How Consumers Buy(Shop)

Customers employ a broad array of channels to discern new products they would like to buy, and some of them, like word-of-mouth, are very important to customers, but not directly under marketers' influence. 

This presents a challenge to marketers' contemporary thinking and practices. "Marketers don't really organize around the customer and how they behave; they organize around the channels and how people use those channels".

In bid to stay with customers at every step of the way and be significant to them, marketers need to think holistically. "We want to, as marketers, try to understand what their journey looks like — when are they going into the store, when are they going online, why are they doing that, where do they see the value — and try to really craft a journey that captures that."

Once the consumer journey is designed and after discovering what customers value, it's upon the organisation to provide that value. The primary predicament & challenge is figuring out what are the relationships between all those channel usages and visits, how do we measure it and how do we attribute our success across the multi-channel journey?"

How to create a reliable customer experience between brick-and-mortar and digital channels

The most popular ways for customers to discover new products were:

• In-store browsing (59%)

• Word-of-mouth from friends, family, colleagues (57%)

• Using a search engine (47%)

• Articles in print magazines/newspapers (34%)

Lucidly, both brick-and-mortar channels and digital channels are in the top three. Since consumers can come to a brand's physical stores from digital interactions, and they can come into a store to glance through, and then make a purchase later online, it's imperative for any organisation to construct a horizontal transition between the offline and online parts of the consumer journey.

Financial services are an interesting example of creating a consistent brand experience across branches and digital channels. Bank clients go online and see value in online interactions, but they also still go to branches. Creating a consistent brand experience is key for converting consumer into prosumer.

"Especially in the financial sector with special regards to banks as they create some interesting programs where the customer interacts online, and through that process they're actually creating an asset or an artefact that they then bring to the branch, and that artefact guides the in-branch staff to know how to react," So in that sense the customer is carrying the consistent touch piece as they pass through the channels, and you're not leaving it up to whether or not the people in the branch have been trained correctly." It is best example of coherent marketing across the consumer journey.

The artefact consumers create can be based on a quiz, or creating an action list — anything that enables the consumer to get a step closer to the service that they are interested in. This type of consumer-led artefact creation functions like content marketing, focused on utility — it goes beyond informing and educating, and enables the customer and customer service representative to have the most meaningful interaction later.
"So you can really use your customer as a kind of conduit for the experience as they pass from digital to bricks and mortar”.

To sum up, consumers use various channels to discover new products that they would like to buy, and Companies face the challenge to map customers' journeys across digital and offline channels, and provide relevant service every step of the way.