks. IT's also to project the future of marketing and consumer behavior. Based on the three paradigm shifts I mentioned, we will take a glimpse into the next decade to see how we, A business owners, crapper adapt to this untried and ever-shifting world.
Paradigm 1: First Moment of Sojourner Truth
Imagine yourself as a customer in the year 2005. You just walked into a grocery store to buy a bottle of shampoo.
You look down the aisle and see over 10 shampoos of different brands and types, and you need to make a decision connected which one to purchase.
You may consider several factors when qualification this decision — the design of the label, the position of that shampoo on the shelf, and the careful explanation on the label.
The conclusion litigate you are going done satisfactory now is what marketers at P&G call the "First of all Moment of Truth."
Coined in 2005, the "Moment of Truth" modeling is one of the most celebrated marketing frameworks because it thus accurately captures the customer's decision process when purchasing a product (First Moment), experiencing a product (Second Moment of Truth), and sooner or later becoming loyal to the brand.
You hindquarters see an overview of these "moments" in this graphic:
Arsenic the shampoo story illustrates, the original "Moment of Truth" example does non incorporate digital technologies operating theater the internet into customers' shopping conduct.
For the resolve of this article, information technology serves as a terminus a quo.
Now let's add digital to the mix.
Prototype 2: Zero Moment of Truth + Customer Determination Journey
Army of the Righteou's go back out to the shampoo story again, but in the year 2011.
Now, As a customer, you have sufficient memory access to smartphones and the internet to go on the far side the shelf when evaluating the production.
In fact, you might not comprise at the physical store at complete since ecommerce stores like Amazon and Walmart.com have also become significantly more touristy, serving as viable alternatives to the physical retail store.
Therefore, when you need something look-alike a shampoo, you are unlikely to give-up the ghost direct to the store to purchase, but sooner go online to search something like "the outflank shampoo in the macrocosm" — and that's the Zero Minute of Trueness.
Coined away Google in 2011 (the stallion ebook is linked under), the Nothing Moment of True statement (ZMOT) describes how digital channels such as social media and look tempt the customer decision journey.
The significance of ZMOT is that it is perhaps the first marketing frame that emphasized the importance of appendage channels as a faultfinding component part of the customer determination journey. This encouraged companies to start considering "buzzwords" such as SEO and SEM (search locomotive engine marketing).
Whereas ZMOT signaled a turning point of the digital age in marketing, a new theoretical account popularized by McKinsey in 2009 gave marketers an straight more up-to-date way to think about the new, repetitive customer journey created past new technologies.
Under the time-honored marketing mindset, customers behave in a funnel. They set out by becoming aware of the product and denounce. Then, they eventually pass over several stairs to purchase a product and get along loyal customers.
In each of the stages, customers may "dribble off" in the funnel. The marketer's job here is to prevent these drop-offs by optimizing their electronic messaging in all step of the funnel.
However, with an enormous measure of conclusion power and data unlocked by smartphones and the internet, customers none longer interact with companies in the simple manner delineate above.
Instead, the modern customer's conclusion process is very much more iterative. Customers today hop 'tween different stages of the funnel betwixt aggregate companies, thanks to the power granted by the internet. Their decision journey looks closer to something like this:
The significance of this new McKinsey model is that information technology none longer views the client's journey as their fundamental interaction with indefinite individual company.
Instead, it introduced the idea of a "circumstance set": a basket of products that customers are considering that English hawthorn meet their needs.
This "circumstance set" modelling showed companies the importance of providing their customers with enough information for them to make the purchase decision, instead of "plugging the funnels."
This framework, combined with ZMOT, is the well-nig popular marketing framework of this decade. It has been evangelized aside countless online courses, and victimized by businesses ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small ecommerce stores.
However, even these two models are being challenged by integer acceleration.
Epitome 3: The Accelerated Loyalty Journey
One of the biggest problems of the deuce late frameworks is that they are too slow.
Nowadays, customers are bombarded with thousands of pieces of information every unmarried day o'er the internet, and their attention span has deteriorated rapidly.
What this means to marketers is that a customer's evaluation cycle is importantly crunched from a stage of multiple years Beaver State hours to a matter of minutes or seconds. If your ware does non convince customers to buy flop now, you have lost that customer's attention forever, and they will probably not come back no matter how untold you bombard them with ads.
This simple fact led McKinsey to update their customer decision journey to an updated model, illustrated below:
The significance of this new "accelerated loyalty travel" is that it doesn't just revolve about providing information to help customers evaluate the society's products.
It also emphasizes the importance of delivering that data in the shortest amount of clip to the most targeted customer segments. This allows marketers to get these customers to take direct activeness and convert.
In other words, having the information is not enough. You penury to button that info sharply ahead of the customers at the exact moment their needs are generated.
Enabled by advanced technologies such as machine learning and fake intelligence, more and more companies have started to conduct this type of "hyper-speed targeting" to their audience. This marks a new age of merchandising mechanization and acceleration.
Where are we going away?
Now that we have examined the three shifts in marketing paradigms in the last 10 years, it's time to talk about where we are going next, and what we give the axe practise as modern marketers to stay ahead of these trends.
While these shifts in merchandising may seem very different, the underlying theme is the same: customers are comely more powerful in making their possess buying decisions.
Gone is the time when we could aver, "advertize it and they will come." Now is the time when we have to nominate products WITH and FOR a specific customer audience in order for them to become a hardcore customer.
As the information available to customers proliferate, this trend wish only accelerate in the succeeding 10, making "customer-centrical" marketing even Sir Thomas More important for companies to bring home the bacon.
So as marketers, here are some important steps we should take to obtain in this new digital age:
- CO-make up our brand and product with customers: it's time to talk to our customers typeface-to-face to understand what they need, what drives them, and how we can best serve them. It is clock time to plosive consonant hiding behind the facade of digital ads. We moldiness develop genuine conversations and relationships with these people that we truly charge about.
- Endu in employees that actually give care roughly your cause: the paint to advanced marketing is to be trusty and genuine. You cannot achieve unfeigned authenticity until everyone in your company deeply cares about what you build and consider in your values. Only by hiring these people who are aligned with your individuality can you chassis unfathomable connections with your customers.
- Invest in technology to accurately target your audiences: the merely way to make sure you send the right message to the suited audience at the right time is using technology. Machine learning and artificial intelligence platforms are getting cheaper and easier to use every day for non-technical marketers. Take advantage of these technologies and advance your marketing to the next tied.
- Try out perpetually: the great thing about digital platforms is that they are inexpensive and wanton-to-use. This opens up opportunities for a large intensity of testing and experiment in your company. So purchase these brand-new testing opportunities to figure out the best way to reach the people you want to reach.
Act up you bear any some other ideas on what other we can do to stay ahead of the upcoming paradigm shifts in merchandising? Comment below!
when a grocery store chain adopts a new practice
Source: https://medium.com/analytics-for-humans/the-evolution-of-consumer-behavior-in-the-digital-age-917a93c15888
