How to Research your
Customers' Decision Process
...and Develop Ways To Accelerate It
By George Silverman
President
Market Navigation, Inc.
Why research the decision process?
Because - in marketing - there is nothing else! Everything
else is a distraction.
The customer decision process should be the
central focus of marketing: Marketing is all about developing the
right product that people will decide to use, influencing
the decision in favor of your product, and, most of all, shortening
the decision cycle. These are the keys to dramatic sales
increases. Anything in marketing or marketing research that
doesn't ultimately influence the customer decision process
diverts your resources from the real goals of marketing.
We have found, in over 35 years of consulting,
that shortening
the customer decision process is by far the single
most powerful approach to creating enormous increases
in sales, even to dominating markets.
Why? The product that shortens the decision cycle accumulates
customers faster. That means that it captures market share
faster, thereby outpacing competitors.
In order to shorten the customer decision cycle, four things
are necessary: Map the decision path, find the bottlenecks,
remove the bottlenecks, and simplify the rest of the decision
process.
Any marketer who has not mapped out the decision paths that
his/her customers take is laboring at a severe disadvantage. When
you have the roadmap, you can spot the bottlenecks, and plan out
more efficient routes.
If you haven't run separate focus groups of your most
enthusiastic customers, your defectors, rejecters, triers,
prospects, etc., and haven't then combined them to understand the
persuasion that occurs between them, the good news is: your
competitors probably haven't either. The bad news is that they
are probably also reading this article.
Let's not mince words, folks. You are driving in the dark
without headlights if you haven't mapped exactly what triggered
your customers' decisions, why they almost didn't buy, what they
had to overcome in order to buy, what they reacted negatively
toward but bought anyway, how they would convince others, etc.
Likewise, you are flying blind if you don't know what turned off
your defectors and rejecters, or what attracted them to your
competitor. You are flying by the seat of your pants if you don't
know what would convince the undecided, and what would
lure away the people who can be attracted to defect from the
competition. Every time we have conducted decision research, we
have made major breakthroughs for our clients!
Why not just ask your customers?
Unfortunately, you can't ask most of the above questions
directly. Asked directly, most of the above vital questions put
people in the position of defending and justifying a decision
that they don't necessarily even understand. Often, people have
little insight into their own motivations, or they want to
present their decision in the best light, or they don't want to
mention the "trivial" reasons they bought or use the
product. So, don't ask people "Why did you buy product
X?" unless you are researching the rationalizations that
they give for buying the product.
You have to get to the decisive reasons
People have multiple reasons for buying: some are the necessary conditions
without which they won't buy, others are the real deciding
factors. So, when you ask, "Why did you buy X?," or
"what are you looking for in a product of this type?"
Often people answer, "quality, reliability and
service." That may be what they were looking for, but
usually not why they made their choice. They are the necessary
conditions, not the decisive attributes. They often really chose
products based on a complex series of decisions that have to do
with such things as: feeling better about themselves, making a
better impression on others, removing a trivial annoyance, liking
the feel or color of the product, the impression they get from
the promotional materials, wanting to look more scientific, avant
guard, or more intelligent.
There is an old saying that people buy on the basis of
emotion, then explain their purchase on the basis of logic. I
hate to agree with such a cynical and general statement, but it's
very often true. It's even true with the more cerebral products
such as physicians deciding on medications, or MIS managers
deciding on computers. "How does this product make me look
to my colleagues?" can be as important as "what are the
real benefits of the product?"
Because of all this, the consultant has to know how to get at
the steps of the decision process indirectly, using a variety of
techniques, such as indirect questions, projective techniques,
and other techniques that promote psychological safety and allow
people to express either what they are unable or reluctant to
express.
So, how do you research the decision process?
As the old joke goes, "very, very carefully." As
you can see, it isn't easy to get to hidden motivations, get past
rationalizations, and find out the decisive issues. It is possible,
however.
The methodology that I have found to be most revealing is a
unique kind if focus group design. The group interaction in focus
groups stimulates people to remember and express beliefs,
opinions, attitudes, preferences, expectations, intentions,
images, hopes, wishes, dreams, fears and even vague concerns that
they will only express in the most superficial manner in a
one-on-one interview or a survey. These are the kinds of thoughts
and emotions that you have to identify in order to understand the
decision process in enough depth to see what will actually
persuade people to use your product.
The most effective research design, within the focus group
methodology, is what I call Decision Acceleration Laboratories™. We conduct a series of focus groups with
your, suspects, prospects, defectors, rejecters, customers and
evangelists. (Depending on the product, some of these may be
separate or mixed.) We walk them though their decision process
(more about this below), and identify exactly what triggered
their decisions, and where they are blocked, or going off track.
We then work up a series of marketing recommendations to speed up
the time it takes to decide on your products.
The moderator has to be a world-class expert in the decision
process.
The decision process can be either so agonizingly slow, or so
lightening fast, or so complex that it is almost impossible to
see all the steps. Some of these steps are implicit, unconscious,
or otherwise hidden. You have to know the steps that tend
to be taken, then probe for the particular ways that the steps
are taken with that particular product and population. For
instance, all products are "tried." But for some, this
might take the form of a demo, sample, actual trial, "test
drive," video, tour, or other kind of experience, even a
daydream or mental rehearsal of what it would be like to use the
product. In addition, there are many subtleties to some trials
that have to be appreciated, such as how a physician tries a new
drug (usually on refractory patients).
A thorough understanding of the steps that people take in the
product decision process is absolutely essential in order to walk
customers through their decision process. That's because there is
no such thing as "the purchase decision."
It is really a series of more than 18 separate
decisions and steps, some of which customers sail right through,
others where they get bogged down and flounder. The specifics are
different for every product. But when people try to describe how
they decided on a product, they skip important steps. For
instance, they will tend to describe how they chose between two
products' sets of benefits without describing how they got into
the market for such a product in the first place, how they
identified alternatives, how they gathered information and
rejected some products from consideration. They might skip steps
in describing their trial. An experienced decision researcher
knows what to probe about how they decided on various criteria,
or how they determined the importance of the criteria.
Complicating matters is the fact that many decisions are made
by multiple decision makers, all having different agendas, goals,
belief systems, standards and viewpoints.
All this complexity can be simplified
If this all sounds complicated, it is. But I've found that it
is always possible to cut though this complexity and find the
simple sequence of materials and events that will break through
the most important decision bottlenecks and send the product
through the roof.
