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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Managing marketing information to gain customer insights

Deep customer insights lead to meaningful customer relationships.

Information about customers are hard to get. You need them to understand the customer's behavior, but when even the customer doesn't know precisely what he needs or what are his demands, marketers cannot easily tell what are their wants. In order to do marketing you need strong understanding of your ecosystem. Furthermore, you need deep customer insights that will tell you how to act.

Sometimes customer have to go and look for information. Yet, you can find cases when customers provide direct information to the brand. The first way customers where able to communicate through brands were handwritten documents. Then you had the call centers, then e-mail and text messaging and finally, blogging, Facebook, Twitter and so on. An organization that can gather and use these data can provide richer and precise customer insights at a lower cost.

Now you can find cases in which marketers have too much information. We call this data glut. Marketers cannot process it. What is nice, is when they have the right information. They need relevant data, not more data. They also need to better use the information they already have. Therefore marketers join and think together in what we call “customer insights teams”. A marketing information system consists of people and procedures for assessing information needs, developing the needed information, and helping decision makers use the information to generate and validate actionable customer and market insights.

Marketers find information from internal data marketing intelligence and marketing research. Each department has its own internal database and delivers these information to the other parts of the company. Marketing intelligence is when you keep a track of what people are doing on the markets, your clients, competitors and R&D. Market researches start by defining the problem and objectives, developing a research plan to collect information, then implementing the research plan, collecting and analyzing the data, and finally interpreting and reporting the findings. The company with better insights gets rewarded with greater customer value and satisfaction.

Measure and manage the ROI

By the past, some campaigns were expensive, with low financial returns on the spendings. Marketers used to be spending like rock stars on big marketing programs, trying to impress the customers. They were saying that marketing produces intangible creative outcomes, which you cannot translate in financial terms.

Nowadays, marketing ROI is a big issue for marketers and the economy. Marketers must be able to justify their expenses. They also need to be able to measure perfectly is the combination of strategy and tactics they are implementing is about to generate the most in terms of profit.

The return on Investment is now possible to measure. It is the net return from a marketing investment divided by the cost of it, and helps us measure the profit generated by investment in marketing activities.

It is still hard to measure. Harder than any other business expenses. If you buy a piece of equipment and then measure the productivity gain, you have the ROI of this investment. In marketing, benefits such as advertising impact can't be put into dollar returns.

A solution was found by some companies to capitalize all marketing performance (brand awareness, sales, or market share) into one marketing dashboard. This dashboard displays all the information needed to implement new strategic programs.

Increasingly, beyond the sole performance of marketing, marketers are using customer centered measures of marketing impact such as customer acquisition, customer retention, customer lifetime value and customer equity. These measures showcase not only sound marketing performance, but also future performance benefiting from stronger customer relationships.

Improving investment in marketing should increase customer value and satisfaction. Thus it improves also customer attraction and customer retention. Finally this delivers an increase in customer lifetime value and customer retention. Customers equity in relation to the cost of marketing determines the return on investment of the marketing program.

The Zero moment of truth

The ZMOT, or zero moment of truth, is a marketing term that has been developed by Google in 2011 by Jim Lecinski. It has been influenced by the original moments of marketing unraveled by the teams of Procter and Gamble in 2005. They are the First moment of truth (FMOT) and the Second moment of truth (SMOT). This was possible through the stimulus at the beginning of the marketing process. This was so important to Procter and Gamble that they decided to create a position for this as Director of FMOT. The job was filled with Dina Howell.
According to Procter and Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley, there are two moments of truth. The first one happens at the store shel, when the consumer has to choose between the brands. The second one happens at home, when the customer uses the brand and is deeply satisfied by it. As a result, we use to see the marketing stigma as, first the Stimulus, then the Shelf, then the Experience.

