Understanding customer path to purchase–promise or hype?
Google “Path to Purchase” and you get hundreds of thousands of hits. Yet it’s not a term that is particularly familiar to many Marketers, Operations Professionals, or Store Managers nor have they attempted to harness its power. Simply stated, the Path to Purchase acknowledges the complexity inherent in understanding consumer behavior. It recognizes the many forces that play a role in motivating consumers to purchase your products rather than those of your competitors. For example, consider the role of media in the consumer’s Path to Purchase. In just the last 10 years, we have moved from a mass media environment to one of segmented multi-media. It was not long ago that: TV, radio and print advertising were the prime media for motivating customers Companies created websites with the sole purpose of showcasing their products and discussing policies rather than leveraging a powerful selling tool at hand Companies consciously, and capably evolved their catalogs and their website did what it could to catch on as a force to sell products Twitter and Facebook had little influence on the products consumers purchased There was no GroupOn. No interactive media. No apps. Companies were slow to acknowledge how critical it is for their brand to speak with one voice across all media influences: To have a coordinated message, look and feel whenever and wherever the brand is saying “buy me” to customers. It’s clear that the power of traditional selling channels is being diluted. Physical and digital channels are becoming integrated and customers are being asked to consider more messages from more sources than ever before. New touch points, such as smart phones, social reviews, and platform aggregators are being increasingly used in combination with websites, catalogs, point of sale material and, of course, traditional advertising. Additionally, thanks to the rise of social networks, word of mouth is becoming the new currency. Indeed, it ...
Apple store lavishes service on disgruntled iPhone user
The customer enters a teeming Apple store one week after the release of the new iPhone with a head of steam built up over a seven-day period of unalloyed product frustration. “I want my money back,” the customer says to the first associate by the door. “This phone is a complete failure on every level. And don’t even try to tell me I’m holding it wrong.” The associate in harm’s way, a maybe-at-most-23-year-old woman, changes her bright smile into a look of sorrowful concern. “That’s terrible you’ve been having trouble. I’m so sorry. Let me help you right here if you want to return it and get your money back,” she says. “One thing, though--you don’t have to, but would you mind telling me what’s been going on with it? I’d really like to know.” This initial rejoinder is a pitch-perfect response. She apologizes before doing or saying anything else. She is immediately acknowledging there is not going to be an argument or hoops for the customer to jump through to get satisfaction—in this case wanting his money back. She then does a quick verbal pirouette to express genuine interest in what the problems have been. After the customer finishes his description of dropped calls, email issues, lost data, and more, the associate again apologizes, sympathizing with the customer’s plight. “I know that must be really tough when you’re on a business call or sitting waiting for an important email,” she offers. “If you have a minute, there’s something I can do that might help quite a bit by just resetting the connection—you won’t lose any data—want me to give it ...
When execs come to visit the store: what’s real and what’s typical?
Parents’ Day at summer camp is usually a kid’s first lesson in the art of spin, optics, presentation, veneer and varnish. This is the day the food is better, cabins are swept, and everyone’s smiling. As soon as the last car leaves, the gussied-up, rustic Eden reverts to its usual repose as juvenile hellhole. It’s still shocking how many times we’re in the field on store visits with retail executives and hear how great this particular location is—only to see later the abyss that it truly is when we’re reviewing video that’s been captured with “mom and dad” not around. When a regional manager happens to be in the store, customers are magically lavished with help and praise and good cheer. There’s a bustle about the store, with purposeful professionals doing the Lord’s work of selling and stocking and just being busy and fussy. Products are laser-lined on every shelf. It’s all quite—what’s the word?—lovely. Until it isn’t. Which is usually the next day. We see lots of non-sales winning behaviors as soon as stores return to “normal.” The customer greetings are weaker, contact interactions on the floor are less effective, and products look sloppier. Rote recitation often takes hold, where associates go through the motions. It’s no wonder when we’ve asked retail executives how much time they believe their associates are in direct contact with customers, giving assistance, the answer is sometimes in excess of 40 percent—a belief the staff is spending almost half its time attending to the needs of the shopper. This is their experience, and may well be what’s occurring when they’re in the field observing. But when we show them the day-in and day-out reality—sometimes at 12% or less—it’s an eye-opening experience. Kind of like sneaking a peek at camp the day after Parents’ Day.
