A Customer's Mind: How to Really Influence Customers?

The way customers make decisions today is quite different than the way they made decisions 10-15 years ago. In the past, the factors that influenced consumer behavior were more superficial and more limited: brand name, advertising, and brand messaging were crucial and limited to shelves and catalogs. Now, consumers demand strong content, consumer reviews, and clear-cut technical information about products and services. Consumers have reached a point where products can be assessed not only based on their individual merits, but even in isolation from other products in the market.

The advent of expert assessment, vast quantities of easily accessed information about a product and its components, reviewer feedback, and company transparency all put power in the hands of the consumer. Unlike before, consumers are now able to predict the likely experience they would have with a product or service using that information. The total unconditional value of a thing is right at their fingertips.

Total Unconditional Value

The “total unconditional value” of a thing refers to supposed subjective quality of a product or service, whether experienced or not. The increased access to this volatile yet vital information marks big changes for the marketing industry. What I see is that as consumers rely more and more on the total unconditional value of things, they are becoming less susceptible to context and framing manipulations, to traditional marketing strategies, and are more likely to make reasonable market decisions—economists rejoice!

Where Marketing Was And Where It Is Going

Throughout the 20th century, marketing was largely a game of smoke and shadows. Marketers understood that consumers made decisions about products and services using relative quality proxies; in other words, using what was immediately available to them. Before the rise of the Internet, that amounted to very little. 

In many cases today, consumers make decisions based on a global context, which amounts to a lot more. Broader comparisons can be performed and they are not limited to your immediate experience. For one, you can access large repositories of information about a product or service from consumers just like you. This is the stuff that total unconditional evaluations are made of. It all brings us closer to accurate expectations about a product. 

This isn’t to say a product has some inherent, quantifiable, or describable value; rather it is that consumers can better evaluate their possible experience with a product without ever needing to come in contact with it. That, quite simply, is revolutionary.

This revolutionary spirit rides on the back of the technological revolution. At this point the term may very well sound like a platitude, but its effects cannot be understated, nor can their extent be presaged.

Inside The Consumer’s Armament

A number of tools have emerged that catalyzed the shift toward total unconditional value as an implicit norm of consumer behavior. Aggregation tools, advanced search engines, reviews from other users’ social media, unprecedented access to experts and other emerging technologies. These and many other advances are conducive to more accurate and most fast-paced decision-making among this generation of consumers.

Consumers today have a varied and sophisticated armament of tools against the traditional ploys of marketing. There are apps that let you scan items in the store and compare the store price to online prices. There are apps that inform you about resale values of products, such as ShopSavvy and Bakodo. There are e-commerce sites and review sites dedicated to distributing goods and providing copious quantities of consumer feedback about products and services. Amazon, Yelp, and PCMag all fall in one or both of those categories. 

This poses a problem for the obstinate marketer and significantly alters market culture at every level. Simply put, companies and marketers will have a hard time influencing consumers using traditional tactics and indirect cues based on the model of local context.

Their bag of trick is old hat.

Four Decades Of Spring Cleaning For Marketers

Over the past four decades, a number of experiments in marketing have highlighted how susceptible to influence people are. The prevailing belief was that marketers could sway people to behave in irrational ways.

The modes of influence employed by marketers fell into three broad categories: Framing Effects (the way you present a product or service); Choice Context Effects (contrasting one product or service with others of different prices); and Task Effects (the way in which consumers are asked to evaluate an offer).

These modes have lost their theoretical force in the age of information and technology. Consumers today can insightfully assess quality and compare their assessments with the experience of others and easily tap market information. This virtually amounts to noise that consumers make sense of, and all this noise turns those theories on their heads.

The reason is that all of this noise has pushed consumers to think more about their purchases. This has diminished the impact of marketing strategies based on those traditional theories. Consumers know there is a man behind the curtain.

There are still experiments emerging that add fodder to the belief that consumers are irrational and sheepish. Be wary of these claims! These studies are often performed in laboratory environments that cannot simulate the noise of the market. In a lab, experimenters have far more control over their subjects than a marketer does over consumers in the real world. 

Some experiments have claimed the opposite. They hold that the increase in noise and distraction is turning consumers into a deer in headlights, but that’s a theory that may not hold water.

New Decision-Making For A New Age

Consumers are still buying, they are still deciding, and they are doing it in a brave new world. The thought that they will simply grow weary and succumb to the wiles of marketers is overly optimistic for the marketer and pessimistic for the consumer. 

New decision-making trends among consumers can be observed. Possibly in response to the increased noise, coupled with access to tools and information previously unavailable to consumers.

As I see them, the three new decision-making trends can be described as: Couch Tracking, Faster Verdict, and, More From The Head.

Couch Tracking

Consumers: Couch Tracking describes consumers who are not in the market for a particular product to address a particular need. They are simply keeping track of new products and sales, constantly consuming information about new products on the market and deciding when is the right time to purchase. 

