The decision buying process

The decision buying process is an important part of the customer’s journey. It is where marketers should focus on in order to gain the best results. Major companies have to study and research the consumer buying decisions. Understanding this process is really hard as it is most of the time locked in the consumer’s mind. The important question is « how do consumers respond to the stimuli of the marketers ? ». The stimuli enters the customers « black box » and produces certain responses. As a result, depending on the product, the decision buying process is not the same.

There is the complex buying behavior, the dissonance reducing buying behavior, the habitual buying behavior, and the variety seeking buying behavior. The complex buying behavior is called like that because the consumer has to go through a learning process before acquiring the product itself. Sometimes, when the product is specific or technical, the customer, in order to buy the good quality product, has to find details about the product in order to understand what he is buying better.

The dissonance reducing buying behavior takes place in an expensive, frequent or risky purchase. The brands and the products look the same, but the customers needs a global vision of the market before buying the product.

The habitual buying behavior is under conditions of low involvement and little significant brand differenece, in other words, we are talking about the most common products, grocery shopping for example is a place for habitual buying behavior.

The variety seeking buying behavior happens when there is low customers involvement, and significant perceived brand difference. In this situation, the customer will buy a common product but will change regularly the brand to try something else.

Customer relationship management

Around 2000 a new category of worker arrived on the market. Basically, marketers realized soon that they gathered too much information. As companies often searches for data at every moment possible through customer purchase, sales force contacts, service and support calls, web site visits, satisfaction survey, credit and payment interactions, market research studies- thus making data management an issue at hand.

Indeed, these information are provided by different department within the company. Each department collect information through their own way of doing, and might be reluctant to give them to anyone at first contact. To face this problem, Customer relationship management has been in some companies the best department to handle this. The department is able to manage precise details about individual customers and manage customer touch points to maximize customer loyalty.

Main companies providing this service are Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAS. They provide simplified information system where to gather customer data. These information systems consist of software and anlytical tools. Part of the customer relationship management consist of using data warehouse to stock information for example, or datamining to search for deep customer data.

To have the software integrated is only a step in CRM. It is not enough. Once you have the information, another job is important, it is to get to the relationship with the customers. This is the most important part because information with no implementation is plain information. Marketers often make the mistake of only talking about the tools, the software. Yet it is just a part of a more important customer relationship management strategy.

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