First Moment of Truth (FMOT): Impact on repeat purchases & basket sizes

At 宝洁 , moments of truths are treated as sacrosanct: brand managers scramble to ensure that shoppers and consumers are ‘delighted’ across the different moments when they come into contact with the product or brand.

Hence, acronyms like FMOT for First Moment of Truth, SMOT for Second Moment of Truth, etc were coined within this consumer goods behemoth decades back to guide the thinking and choices of actions and steps within the marketing funnel for the brand.

This same framework is even more important for a service-oriented company like the Jewellery Design and Management International School (JDMIS) in Singapore. JDMIS is the only specialised jewellery training institution in Singapore and the largest such school in South-East Asia.

Established 15 years ago, and built upon a Singapore training organisation with 27 years of operation, JDMIS has around 8 million data points within its database covering all the key moments of consumers’ interactions with it – this raw data covers records interactions such as when leads first come in contact with their website and / or sales team all to go e way through to their sign-ups to be students and their entire journey as a learner at the school.

In June 2022, JDMIS requested Edwin Lam Choong Wai to take a deep look at this ‘big data’ database to try and unearth key insights that might help to improve its business operations and performance.

“We wanted Edwin to take an exploratory look at our operations data to try and identify key patterns of our leads and students’ interactions with us in the marketing funnel. His goal was to find out what was workIng as well as identifying areas that needed improvement.” explained Alex Zupancich , co-founder and director of JDMIS.

The first step involves zooming in on JDMIS’ web traffic data to determine the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) of potential consumers. ZMOT is the stage of the marketing funnel whereby the individual is in the exploratory stage of researching and finding out more information about the courses available.

The source of the individual might be coming from web searches, social media platforms, digital ads, emailed newsletters or simply referrals from previously satisfied students. At this stage, the idea is to study the trend or pattern of who these individuals might be as a group and how well they interact with the online assets or real estates.

This is then followed by the honing in on data of leads being qualified before the interaction of registration team with them. Thereafter, there is a close-up look on the data of conversion of leads to students, upon sign-up for courses and their subsequent attendance of more course modules.

Here, some interesting insights were found related to the students’ First Moment of Truth (FMOT) in attending classes at JDMIS. The data indicated that there may be a correlation between the first instructor for new students and how this affects the likelihood of repeated course sign-ups as well as the choice of the type of and fee value of classes (basket size) being enrolled upon later on.

With such insights, JDMIS can explore tweaking its course offerings and the choices of first-time instructors as well as enhance its online ecosystem to feature its preferred instructors a lot more prominently. All these are done to better enhance the FMOT experience of new students with the idea to encourage ‘progression’ (the educational equivalent of a repeat purchase,) and at that, a higher value one as well.?

“With insights derived from big data analytics, we can move make more informed decisions as to strategies and marketing execution, unlocking value and improving our customer experience,” concluded Alex.

While this case example represents that of a service-oriented business, the same framework and data-centric approach is also applicable for product-oriented businesses to help find ways to enhance the conversion rates across the different stages of the marketing funnel.

Such an approach has been used and is proven successful by the author during his brand and marketing management stints at product-oriented corporations such as 宝洁 , 辉瑞 , Essilor Group , etc.

Should you and your service- or product-oriented business need help to work out a data-driven, business strategy that will grow the value of our venture, feel free to contact me at?[email protected]?or +6016 977 9639 / +65 8429 0112!?

Remember, insightful findings from data is the sure-fire way to build your business!?