Marketers: What Couch Tracking means for marketers is that preferences about certain products are already formed well in advance of seeing the potential purchase item. Products, therefore, are not assessed solely of their own merits but against a bevy of unpredictable and unique information compiled by the couch tracker.

Faster Verdict

Consumers: Faster Verdict describes the perception that items directly searched for should be purchased quickly. This happens because the discovery step in the purchase chain now occurs more rapidly and more confidently than before. In the wake of this revolution, we can expect faster uncertainty resolution regarding product quality, preference fit, and acceptance. All this equals efficient purchase decisions. 

Marketers: What Faster Verdict means for marketers is that they have a small window of opportunity to influence potential buyers, and much of their influencing must happen indirectly, way before the decision to buy even occurs. It must happen in the discovery phase, in the noise.

More From The Head

More From The Head describes the shift from emotional content to matter-of-fact content. Reviews, marketing, and information about products and services tend to be less about subjective experience and more about the technical aspects of the product. Consumer’s are persuaded more by practical product considerations and less so by emotional cues. This is the result of consumer skepticism about marketing tactics, particularly those that arose from the modes of influence mentioned above.

This should dramatically affect marketing strategy. Marketers must change with consumer culture or risk falling out of touch. Here are some areas where improvements can be made. 

It’s Not Me, It’s You: Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is another thing of the past. With some many options, so many competitors, and so much information out there, purchases as largely considered transient transactions. Consumers see their relationships to brands as open, non-committal. 

One phenomenon contributing to this trend may be that consumers see transactions with the same company as isolated from each other. Even if someone purchased a product from a company and had a positive experience, they do not assume that all of the company’s products will be as good. They will usually go through the same decision-making to assess the relative merits of each product or service. This undercuts the attempts to foster customer loyalty on a fundamental level.

The bright side for companies is that the trend is ubiquitous. Everyone is feeling it. The way to counteract the effects of this is to provide value across the board and make it convincingly clear why your product or service is superior using facts. 

Cut The Fluff: Communications

Positioning is a cherished marketing concept. It is rooted in the idea that product evaluations are predominantly dictated by communications strategies. The problem is that the concept is bankrupt for today’s consumer culture.

Positioning statements created in conference rooms don’t have the same persuasive force that they used to. If your product has an identifiable advantage over your competitors, that’s the differentiating factor you must emphasize. It’s the factor that consumers really care about.

The attempts at making products appear unique just won’t fly with consumers anymore. Consumers are savvier. They don’t care for fluff; they want concrete information.

If You Build It, They May Not Always Come: Social Media

As social media grew and grew, marketers flocked to all channels, trying to stake their claim to user newsfeeds. It was envisaged as a panacea of profits via connectivity. As more and more social media sites emerged, users began to scatter, so marketers started stretching themselves thin trying to keep up with the flight.

This approach to marketing is unrealistic and unwise. Not every consumer will be on every social media site. Success lies in targeting the place where your potential customers dwell and attacking it.

You must seek out your customers, not the other way around.

A New Perspective: The Influence Mix Approach

Marketing and consumer culture have certainly undergone changes. So, too, should marketing strategies and systems of belief regarding customer behavior change. 

The Influence Mix Approach addresses those points and a number of others.

The Influence Mix approach is comprised of three axes:

• The consumer’s prior beliefs, preferences, and experiences (P)
• Fellow consumers and information platforms (O)
• And, last but not least, marketers (M)

This approach is aptly described as a zero-sum game. Reliance on one axis decreases the need to rely on another. In today’s market, however, P and O are largely more influential than M. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of M, but in terms of persuasive force, P and O take the cake.

The goal shouldn’t be to choose one over the other. These axes are interaffective not mutually exclusive. However, funds and time are limited, so priorities must be defined and enacted.

At a philosophical level, marketers should step away from the notion that they are behind the drivers seat. For example, consumers who are closer to the O side of the continuum may not depend on marketers’ outputs to make decisions: their O features may primarily guide decision-making. Furthermore, some products and services are more O feature evocative than others. 

In theory, an optimal application of this approach would hinge on marketer’s understanding of their customer’s current and future influence mix. The medley of P, O, and M should correlate with customer’s purchase decisions and customer characteristics. These attributes will vary from market segment to market segment. Marketers should keep abreast of this.

The driving question of this approach is, “To what extent do my customers currently depend on O and on specific O features to make their purchase decisions, and to what extent might they depend on O in the future?”

Answers to that two-part question are always changing and always on a continuum.

The Moral of The Story

If you have heard about the rising tide of content marketing, all this should help explain its existence.

The crucial takeaway is that marketers should recognize where they can exert the most influence; that is, where effective impact is localized. Marketers are moving away from modes of influence towards modes of communication and content dissemination centered on these trends and the Influence Mix approach. 

Market research will also change. Tracking O features is hard work and time sensitive. Consumer preferences are not static, and for a marketing strategy to succeed, it must keep updated on O changes, constantly. 

All marketers should learn how to do this.

Other articles on marketing by this author

• Why Do Consumers Purchase?
• Understanding the Relationship Era Where the More You Sell the More You Scare