Don’t Let Digital Give You a False Sense of Precision

Consumers make irrational purchase decisions; help them choose you.

A friend once said to me, “When it comes to shoes, ‘need' is a relative term.” We've all experienced a similarly loose definition of need when making purchase decisions.

As Shar VanBoskirk, a Forrester Research VP and principal analyst, pointed out in her keynote at Forrester's 2015 Forum for Marketing Leaders: Most choices are the triumph of “something” over reason.

“We don't reason our way through to the best answer, but marketers presume that we do,” she said. “Marketers believe that we'll choose the right answer…. But we overeat, oversleep, and consistently choose without regard for the consequences.”

The situation, VanBoskirk explained, is that people don't have the processing power to review all the information the way they should. They take mental shortcuts. A long line outside a restaurant means it must be tasty. “We preserve mental energy by making habits,” she said. “We biologically crave comfort, and tend to be change-averse as a result.”

So, although digital disruption creates opportunity for consumers, it also provides stress, VanBoskirk said, adding that this situation can be a boon to marketers who approach it properly: by reducing customers' stress in making a purchase decision, not by coercing a transaction. Doing the latter is a bad practice that's also misleading to marketers. “Digital disruption provides marketers opportunity to prompt decisions without rational consideration by consumers,” she said, adding that, as a result, “digital gives marketers a false sense of precision.”

Read the full article at dmnews.com: https://bit.ly/1AKFGby