Engaging with the Customer
“Can I help you?” “Doing okay over here?” “How’s everything?” We’ve all been on the shopper’s end of these low-value contact questions in stores, restaurants and whatever chain retailer trains its associates with the blunt instrument of “engage the customer.” It’s gotten to the point where such expressions are so empty, they’ve become little more than verbal tics on the part of employees—rote recitations they almost cease to be conscious of even asking. And there’s a perfect synchronicity to this, since customers are barely conscious of these low-impact greetings, either. In our work with retailers, we hear this literally thousands of times. As an example, associates are typically trained and expected by management to greet the entering customer. Too often, this requirement gets translated by employees into saying “hi.” From a courtesy standpoint, this may sound better than no acknowledgment at all, though we’ve yet to see a higher buy or conversion rate when comparing customers who get a “hi” to those who enter with the absence of any greeting. Not surprisingly, most customers don’t even acknowledge this greeting and walk right beyond the associate saying it—not even saying “hi” back. That’s a big bowl of nothing for a key component of a customer engagement initiative. “Doing okay over here?” is another low-percentage expression, a perfect invitation for the customer to say yes, fine, just looking. Once we diagnose how interactions like this are working or aren’t withvideo and audio behavioral analytics, we provide retailers with the approach to make contacts count more—not in a theoretical, one-off way, but with a selling model that can be scaled. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on how retailers are pushing enhanced sales tactics to drive top-line growth. The realization to bring about more sophisticated training is sinking in, which comes from the realization these chains have a way ...
The Pleasant Shopper
A casually dressed but stylish woman enters the store with her pre-teen daughter and stops to say hello to the associate who’s stationed near the entrance. She’s extremely friendly, and has a large shopping bag of items from a neighboring store. She tries on many things during her hour-long visit. This woman is quite a shopper! She leaves her daughter in the store to run out to the car because she had forgotten her checkbook. During her visit, she approaches a salesperson at the cash wrap several times with questions about various items, and asks about returns. When we looked at the videotape, it was clear she had stolen five itemsduring this visit, totaling about $350. From the moment we saw her cross the lease line, she sold herself repeatedly and extremely convincingly to the store associates. Unlike most customers who are greeted at the entrance but keep walking to some real or imagined destination point within the store, she actually stopped to return the salutation and exchange pleasantries. She carried her shopping bag proudly – almost flaunting it to make sure it was in full view of everyone, as if to say you have nothing to worry about with me or my bag or my previous purchases or even my credentials as a spender. She sold herself by speaking with three different associates -– for her, there was no hiding or skulking around in the aisles like somecommon shoplifter. With more than a dozen cameras positioned throughout the shopping environment, we caught her every move. We watched as she waited to see where the associates were positioned, biding her time to make sure two of them were occupied with other customers. We watched her use the empty boxes in her shopping bag to conceal each item she stole. We watched her leave the store with ...
Agape in the Aisle
It all became clear in an interview a few years back with a man namedSherwood Schwartz, the television producer who created the dubious passel of 1970s-era comedy shows like Gilligan’s Island, Beverly Hillbillies, and the Brady Bunch, among others. The interviewer asked him to explain why every one of his shows always began with an expository theme song---a song that would explain in vivid detail the premise of the show (“So this is the tale of the castaways….” and “Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jed….” and “Here’s the story of a lovely lady…”). Schwartz said he believed this was the essential week-in-and-week-out ingredient to the success of his television comedies because, as he put it, “the puzzled cannot laugh.” Cut to the aisle of your local supermarket. We use video systems to capture and code shopper styles and behaviors in retail stores. This lets us see thousands of repeated behaviors, many of them eye-opening to ourselves and our clients. But whether the study is about diapers, dog food or analgesics, we too often see a hidden segment of shoppers perhaps best described as “the puzzled.” These shoppers stand perfectly still. They stare at the shelf and—I’m not kidding—their mouths are usually open. When it seems like divine Providence will not explode off the shelf to help them find the brand answer they seem to be looking for, the following sequence usually takes place: they reach for a product, they heft it, they turn it over in their hands, they return it to the shelf, they reach for a competitive brand and go through the same “heft, read and regard” routine before putting it back. Then they walk away, shaking their heads ever so slightly (this is one of the reasons we also do intercepts—a way ...
Fiddling While Commuters Rush By
A young musician is in a Washington DC metro station. He wears jeans, a long sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. It’s Friday morning. A violin is in his hand. The case is open at his feet. A few coins and dollar bills are inside as seed money to stimulate contribution. At 7:50 am, he begins playing. He continues for 43 minutes. During this time, he plays through six classical pieces, including the stunning Bach Partita in D minor. His music resonates through the entire metro arcade. About a thousand people pass by. Almost all ignore him. Twenty three of them glance momentarily and wait. Seven people stop to listen for more than a minute. He collects a total of $32.17. The violinist is Joshua Bell. He is one of the great musical virtuosos of our time. He sells out concert halls. He plays to capacity audiences all over the world . Now, here he is, in the Washington Metro, playing an 18th century Stradivarius violin, and just seven people stop to listen for more than a minute. (Interestingly, according to Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten, who concocted this Pulitzer-prize winning experiment, every time children walked by the performance, they tried to stop and listen. And each time, a parent swooped them up and kept walking.) What does this experiment show us? It depends on your perspective. Are we too busy to appreciate beauty? Was Bell just a bad busker? One lesson to draw from the story is how much we can learn from well-designed, rigorous real-world experiments. When the reporter first proposed the experiment, he anticipated that the music would draw a throng, perhaps even create problems with crowd control. Instead, he learned that only a very few classical music fans (and children) would stop to enjoy the music. No focus ...
Sara Lee’s Bread is Making Less Dough
Somebody doesn’t like Sara Lee. It almost seems unfair. After finally recovering from the low carb diet craze of the 90s, the company isfeeling the squeeze from private label, especially in the bread aisle. Thanks to the recession, customers are shunning name brand loaves (and cakes) in favor of cheaper private label starches in order to stretch their grocery budget. Sara Lee must also compete with price-slashing name brand rivals. Not to pick on Sara Lee – other packaged-food companies are gettingpinched – but you have to wonder whether Sara Lee fully understands the customer motivations and behaviors played out at the shelf that might be causing sales to plunge. The company knows profits are down, but competitors Kraft and Kellogg are turning in respectable numbers as shoppers trade takeout for meals at home. Does Sara Lee know why buyers are reaching for the doughy store brand whole wheatinstead of Sara Lee’s innovative Soft & Smooth loaf? Does the company understand on a volumetric basis those who have come to the store fully intending to buy the brand, but then bail in the swirl of the last three feet? And why they bail? Is it price, promotion, packaging or an intriguing blend of yes to all that? Or maybe is it some other lure or allure? Sales are an important, obvious, but crude measure of how shoppers interact with brands. If companies hope to stop the slide toward private label, they need to be where the in-the-moment calculations of the shopper occur. They need to take hold of the in-aisle thinking of shoppers who buy the brand, don’t buy it, and most tellingly, the ones who intended to do so and then decided in favor of another.
Hyatt’s Random Walk Down Service Street
Last month, Hyatt Hotels’ C.E.O., Mark Holamazian, announced that Hyatt Hotel employees will be performing “random acts of generosity” for some customers, such as comping a bar tab or waiving charges for a family breakfast. Bloggers have noted that conducting a publicity campaign around gestures hardly seems random, and runs the risk of angering those who don’t receive the largesse. Rob Walker’s Consumed column in this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine points out that the Hyatt campaign is an effort to leave the customer grateful. Walker cites a coming paper in the Journal of Marketing which argues that a customer who is made to feel grateful is likely to become “enduringly loyal.” Humans enjoy reciprocating out of gratitude, and we feel guilty when we don’t, which is a phenomenon that businesses can exploit. But, as Walker writes, in order to inspire gratitude, favors must be performed “as a function of free will,” not merely in service of company rules. Loyalty programs sponsored by hotels and airlines do not automatically inspire gratitude; instead, frequent customers feel entitled to the free flights and hotel nights, andstrategize to gain the most generous rewards for the points they’ve earned. It’s not wrong for Hyatt to be ramping up customer service, especially now. Service has always driven loyalty, especially when customers are giving more thought to how they spend each dollar. One recent studyfound that nearly half of all customers feel service has declined since the recession started, and more than that said they’ve recently cut ties with a company due to a service lapse. It’s no coincidence that Nordstrom, with its legendary customer service, has recently trouncedcompetitors such as Macy’s and Saks in terms of sales and stock performance. But we question whether Hyatt’s scattershot, random approach is the best way to go. ...
Saturday Morning at the Hardware Store
I walk in and a clerk approaches to ask if I need help. I tell him I need a flashlight, just something basic. He walks me to the appropriate spot in the aisle, and begins describing the selection. “We’ve got your Eveready. $3.95. Not the greatest, but does the job,” he says, starting at his lowest price point. “Then there’s this Energizer. Better grip. $6.99. Or we’ve got a Sylvania. Good for the garage. It’s $12.99.” He takes a step to the right, moving toward something else, as if he’s signaling that we’re about to enter a special new universe. “Of course,” he tells me with a knowing look, “you could get this.” He begins hefting a powerful looking cylinder of silvery black metal and then starts thwacking it slightly menacingly on the palm of his other hand. “This,” he pronounces, “this is the one the cops carry.” Of course, he had me at the product demo, but the law enforcement piece put me all in. I buy two of them……at $49.99—each. There are a number of lessons here, not the least of which is the incalculable sales value of story in the store. This was a pitch-perfect bravura performance, and in case you’re thinking today’s workforce isn’t trainable in this skill, you need to know that this associate was not some old-timer hardware store guy—but a 20-something “kid.”