The ZMOT introduced by Google ads another moment of truth. The zero moment of truth is made possible thanks to our connected environment. The consumer is now able to search for a product on his/ her laptop or his/ her smartphone. He can see which brand fits the best it's needs before the shelf. As a result, the ZMOT is volatile and is hard to visualize for a brand. The new "mental model" as Lecinski calls it, is Stimulus, ZMOT, FMOT, SMOT. First, the consumer sees the ad on TV, he makes research about the product, and finds the best brand. When his decision is made, he goes to the shelf, buys the product and enjoys it at home. The weakness of the first model was that the decision was made at the shelf. The consumer was able to get help from the seller. He could directly see if there was a specific promotion or a bundle of the product he was buying. Yet he was directly influenced by the advertisement on the point of sale. The product that would win would be the one standing in front of the customer at that specific moment. Now the consumer's decision happens far away from the point of sale. The consumer doesn't waste any more time wandering in the alleys, he already knows why he came to the shop. He is still able to ask advices from an employee and might still be influenced on his way to get the product. The ZMOT ads up a whole new  dimension to the customers experience. The content is richer, through videos, pictures and buzz marketing. The brand have to take this into account and find their ways to adapt their strategy to customers.

As a result ZMOT is a big part of our buying process. ZMOT stands as the perfect solution to describe the online marketing and sales. The search engine is the best suited to do the job as they regularly receive tons of questions. They are the best at engaging with customers and providin them with the best product they would need, at the right time. When a customer searches a "shampoo for bright hair" for example or a "soft toothbrush", you have to do it right. When is the best moment to show your product to the customers?

Audio:
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Marketing planning and implementation

In marketing, in order to be efficient, you must always be one step ahead and act in prevision of what will or can happen. As a result, we deliver strategic marketing plan that will be able to lead people, to show how the strategy is going to be implemented overtime.

(Marketing plan: Executive summary, current marketing situation, threats and opportunities analysis, objectives and issues, marketing strategy, action programs, budgets, controls)

A marketing plan comprises an executive summary. This column is a little recap of the projects, the goals, the recommendations that has been going through around it.

After that, you must include a marketing analysis of the current situation.

The SWOT analysis helps you analyse and group internal and external forces, and turn them into positive or negative factors.

SWOT stands for Strenghts, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Strenghts are internal capabilities and resources. It is a positive situational factors and will help you deliver the right value to customers and atteign its objectives.

Weaknesses are internal limitations and negative situational factors. It interfere with the company's performance.

Opportunities are trends or favorable factors in the internal environment. Companies may exploit opportunities to reach their goals.

Finally Threats are unfavorable external trends that may present challenges to performance.

Finally, you conclude the marketing plan by explaining the objectives and how to achieve them.

In order to make the strategic planning possible, you must go through the process of marketing implementation. You must put into action the marketing plan. The focus of the organisation is then on how to implement the planning and it is made possible thanks to managers and leaders inside the company's team.

Audio:
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Market Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning

One first concept of marketing that we need to explain is market segmentation. In order to find value, the marketer must choose the best segment for the best opportunities.
You can group each consumers in terms of geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral factors. Each group will become a segment of the market, and this process of differentiating customers is called market segmentation.
According to your product, one must find the proper segment that are relevant to his market. If you sell cars, you don't find useful the same segments as a toothbrush company. You must pay attention to how you segment your market in order to stay relevant.


After you have done this market segmentation, another process takes place in marketing, which is market targeting. After finding the segment, you evaluate, test and mark the segments' attractiveness and select one or more segment to enter. Of course, one must chose the target segment that will provide him with the most benefice over the most number of years. You can chose to develop your product just for one specific market niche, or to sell it to a broader number of people. The best strategy is to enter a new market by serving a single segment, and if the campaign is a success, then you can add more segments.


Finally, sound marketing is about market differentiation and positioning. When you've decided about the market segment you are entering, you must decide how you will differentiate it from the others, and the position you want your product to have. A product position depends of the perception of the product through a customer's eyes. A customer will classify the product according to its needs. So you want to develop unique market positions for you products. A product that is exactly the same as the others won't be bought by customers.

As a result positioning is an important process to work on. You have to plan and improve this position by putting effort into your marketing teams.