Awareness. The customer is aware of the existence of a product or service.Long before advertising’s Mad Men era, an American marketing executive named E. St. Elmo Lewis concocted a model to illustrate a customer’s journey from the moment a brand or product attracts his or her attention all the way to the point of action or purchase.
Lewis’s approach is often referred to as the AIDA model, an acronym for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. It’s a pretty straightforward approach:
Awareness. The customer is aware of the existence of a product or service.
Interest. The customer actively expresses an interest in a product group.
Desire. The customer aspires to a particular brand or product.
Action. The customer takes the next step toward purchasing the chosen product.
Then in 1923, a fellow marketer by the name of Edward K. Strong published what became known as a seminal advertising tome: Psychology of Selling and Advertising.
He credited Lewis with the Purchase Funnel model, and it has been taught in every marketing and advertising class ever since. The impact of Lewis’s model was thought to be so great that he was posthumously inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1951.
Lewis’s model stood—with some tweaking and refining—until 2009. At that point, every marketer knew that the model didn’t reflect the new age and impact of the explosion of product choices, the Internet, and social media. But it took the venerable blue-chip consulting firm McKinsey & Company to propose a new model after examining the purchase decisions of almost 20,000 consumers across five industries and three continents.
McKinsey’s model, known as the “Consumer Decision Journey” and shown in Figure 4.1, brought to life the new reality: the shift away from one-way communication—from marketers to consumers— toward a two-way conversation. It meant that marketers needed a more systematic way to satisfy customer demands, to manage word of mouth, and to harness the power of recommendations.
Today, you can see how every aspect of the Consumer Decision Journey is affected by the Internet, which has essentially changed one-way communication into two-way communication. As shown in Figure 4.1, there are four phases in the journey:
Initial consideration set. In this phase, the consumer reviews an initial set of brands, based on brand perceptions and exposure to recent touch points. Today, these touch points include a variety of online sources, including consumer blogs, forums, e-tailers like Amazon.com or BestBuy.com, and the company’s own website. Consider the selection of a new laptop. A consumer might visit Dell.com directly, where she can read about the product specs, see a variety of pictures, and possibly read consumer reviews. Or she might visit BestBuy.com where she can see a more random and openly critical set of consumer reviews, or visit a “Dell” forum where she can ask questions, get answers, or read earlier threads.
Active evaluation. Here, consumers add or subtract brands as they evaluate what they want. In our fictional search for a laptop, our buyer may have been swayed away from Apple or Hewlett-Packard by a great offer from Sony. Or a friend might have shown her his own laptop from Sony that had all the bells and whistles she needed. Now focused on a Dell Inspiron model, she purposefully searches out the best deal for herself.
Moment of purchase. Ultimately, consumers will select a brand at what McKinsey referred to as “the moment of purchase.” For a laptop, this could mean walking into an Office Depot, Best Buy, or CompUSA store, ordering it online from Amazon.com, or using a combination of the two.
Postpurchase experience. After purchasing a product or service, consumers build expectations based on experience to inform their next decision journey. For instance, let’s say that buying a laptop in a brick-and-mortar store has always been vaguely problematic for our laptop purchaser. She has always felt bullied and intimidated by the more knowledgeable sales staff, and she has often bought more than she wanted or needed, including buying a variety of warranties or service plans she’ll never use. Consequently, if during her initial laptop consideration set and active evaluation, she was able to research most of the laptop’s specs online, compare them, and contrast them through unbiased reader reviews and even use her friend’s computer, all without ever entering a store, she may never buy another big-ticket item in a retail store again.
Loyalty loop. What’s more, if she particularly enjoyed the online ordering process via, say, Best Buy’s website, she might become a loyal customer. She may have even taken advantage of a financing plan offered at the time of purchase, or she may have applied for a Best Buy card midway through purchase, and, once approved, she may come back later to use it on the laptop. She may even join a “rewards program” at the store and use the points from this purchase to get an accessory, like a fiber optic laptop mouse or a set of portable speakers, for free.
Many companies focus on the prepurchase aspects of the Consumer Decision Journey, and rightfully so. You can’t run a company without appealing to, finding, and ultimately selling to actual consumers. But those who ignore postpurchase behavior are literally leaving money on the table.
