At each step along the way there is different questions as that brands can ask and wouldn't want to get an understanding of, as well as different information and data available to them that provides answers to those. At the point of trigger, brands would want to know what creates that consumer need? Why do consumers suddenly feel like they need my product or a competitor's product? Was it an ad that I placed? Was it some environmental issue that popped up? What is better? Understanding an answer to that question can provide to a brand great insight into when they need to intersect with the consumer and how they need to position messages. The question around the initial consideration set for brands is pretty clearly. Am I part of that list? Do customers recognize my brand? Are they aware of me and my products? And how trusting, how much do they know about me? Brands in this sense, to get on that initial consideration set, must build great trust and loyalty with consumers, must be present at the time that they have these needs and must have some kind of relationship developed with them to make that set. But if you're not on that initial consideration set, not everything is lost for a brand because you have the chance during active evaluation to get into the consumers mindset, to get into their decision process. At that point, what is important for brands to understand is what kind of needs do consumers have and in the products that I have, satisfy those needs? Am I positioning them in a way that makes those products, those brands attractive to consumers? So understanding what consumers are evaluating during that process is vitally important to brands and a way for them to really win that zemur. At moment of purchase brands will ask a number of questions but one of them are my sales efforts resulting in wins for my brand? So are the things that I'm doing at shelf, or in store, or even if I have an online component, my checkout process. Am I facilitating sales there so that at the moment of purchase I am winning? And then what can I do to improve the the win percent that I have? In the post-purchase experience, the primary question that brands will ask are: do the experiences I deliver fulfill the expectations that consumers have of my product and what can I do to help them? This is where customer service comes in. This is certainly where having a good solid product and a reputable name behind it comes into play as well. And then in the loyalty loop, another question that brands are going to ask is: do customers advocate for my brand? If they are advocating for my brand, I know that I've got a loyal strong customer. I know that that someone who, most likely is entering into loyalty loop next time that that trigger comes about. So, those are some of the primary questions that brands may ask of consumers during their process of purchase. And it's laid out very well in this consumer decision journey. And one of the things that I love about this framework in particular is that it takes something that is very complicated as we've seen to be very very involved and made it very simple. Put it into very discrete chunks that 'a' Do work; when you think about yourself if you're buying a car or if you're standing in line at a grocery store and look at a number of candy bars, you're really, whether you know it or not, going into the same phases. Perhaps for someone who only needs one kind of candy bar, then you have gone from the trigger of being hungry and seeing a candy bar through the loyalty loop and making that purchase. Otherwise, you may do a quick scan. You are effectively doing an active evaluation there. And as I said it doesn't matter how big or small the product is. The only thing that's really going to differ is the amount of time that you are that you are in this in this journey. There are also, for each step in that journey then and because you have different questions, different analysis techniques that you can employ to get those answers. So for trigger, a good method of understanding what drives a consumer's clickstream analysis. Taking a look at how they're interacting with you online, where they're coming from, what has motivated them to come and check you out, that could be the trigger that incites purchase in your industry. And so a clickstream analysis can provide that kind of information. Competitive intelligence is clearly a way to get a sense for who is winding up on the consumer's initial consideration set. Who are the brand leaders? Who are the competitors out there that, I as a brand am up against? Experimentation and testing is a great method for assessing active evaluation. If you're putting in different inputs, different advertising, or different programs, seeing as consumers are in active evaluation, how they're reacting and what is working gives you great insight into your ability to influence them. And we'll also reveal to you what is important and what is not so important to those consumers. Outcomes analysis is a great way to look at that moment of purchase and, say someone purchased something, what were the factors that led up to that. So that's a that's a very powerful set of analyses that can be done at that point and reveal great insights. And then clearly, during the post-purchase experience, hearing from the customer through a voice of customer study particularly around the experience that they've had with that product and crafting some surveys there, is a great way to get the information that will be vital for you in a setting consumer expectations, but then also improving your products so that you deliver a better experience. And then on the loyalty loop, clearly again a great opportunity for voice of customer to take a look at the advocacy that's been going on there. And social media is a great space for that. People will take to Twitter, take to Facebook and talk about the products that they love. Collecting that information in and developing that voice of a customer is a great way to get a good insight and sense into that advocacy. Now there are a number of tools available for you, either free or very low investment banking can conduct all of those different activities that we talked about. As an analyst what's important for you is to get a sense for which of these you like, which you don't like as well, what works for you, what doesn't, so that you can walk into an analysis and know the tools that you have available and a familiarity with so that you can efficiently and effectively conduct that analysis. Let's quickly sum up what we've learned in this lesson. We saw that the customer's digital life, the consumers digital life is very very busy and very complicated. We saw that to make sense of that you need some kind of framework that's going to allow you to organize that data that's being thrown off in that digital life. McKinsey's consumer decision journey is one such framework that works very well, something that we talked about in this lesson. And that at each step of that consumer decision journey, there are new questions that come relevant for brands. And then also how data can be used to answer each of those questions. A little supplemental reading for you in this lesson, great resource on the consumer decision journey to get much deeper into that theory behind the development of that framework, as well as some case studies of that framework being used today.
