Through the SIVO, Inc. "Modern Ways of Working" Mini Chat series, we spoke with a strategic consumer insights leader, Anna Estlund, Senior Director of Insights and Strategy at Pernod Ricard.
In this conversation with Natasha Weith, Anna discusses how she is working to the ways her team works to drive impact and efficiency. Examples include building more flexibility into her teams roles, spending more time focused on the front and end stages of projects and hiring on demand talent to extend the bandwidth of her team. All of these things allow Anna and her team to maximize their value and relevance to the organization. Check it out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhrIyqHooiM
Special thanks to Anna for generously sharing her experience and knowledge with our peers across the Insights industry!
In your brand's early development stages, you likely gave much thought to the idea of a buyer persona.
You researched who you expected to purchase your products, how they would interact with your brand, and which factors would influence them to choose your brand over a competitor's. You painted a picture of what their needs are, what they do, and how their key motivators would align with your offerings.
Now, it's time to see that journey in action.
The path to purchase describes the journey that your target buyers take from the moment they first discover your product or service until they ultimately decide to buy it. The better you understand this journey, the easier it is to connect with them at key milestones and decision points to convert them from awareness to consideration to purchase, and then to repeat purchases.
Today, we're sharing how to conduct this research effectively and what to do with the results you uncover.
Put simply, the path to purchase encompasses all of the steps that your users take as they convert from a prospect into a paying customer. This can include multiple different channels, touchpoints, and platforms.
While each person's brand experience will be nuanced and unique, most leads take a few central steps as they travel along this journey. These include:
Also known as a customer journey or buyer journey, the path to purchase can be a valuable part of your audience analysis. It allows you to climb inside the mind of your prospective buyers, and current buyers and understand why and how they're engaging with your brand.
Let's break these stages down a little, explaining the important aspects to research and analyze.
The first step in the path to purchase is awareness. This is the moment that your prospective customers first learn about your brand, and it sets the tone and the stage for the rest of your interactions together.
Years ago, mass marketing campaigns were more effective than they were today. Modern buyers want customization and personalization at every turn, and 80% are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers tailored experiences. This means that gone are the days when you could send out one e-mail blast or a generic postcard to your leads and expect them to convert.
Now, the most effective ways to reach your target audience include:
Not only should these outreach measures be personalized, but they should also include a call-to-action (CTA) that encourages users to take that next step. Do you want them to check out your website, sign up for your e-newsletter, contact you to set up a consultation? Remember to make the CTA clear, actionable, and easy to follow.
Once you've initiated the path to purchase, you can track your marketing efforts, e.g., engagement and response rate, to understand how effective your chosen tactics were. For instance, with inbound marketing campaigns, most website analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics, or CRM systems, such as, HubSpot, allow you to easily monitor the traffic going to your website, the number of views each blog gets, or the success rate of your paid online ads.
Regularly review these numbers to understand which channels are the most successful. Then, fine-tune the most profitable ones and look for ways to eliminate or phase out the ones that aren't as fruitful.
For larger brands with national distribution, you can also conduct advertising and brand awareness tracking research to understand the percentage of consumers who are aware of your advertising and brand, pre vs. post the execution of your marketing campaign or in regular intervals such as, one or two times per year.
Key questions to ask at this stage include:
Piquing the interest of your target buyer is only the first part of the path to purchase. Next, the prospect will consider all of the features that your company or product offers, comparing them against others in your same space. They're looking for differentiators that set your brand apart, such as price point, quality, speed of delivery, product features, and more.
To perform this competitive analysis, they may perform the following steps:
At the core of this step is the buyer's need for information and insights. If you can provide this intelligence about your solution better than anyone else can, then you're more likely to move them from this phase of the buyer journey to the next.
In this step, you'll need to research and manage your online presence and reputation. Do you know what your target buyers will see when they search for your brand name online?
There are reputation management tools that can help you uncover and respond to your company reviews. In addition to the reviews on your website or Google Business Profile, remember to also check common and industry-specific third-party review sites.