What’s more, those who truly believe that marketing is dead are missing the fundamental opportunities provided by the last two items in the above scenario: the postpurchase experience and the loyalty loop. If anything, here is where modern marketing and the recommendation age are enjoying a glorious and active rebirth.
If we are to take part in this marketing resurrection, however, we must learn to engage consumers postpurchase—not as just a onetime event but every time, as a habit.
One of the earliest industries to note the power of the postpur-chase experience and fully invest in the loyalty loop was actually the auto industry. In particular, Lexus and Acura were both early adopters. What likely began as a way of differentiating their luxury cars from those built by Mercedes and BMW became an active and profitable business practice aimed at gaining not just one-time car buyers but Lexus and Acura buyers for life—true advocates who lived and “cheerleaded” for those distinctive brands.
Those early forays into postpurchase customer service encouraged customers to come in not just for an oil change every 3,000 miles but also for a car wash and tire pressure check, all accomplished while the customer waited in a low-key waiting “lounge” complete with a coffee bar and soothing refreshments. Today, of course, most dealerships come complete with waiting lounges, and they work just as hard as Acura and Lexus did back then to ensure consumer loyalty.
To ensure that your own marketing never dies, it’s critical for you to believe that the postpurchase sale is really the beginning of the relationship, not the end. To ensure the loyalty loop is indeed a never-ending circle instead of a finite line, your job is not just to keep your customers satisfied but to make them active advocates by providing feedback and improving your relationship so it continues to their next purchases.
Again, this postpurchase experience is not unique to the auto industry, nor does it require converting your waiting room into a waiting lounge, though that probably never hurts. Here is what could contribute to the postpurchase experience in a variety of industries:
A dry cleaner that helps you recycle your wire hangers and rewards you for doing so
A shoe company that matches your purchase by giving away a pair of shoes to needy people
An electronics retailer that updates you on a new software download that will make your Blu-ray player work even better
I’m reminded of a local chain of tire and auto repair shops that recently entered the gas station business in a very significant, real, and telling way, indicating that the company was not only aware of the loyalty loop but also eager to have customers join its loop.
Duxler Tire has been in business in Illinois since 1926, opening four branches over time and maintaining hundreds of thousands of cars. Now, I could write reams about how the company treats its customers with respect, runs free car care clinics, and celebrates a customer’s 400,000-mile mark with cake and a party, but Duxler’s attention to postpurchase details recently hit a high water mark when it decided to start selling gas.
Not only did Duxler debut with gas prices 5 cents below its nearest competitors but it also made all of the pumps full service, something many in the younger generations may not have ever experienced in their lifetimes. What’s more, when the attendants appear at your driver’s side door to collect the money, they’re there with a basket of candy, popcorn, or if you’ve got a pooch, a dog biscuit.
Since I get gas nearly every week, I’ve become very familiar with the folks at the local Duxler. So when my daughter’s brakes started squeaking, Duxler was the first place I thought to bring her car. And since she was treated so well, it was the first place she thought to bring it back when the air went out of a tire and Dad was traveling for business.
So, in this case, Duxler’s loyalty loop included me and my daughter. And it included how many other countless families due to the company’s unwavering commitment to postpurchase customer service. What’s more, Duxler’s business practices — attention to detail, customer commitment, going the extra mile, and so on — can be applied to the marketing practices of businesses large and small.
In the last chapter, I introduced you to the concept of “interrupting” as a popular form of marketing. While this may sound old-fashioned, the fact is, it’s very much a part of the traditional marketing method employed by companies big and small.
Even young, so-called hip or modern media-savvy companies still engage in this “look at me, look at me” method of marketing. Even those same authors, bloggers, pundits, and consultants who tout the “marketing is dead” bait and switch— see my sensational headline! click on my blog! read how marketing isn’t actually dead after all! just foolin’!—are basically interrupting your morning, afternoon, or evening routine to stop what you’re doing and look, listen, and pay attention, even if it’s all smoke and mirrors.
Which is not to say that interrupting consumers can’t be effective. Whether it’s “Flo” from Progressive Insurance, Kia’s dancing hamsters, or the Aflac duck, those commercials, mascots, or icons everyone loves to hate are obviously quite effective, or how else could the companies who create them afford to keep producing them?
The radical transformation that is occurring in marketing at the moment really centers around this old method of interrupting you to make a point and sell you something to one of interacting with you so that you’ll feel involved, like you’re part of the movement, group, or family, and ultimately not only purchase from them but recommend them.
Again, interrupting your normal routine with a funny visual, an arresting image, a controversial billboard, or a statement à la “Marketing is dead” is still an incredibly vital aspect of marketing. The challenge, the shift, the transformation comes when you go from interrupting—which is an event more than a habit, an occurrence rather than a trend—to starting to interact on a serious level with your consumers.
“It’s a burger for the people. By the people. Eaten by other people. That’s the People’s Burger.” Such was the bold claim made by the Red Robin restaurant chain upon announcing the creation of “the people’s burger,” perhaps the first “create your own burger” ever to see an actual menu.
It was a contest, one emboldened by the creation of a separate website, www.peoplesburger.com, and it was shared daily on the Red Robin Facebook page. It got a lot of play in the Internet searches, featuring prominently on contest, game, and sweepstakes sites. And of course, what casual fans with a few minutes on their hands wouldn’t want to create their very own hamburger and then . . . have other people eat it.
While many companies run contests, few have the nerve to serve the winner of the contest’s creation in their stores and on their menus for better or worse. That was not just a promo item. That was a menu item and a conscious business decision.
It was also marketing gold. It was a hands-on, interactive request. It called for customers to manipulate menu items, combine them, and add or subtract them. Then they had to submit the creation and wait for the judging, voting, being judged, being voted on, a hundred times, a thousand times, however many participants there were, all of whom urging their friends to vote for them—and everyone, all the while, was looking at pictures of delicious Red Robin burgers and talking about Red Robin burgers.
Ultimately, the winning burger was called “The Dictator,” and it featured a host of Red Robin’s trademark offerings, including “angry onions,” an onion bun, bacon, a fried egg(!), mayo, and, of course, an all-beef patty. Not only that, but dozens and dozens of runners up, including the “Caliavacado Burger” created by Shirley McNeill and the “Big Ben Burger” created by Adam Pellegrino, got a full profile page on the People’s Burger website, bringing fame to participants who were also likely to become fully engaged in the loyalty loop for years to come.
Similar to the interactivity of Red Robin’s “People’s Burger” contest, Frito-Lay held a contest inviting consumers to help “Do Us a Flavor” and create a brand new flavor of Lay’s potato chips. PepsiCo has activated this global program in more than a dozen countries around the world. The winner of the U.S. “Do Us a Flavor” contest wins either $1 million or 1 percent of the chip’s net sales for one year, whichever is deemed the larger amount.
As of this writing, the Lay’s “Do Us a Flavor” Facebook fan page had 6.1 million Likes, as well as a Facebook app to make it even more convenient for users to submit their flavor ideas.
Many posts on the page had upward of 18,000 comments, some offering flavors like “chicken fettuccini Alfredo” or “Nutella” flavor, others offering recipes to sweeten up current Lay’s flavors, such as melting chocolate on top of the chips in the microwave.
Naturally, the Facebook fan page is fully interactive, and Lay’s is making full use of user recommendations to collect not only priceless data but also promote current flavors, as the company did with this recent post: “17 percent of your submissions include bacon. Which reminds us, have you tried our new BLT flavored Lay’s potato chips? They’re incredible.”
In case you’re wondering, by the way, Cheesy Garlic Bread was the winning flavor. Yum.
Obviously, holding contests to name your restaurant’s menu items or throwing up an entire section of your website to chronicle where your farm fed beef comes from is slightly more complicated than throwing together some clip art and clever slogans for a quarter-page newspaper ad in the Sunday circular, but unfortunately what worked then simply won’t work now. At least, not in isolation.
The goal of becoming a truly top-down social business is not for you to mimic any of the companies or case studies you’ll read about in this book but to simply adopt the same tone of interactivity, two-way conversation, and advocacy that make those companies stand out and so easily recommendable.
Likewise, recommendation marketing in the age of advocacy, loyalty, and cheerleading is emerging and evolving by the day. At its heart, recommendation marketing is really about trying to understand where and how and why people are talking about you and, ultimately, why they’ll recommend you—highly.
What will they say about you, and how can you craft that message? How loudly will they say it and where, and what can you do to get them to say it more often, more loudly, in more places? The fact is, we are living in a world where everything—good, bad, or ugly, online or off—is part of our universal brand. We need advocates more than ever, and my hope is that in this book I’ll guide you toward finding more than ever.
