allaboutadvocacy.com

Brands and funnels and journeys oh my

“Toto, are we still in Kansas?” If you’re like me, you wondered this aloud to yourself last week when McKinsey published a study declaring that a new consumer decision journey has replaced the traditional purchase funnel. I honestly thought I was opening a McKinsey Quarterly e-mail from my Outlook archive and not 2009. OK, so that’s not exactly going back to the birth of technicolor. But the purchase funnel as we know it was detonated years ago by experts too many to list and that new phoenix, the dynamic consumer decision making journey, has risen from its ashes in more articles than I can count.

But I’m glad I looked twice. Not because the report provides yet another way to model what the consumer decision making journey looks like now in four stages (though I think it’s fair to say it’s a pretty good one). But because it includes what looks like some new research backing it up. Research that was conducted among 20,000 consumers on three different continents in several kinds of categories. OK, now you’ve got my attention.

One important finding from the report (perhaps more of a confirmation really) is the degree to which brand awareness continues to matter, and the role advertising and other company-controlled marketing and communications play in this regard. That’s because, according to the authors, brands in the “initial-consideration” set–the first stage of their consumer journey–can be up to three times more likely to be purchased eventually than brands that aren’t in it. That’s a big deal. Especially when you consider that media fragmentation and product proliferation mean that people consider fewer brands today. And they don’t miss to point that out.

Another is how the number of brands under consideration during their second phase of the consumer journey, what they call “active-evaluation,” may actually expand instead of narrow as consumers seek out advice and information. That’s not insignificant either as it means you can get beaten to the cash register if a competitor has its integrated marketing act together, and you are just relying on what used to work. Phase three, by the way, is “closure” or the moment of purchase, and phase four they call the “ongoing purchase experience,” where loyalty can take an active or passive form.

But the bigger deal, and it’s just my view, is how powerful the McKinsey report shows advocacy has become. It labels this “consumer-driven marketing” but best I can tell it includes the impact of what is traditionally thought of as influentials or opinion leaders or expert third-parties, too. What’s nice is that they go beyond the nostrum that the things a brand can’t control are increasingly more influential in how consumers make purchase decisions and actually measure the degree to which advocacy and other groups of touch points– including a consumer’s own experience, what happens in-store and company-controlled communications like advertising and direct marketing–are effective at each stage of the journey.

Now, it wouldn’t be very sporting to divulge McKinsey’s numbers here (and a full subscription to the MQ can easily be had). What can be said is that their research ranks advocacy as the #1 or #2 most influential group of touch points in 2 out of the 3 phases of consumer decision-making they provide numbers for (note: they don’t provide them for the fourth phase). Of note, advocacy is the dominant influence during the active-evaluation second phase.

It would have been nice if the report had also provided data on the fourth phase of the consumer journey, where the loyalty loop occurs. But such a strong body of research on loyalty, such as the Net Promoter Score, already exists that it’s not such a shortcoming.  So taken together, we now have a much fuller and robust picture of just how “over the rainbow” effective advocacy has become. Not just at a single stage of the consumer decision making journey. But throughout the entire dynamic cycle, and particularly in all the phases after initial consideration. Thanks to the new research from the wizards from McKinsey, that’s now much less a bunch of Oz.

They just buried the lead, that’s all. Nobody’s perfect. Or at least so I’ve seen in the movies…