Another area to research is how well you've explained and demonstrated your product or service. If a prospective customer wanted to learn more about how your solution works, are there online descriptions, manuals, sheets, videos, or in-store signage that make this step simple? The more transparent you can be, the easier it is to compare your solution against another.
Key questions to ask at this stage include:
After a lead discovers and researches your brand, they may decide to take that next step and make a purchase. To help them get there, you'll need to provide information that reveals why your company or offering is the best fit for their needs.
Depending on the solution you offer, this could require the buyer to make a significant investment. They'll want to review all of their options and compare top features to make sure they're making a wise decision.
This final stage of the path to purchase is all about sealing the deal. Research your company's current methods for engaging prospects and moving them along the sales funnel.
Some companies with “Business to Business” (B2B) offerings might use this time to perform presentations, pitches, and demos to share how their products work. Others with “Business to Consumer” (B2C) offerings might use advertising, on-package claims, third-party endorsements and in-store signage to demonstrate their benefits to prospective buyers. . The nature of your business and the type of audience you serve will dictate the exact strategy you deploy.
Key questions to ask at this stage include:
At each stage of the consumer path to purchase, you'll have the opportunity to gather insights into buyer behaviors. As you do, it's important to know what metrics to track, when to dive in, and who to involve. Here are a few tips to help you make the most of the data you obtain.
As brands seek to improve their buyers’ path to purchase experience, most are focused primarily on hard numbers, aka quantitative data, about the purchase, including volume, amount and frequency of sales, who and where purchased, percent of repeat purchases, etc. While this type of behavioral data is extremely important -, but don't underestimate the value of qualitative insights about the buying journey.
The ultimate goal of each phase is to understand the mindset of your buyers, and you can't get there with quantitative measurements alone. You need to understand the emotions that your prospective buyers are feeling, as well as what's behind their concerns, hesitancies, and excitement.
A few of the ways you can capture qualitative feedback include:
Not only are these insights helpful in directing your current and future campaigns, but they can also motivate your internal stakeholders. If you can share direct quotes and client feedback with your C-suite and marketing teams, it's easier for them to understand the human side of their work, in addition to the technical and economical side.
For some B2C companies, there is a primary shopper involved in each brand interaction. However, most B2B transactions involve other, behind-the-scenes decision-makers and influencers.
As such, resist the temptation to consider the path to purchase as strictly linear and one-dimensional in nature. In reality, it's more multi-faceted and complex.
Try to learn about the key stakeholders involved in buying decisions, as well as their specific roles. It also helps to understand how they interact with one another, as well as when each one enters and leaves the buyer journey. While some will be involved from start to finish, others may join and leave at different times.
To get the fullest view of your path to purchase, don't start your research at the first time the buyer and seller interact. Instead, go back even further to the pre-shopping stage. Increasingly, this means analyzing how buyers live, work, and how they find and compare offerings to meet their needs.
Today, most buyers are hopping online to discover new brands. In fact, in the B2B sphere, the average customer performs 12 different searches before deciding to engage with a specific brand. While it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly when a buyer first discovers your brand, spend time exploring different purchasing triggers to understand how to optimize these interactions.
As you research and learn more about your customerpath to purchase, you can customize and fine-tune your offerings and marketing communications to appeal precisely to those who are interested in them the most.
At SIVO, we're dedicated to helping our clients understand their buyers' needs, beliefs, and behaviors. We can help you gain visibility and address challenges by asking the right questions directly to your target audiences. Then, we'll work with you to turn those insights into actionable steps that can drive conversions, improve engagement, and build brand reputation. Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or go to SIVOInsights.com today to schedule a discovery call and connect!
Every business has customers, but how well they know their customers is another question. In a recent Harvard Business Review blog, Peter Merholz explains that many large companies lose that vital interaction with their customers as their business begins to grow.
“Business cannot exist without customers, so it’s sadly ironic that many, if not most, businesses, actually understand so little about them,” says Merholz. “In order to become customer experience-driven, you need to go beyond who your customers are, and understand what they do.”
While it may feel tempting to place your customers into simple, definable categories, Merholz urges companies to dig deeper and understand their customers as real people living in a messy, complicated world. What does that mean for your company? It means going beyond the high-level data and seeking to understand and appreciate your customer’s behavior and true motivation.
