Most purchase decisions are made long before shopping starts. Companies can use three simple questions to identify when and where they can best influence consumers’ shopping decisions.
Most businesses logically assume that the best time to influence a potential customer – and present them with your best ad – is when they’re actively considering a purchase.
But most influence over shoppers’ decisions occurs long before this. In fact, the likelihood of influencing a purchase depends not on reach or attention, but on a customer’s openness to being affected by advertising. This is according to research by WPP Media and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School that explores what drives consumer decisions.
The resulting report, How Humans Decide, is an analysis of more than 1.2 million purchase journeys across 47 countries and over 200 product and service categories. It shows that 84% of consumer purchase decisions are effectively taken before people start shopping. It also suggests that most of the consumers normally considered as being not currently in the market for buying something should, in fact, be the principal audience for advertising. And this should focus on brand preference, rather than simply capturing sales.
This 84% is a product of “priming bias”, which is the influence of existing familiarity, brand affinity and a preliminary judgement based on the differences between options consumers consider when deciding what to buy. As a result, companies often make the mistake of spending more on advertising to be noticed and remembered, rather than identifying when and where they can genuinely influence consumer decisions in both the short and long term.
Finding potential buyers
People are 10 times more likely to consider a brand they’re biased towards, and 14 times more likely to then buy it, according to the report. And so, building priming bias for a brand dramatically increases the likelihood it will be considered and bought.
But when you ask people which brands they genuinely consider when shopping, the number is alarmingly low. The average shopper considers just two or three brands per product type – nearly always the ones towards which they have a positive predisposition.
This behaviour appears across every product category studied – from appliances to food – suggesting that this limitation is an inherent human response to the abundance of choice available to shoppers, and not something that marketing can easily alter.
Brand-building communication is therefore essential groundwork for ranking in shoppers’ “top three”. And this process that must begin long before potential buyers start thinking about a purchase.
Are you receiving me?
Most marketing treats members of a target audience as equally influenceable. But receptivity varies widely among consumers. While 10% are likely to be influenced by almost any form of brand communication, 23% are largely unreceptive to all forms of marketing, according to the research.
This matters because if all consumers are treated as equally influenceable, businesses risk embedding significant waste in their marketing plans. In fact, the biggest single influence on someone’s receptiveness to marketing is the category in which they’re shopping.
In categories where more information or reassurance is needed before purchasing, people are more influenceable. In categories where a purchase is more habitual, less so. For example, people buying home appliances are typically nine times more receptive to marketing communication than the average person, while people buying toothpaste are five times less influenceable.
Reach is not the same as influence
Businesses often mistake increased reach for increased marketing impact. But the variability of consumer receptiveness shows that exposure alone cannot be treated as evidence of influence.
Just as consumer receptivity varies, so does the ability of different marketing methods to influence consumer decisions. These so-called “touchpoints” include anything that occupies the space between a brand and a consumer to communicate on the brand’s behalf – a TV ad, word of mouth or influencer content, for example.
The research shows that choosing four touchpoints based on reach alone creates only around a 20% chance of affecting a decision. However, selecting the four most influential touchpoints – those with the highest probability of influencing brand perception or a purchase – increases that chance to 47%.
Reach might be the same across these touchpoints, but how each one engages with consumers significantly impacts influence.
Influence differs by product type
Unsurprisingly, given how consumer receptiveness varies across product categories, the ability of individual marketing touchpoints to influence consumer decisions also varies significantly by product.
A touchpoint that works particularly well among consumers that want to buy a washing machine may have little impact on those looking for new shoes, for example. And no combination of touchpoints is equally effective across every category – tactics that work for milk or beer may be less effective for travel, telecommunications or banking purchases.
In the personal care category, for example, word of mouth is a particularly influential touchpoint, with a 58% probability of influencing purchase. But in the supermarket category, its probability of influencing the average consumer is just 2%.
Look beyond paid media to drive sales
The final determinant of a touchpoint’s influence is the point of the journey at which the consumer encounters it. Touchpoints that are most effective at brand building are measurably different to those most effective at converting sales.
Owned channels like a company website, shared channels including influencer content, and earned channels such as word of mouth can be nearly three times more effective than paid media at influencing consumers into the final purchase.
And these touchpoints are only growing in their ability to drive purchases. Social media influencers and creators have increased in influence by 54% since 2020, for example, and social media has risen by 143%, the report shows.
More advertising or more effective advertising?
Ultimately, this research reveals that businesses must understand exactly how consumers make decisions, spot which touchpoints are most capable of influencing them and recognize that these nuances are category-specific.
The goal is to identify when and where reaching an audience can genuinely influence their behaviour in both the short and long term. Companies can ask three questions to do this:
Which consumers are open to being influenced?
At what stage of the journey can their preferences be changed?
Which touchpoints are most likely to influence their decision?
Until they accept that reach does not equate influence, advertisers will continue to spend money trying to persuade shoppers whose minds are already made up about what to buy.
