Marketers and planners like to think of the purchase process as a funnel where customers move from step one to step two in tidy fashion. The classic purchase funnel is “attention, interest, desire, action”. Marketers take advantage of that funnel by tailoring messages in advertising to speak to those mindsets. The idea being, if we’ve got their attention, let’s generate some interest. If the interest is there, let’s evoke some desire and incent action.

As Experience Planners for the web know, it’s not so tidy. Customers jump around from one mindset to another. In a recent Adotas article, Cathy Clift talks about a recent ComScore study where the consideration set of a customer looking to buy a product, increased from 4 to 5 or 6 vehicle models after doing generic keyword searches. That’s a huge “wow!” moment for me. This implies that a customer, who had 4 plasma television brands/models in minds before starting research on the internet, had 5 or 6 brands/models in mind after completing an initial pass at research using generic keywords like “plasma TV”.

Marketers should be clamouring for this type of data and insight. It’s implications are clear; brands need to be reaching out to customers even earlier in the consideration stage. For online marketers, this means taking a critical look at your search engine marketing and optimization programs.

Another observation culled from Ms. Clift’s article is the increasing importance of word-of-mouth referrals. The insight here is don’t stop marketing to customers once they become owners. It’s so easy for stories of poor customer experiences to be cicrulated (see Jeff Jarvis’ experience with Dell or check out The Consumerist). As a result, the customer turned brand-advocate is more important than ever. Marketers; market to your owners and keep the brand experience postive and healthy. Your prospects are talking to them more than they will ever talk to you.