Trending
Do customers want to ‘hire’ your product?
Through SIVO On Demand Talent or with SIVO custom qualitative research, our clients uncover the underlying motivations behind their customer’s unique behavior. With SIVO On Demand Talent, we have storytellers who mine existing research to bring our clients’ customers to life. And, we ensure the next phase of research fills a customer knowledge gap, extending our clients’ research budgets. With SIVO custom research, our clients tap into valuable customer insights through approaches like In-Store Intercepts, Shop-Alongs, and Ethnographic research, to gain clear, in-depth analysis of their customer in the context of their daily lives.
How well do you know your customer? Maybe it’s time to take a deeper look…
Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com for more information and next steps.
By Julie Rose
Now more than ever, it’s crucial to balance future readiness with the demands of today.
The future isn’t distant. It’s already here and unfolding in ways most can’t imagine. If you look closely, the signs of what's to come are everywhere. Technology, consumer preferences, and industry landscapes are evolving at an unprecedented pace.
Yet, many still expect gradual change, a slow evolution of today’s norms. The reality is different. The future is coming faster and with more disruption than we’ve ever experienced before. To remain competitive, companies must adopt a future readiness mindset.
More Different Than Ever Before
In the next 20 years, society will change more than it has in the past 300 years. We live in the Technology Era, where things evolve exponentially. This is hard to grasp because we’re wired to think in linear steps, not exponential leaps.
For example, the stepwise expansion of grocery store refrigerated sections to include fresh snacks and functional beverages and grab & go meals was a slow, predictable evolution. But the rise of Instacart, which recognized paradigm shifts in eCommerce, the gig economy, and rideshare platforms was a significant leap that changed grocery shopping substantially. Today, 25% of groceries are bought through delivery services like Instacart.
While we easily project near-term change, we vastly underestimate long-term transformations.
Take TikTok, Zoom, Peloton, Alexa, Airbnb, and Tesla—none existed 5 to 10 years ago, yet they are now embedded in our daily lives, and disrupted industries almost overnight.
How will your industry, competitors, and consumers transform in the next decade?
The Power of Exponential Change
Exponential technological growth, driven by Moore’s Law, is driven by the power and capabilities of technology doubling every two years, if not faster. This exponential curve is almost impossible for our linear human brains to understand. Let’s demonstrate:
Imagine folding a giant piece of notebook paper in half. Now fold it again and again until you’ve folded it 42 times. How tall would that folded tower of paper be? Four inches? Four feet? Four yards?
Wrong. It would stretch all the way to the moon (0.004 inches x 242 ≈ 240,000 miles)!
This is the power of exponential growth—small changes compound quickly, creating massive impacts. Companies and individuals who can think exponentially, recognizing and preparing for the transformational changes on the horizon, will thrive in a future that looks radically different from today.
How to Prepare for Tomorrow, Today
Here are four critical steps to get your organization ready for the era of exponential change:
1. Narrow Your Lens
With endless opportunities (and challenges) on the horizon, it’s easy to lose focus. Which do you want to solve? Where do you want to start? Narrow your focus to areas where you can make the biggest impact. Rather than trying to chase every opportunity, focus on solving the problems that align with your strengths and strategic goals. Successful companies of the future will be those that zero in on the right opportunities, rather than trying to cover too much ground (or worse, choosing to stand still).
You don’t have to be Amazon, Tesla or Google X—but you better not be Blockbuster.
2. Notice & Anticipate
The future doesn’t usually arrive in the form of today’s familiar faces. Instead, it comes from the edges. Netflix didn’t resemble its current form in its early years, nor did Facebook. To see the signals of change, look beyond your immediate competition or traditional industry players. Explore the fringes of culture, markets, and technology. The future often looks weird before it goes mainstream—initially awkward, niche, and impractical—until it’s not.
What are you doing to discover tomorrow’s signals today?
