How consumers make decisions in a market and how the organisation needs to align products, marketing communications, service and organisational behaviours to that decision making process

“How should we engage with consumers to build affinity and sell more?”

We don’t mean media planning.

We mean looking far earlier than that, at how consumers make decisions in a marketplace, who and what influences them, and when, and so how they need to be engaged. In our experience organisations often don’t step back for a moment and think in this way. Individual actives tend to get viewed in isolation, often by different people, sometimes who don’t know each other and who can even be based in different countries!

Whilst in general we disapprove of  ‘models’, in this area we have two that simply ensure that all the right issues are considered in the right order. They don’t dictate process. ‘Brand Choice’ looks at how consumers make purchase decisions in a market and ‘Brand Voice’ looks at how to align brand activity to that purchase process.

The British grocery retailer Tesco used the two models to plan campaigns such as Christmas and ‘Back to School’. We ran a series of workshops with their marketing teams to get them to think about how the purchase decision differs on different occasions and how marketing activity should be adapted to reflect that.

This is what they said:

“The workshops run by Simon and Kiran were extremely valuable. My team felt it was the best training they’d had. It provided theory backed up by real examples, and processes that have given us a framework which is being used daily. Thank you very much.”

An area of particular focus recently has been digital marketing in it’s broadest sense. We have conducted over twenty research projects on client’s digital initiatives. We have only been able to deliver a largely positive debrief once. We worked on one of the biggest digital campaigns that has ever run in the UK. It achieved less than 5% of its target. This was an entirely predictable performance. We particularly like to help on digital initiatives.

You can view an extract from ‘BRANDChoice’ HERE