Items which enable the consumer

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Use the Advanced search. Summaries of EU Legislation. Help Print this page. In addition, we interviewed CMOs, brand managers, and other marketing executives representing consumer brands in 12 industries globally, asking about their strategies and beliefs concerning drivers of stickiness. Consider the marketing activities of two digital camera brands. There they find extensive technical and feature information and degree rotatable product photos, all organized and sortable by model.

Why does she want a camera? Is she just starting to look, or is she ready to buy? The company guides those in the early stages of investigation to third-party review sites where its cameras get good marks and directs consumers who are actively shopping to its own website. User reviews and ratings are front and center there, and a navigation tool lets consumers quickly find reviews that are relevant to their intended use of the camera family and vacation photography, nature photography, sports photography, and so on.

In stores, Brand B frames technical features in nontechnical terms. Instead of emphasizing megapixels and memory, for example, it says how many high-resolution photos fit on its memory card.

The easier a brand makes the purchase-decision journey, the higher its decision-simplicity score. Shifting the orientation toward decision simplicity and helping consumers confidently complete the purchase journey is a profound change, one that typically requires marketers to flex new muscles and rethink how they craft their communications.

Some practical lessons can be drawn from brands that are leading the way. Businesses broadly misjudge what consumers want from them online. In particular, marketers often believe that consumers interact with them on social media to join a community and feel connected to the brand.

But consumers have little interest in having a relationship beyond the merely transactional. In demanding ever more attention from overloaded consumers, brands ultimately lead them down unnecessarily confusing purchase paths. Creating a more efficient path means minimizing the number of information sources consumers must touch while moving confidently toward a purchase.

The savviest brands achieve this by personalizing the route. Marketers face two practical challenges here. First, how can they detect where a given consumer is on the purchase path and what information she most needs? Second, how can they ensure that consumers they direct to third-party information sources will come back? One electronics company has gathered data from four major sources—social media monitoring, ad-effectiveness and campaign-tracking information, clickstream analysis, and individual consumer surveys—to identify common purchase paths.

It studies the resulting maps to determine the volume of traffic on various paths, which paths inspire the most confidence, which touchpoints are best suited to conveying which types of messages, and at what points consumers lose confidence or defect. Over the past two decades, a wide range of experiments have shed light on how an excess of information and choice impairs decision making.

One of the most common consumer responses to the excess is to forgo a purchase altogether. In a classic experiment, Sheena Iyengar, then a doctoral student and now a professor at Columbia Business School, set out pots of jam on supermarket tables in groups of either six or As the psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrates in The Paradox of Choice, an excess of input leads to angst, indecision, regret, and ultimately lowered satisfaction with both the purchase process and the products themselves.

Dozens of related lines of research confirm what now seems like common sense: Too much choice or too much information can be paralyzing. But the hundreds of marketing executives we interviewed told us that their engagement strategies were designed expressly to achieve more-frequent interaction and deepened relationships.

Compounding the overload problem is the human penchant for overthinking trivial decisions and second-guessing.

Think about consumers trying to choose among an array of poorly differentiated products, such as digital cameras: The difficulty of wading through the choices increases the perceived importance of the decision. This in turn causes people to spend even more time and effort on the decision, which further increases its apparent importance.

A trivial purchase decision can thus spiral into a disproportionately complicated and time-consuming one—and the process creates consumers who are less happy, not more. Brands pursuing decision-simplicity strategies make full use of such information to assess where consumers are on the path and to direct them to the best touchpoints.