3. Seek a Catalyst
Driving disruptive change is tough, especially for established organizations. That’s why you need innovation catalysts—people who have the rare ability to get things moving and drive change. These are the people who can activate ideas by building trust, challenging assumptions, and breaking through organizational inertia. If you have them on your team, nurture and empower them. If not, hire them. Additionally, reevaluate your network. Seek and develop deep partnerships that offer 1+1=3 potential.
Do you have a catalyst on your roster? Are your partners driving exponential potential?
4. Practice
Focus, anticipation, and catalysts alone won’t ensure success. You must also create the time and space to “rehearse the future”. Build experimentation into daily routines and make future discussions a core part of company culture. You still need to run day-to-day operations, but by weaving future preparation into daily practice, you’ll be better prepared when disruption hits. World class innovation companies like 3M, NASA and Nike create space, ring-fence funds and reward risk-taking and experimentation.
What systems and norms do you have in place to enable learning about your potential futures?
SIVO is Your Future Readiness Co-Pilot
While tomorrow’s marketplace will look very different from today’s, understanding human needs, beliefs, and behaviors will remain critical. At SIVO, our Custom Research and Growth Framework solutions will highlight tomorrow’s opportunities, and our On Demand Talent network offers “future-ready” experts ready to provide fractional support tailored to your needs. Additionally, we are “rehearsing the future” by actively using and experimenting with AI tools that support our researchers in uncovering insights and optimizing efficiency.
Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or visit SIVO's Website to hear more about our investigation or to schedule a discovery call. Let’s embrace the future together!
By Kerry Juhl
The Responsibility & Privilege of Serving Customers
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.”
– Mahatma Gandhi, 1890
This quote is more than 100-years old, but it is still true today. The opportunity to serve customers is a privilege. The responsibility of that privilege is ensuring the customer’s voice is heard and understood. Brand teams need to know what their customers need and what they value, as decisions about products and services are made on the customers’ behalf.
Defining Customer Value
Understanding customer value can be a differentiator for companies in today’s challenging market. Simplistically, if a brand team has $1 to invest – or needs to cut $1 in spending – knowledge about what customers’ value must guide these business decisions to stay competitive.
So let’s talk about customer value…In everyday conversations, value has many meanings including price, worth, or even benefits. It is imperative for organizations to operate with a common understanding of customer value. From a marketing and branding perspective, it helps to think about customer value as an equation:
Customer Value equals Benefits minus Cost (CV=B-C).
Benefits include the advantages of quality, service, image, brand, experience, and the functionality one gets or emotions one feels when using the product or service. Cost is not only price – which we think of as cash, credit, interest, even service fees - but it can also include non-price terms such as time, effort, energy, and convenience.*
When teams define their Customer Value Equation, they can clearly identify growth opportunities by emphasizing or improving aspects of an offering that customers value (where to invest) and they can identify cost savings by eliminating aspects of the offering that customers do not value (where to cut).
Developing the Customer Value Equation
SIVO employs a 5-Step Process to develop your Customer Value Equation. In partnership with our client teams, we Mine, Explore and Quantify the customer value drivers leveraging Functional, Emotional, Life-Changing and Social Impact values. Note that the Quantify Step can be qualitative consumer learning, a quantitative survey or ideally, a combination of both. The design of this step is dependent on how much past learning that the team already has in hand.
Four Categories of Customer Value
We then partner with teams to Develop & Refine the Customer Value Equation. Lastly, we help teams Apply their equation by assessing where their products/services are over/under-delivering and facilitate them through the generation of ideas to improve the customer experience.
The result of our process is rich with discoveries. These insights provide a unifying understanding of the target customers’ purchase drivers, must-haves and nice-to-haves regarding a product or service – giving teams confidence and clarity on what to do with $1 more or $1 less.
Our Offer to You
SIVO is interested in sharing our Customer Value Equation experience and case studies with you and your insights team! Our “CVE Download” can easily be part of an in-person or virtual “Lunch & Learn” or your next team meeting.
If you can answer “yes” to at least one of the following three questions, please reach out to SIVO.
To learn more, contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com.
*Referenced article by Gautam Mahajan https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2394964320903557
SIVO Insights brings together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence. Have a business challenge? Let's talk!
We bring together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence
