Purchase Funnels 2.0
The purchase funnel has been around since the very first human commercial transaction but it was only identified once social scientists and marketers began to dissect the behaviors and emotions that lead one to transact and with whom. Ever since, it has been a core tenet of marketing - my own awareness of the purchase funnel came on the first day of my first marketing class in college, just after the presentation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
But in recent years the standard purchase funnel has faced some opposition as marketers become more precise with their efforts to make people customers; drafting the skills of ethnographers and anthropologists to further define and illustrate how people behave as consumers.
Forrester recently published a report eschewing the traditional funnel for a model that’s based upon engagement. Scott Weisbrod has a nice recap here with the illustrations and Forrester’s suggested model for measuring engagement. Meanwhile David Armano proposes a marketing spiral that takes the idea of engagement into consideration. It seems everyone has their own take on the the old funnel these days, including us.
Our proposed evolution of the purchase funnel comes out of our study of CGC’s influence on consumer behavior - leading up to the purchase as it is consumed as part of the consideration and research phases, and subsequently created after the purchase when the individual consumer shares her experience with the product.
This model places a greater emphasis on the purchase funnel as the experience of an individual intertwined with the funnels of many others. A critically important point because of the ease with which the experience is shared via online WOM and the influence that shared experience has on another others’ purchase behavior, having reached them at a critical time in their own purchase process. It’s not enough to study a single purchase funnel without considering how that funnel intertwines, is influenced and influences the individual funnels of other people.
So who’s right? What is the correct 2.0 version of the purchase funnel? Is the purchase funnel an antiquated model altogether? Or are we all right, in part? Consumers, their behaviors and the new marketplace are perhaps a bit too complex for any one model.
Posted in Consumer Generated Insight, Opinions, Knowledge
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:22 am
Hello,
An interesting read.
One critical question to be considered while measuring the effective use of CGC would be the driving force behind consumer commentary itself. Who would be most likely to logon to the Internet and express their views or experience in using a product? Taking a practical view of the question I believe it would be customers who are disgruntled with a particular product or service. Otherwise it should be such an unexpectedly high positive experience for a person to induce him to express his views online. (Of course, I am not forgetting those Internet geeks who simply logon to the Net and write about everything that happened to them at the end of the day).
Now, if we assume that it would mostly be complaints and ‘not-so-good’ experiences that get expressed online, what would be the role of CGC on the purchase funnel? Would it be more negative than positive, unless of course, a conscious effort is taken by a particular company for getting positive reviews or comments online? That is ‘Managed CGC’?
Mathew
September 24th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Mathew-
You’re not alone in assuming that the behavior of sharing one’s consumer experience online (CGC) is primarily done by disgruntled people on the fringe with negative things to say. But in fact, this is proving to be a common misconception of CGC - while it varies from case to case, most CGC is actually positive.
Nevertheless, author motivation is still a significant issue when considering the validity of CGC - there are plenty of businesses, industries and political organizations duplicitously creating what appears to be real CGC to influence people in support of their objectives or views. Fortunately we’ve seen that the solution to these concerns is often provided by the CGC community itself.
CGC behavior is becoming so common that it cannot be considered the activity of “internet geeks” or any other specific group for that matter, particularly when viewed in relation to a particular topic. For example, hotel reviews on tripadvisor.com are written by a diverse group of people, some business travelers and others family vacationers but all of whom share a common interest in the hotel experience. Likewise the Diver-to-Diver forum on scubadiving.com is an active conversation about diving interests, equipment, locations and service providers that has become a part of a typical diver’s normal behavior.
This widespread adoption of CGC as a regular behavior associated with booking a hotel room, planning a dive, buying a car, organizing an event, or any other activity is simply the technological extension of Word-of-Mouth; and not it’s now just as common, as credible and perhaps even more influential.