Creating a consumer behavior playbook for your product

Your unhappiest customer is your best source of truth.

From the lens of building products and marketing them, it’s essential to understand why customers think the way they do. Consumer behavior is complex, but you can break down key elements or levers to give you insights.

While product building may look deeply at consumer behavior analytics and consider the steps of the consumer decision-making process, marketing and sales also looks at the stages of the purchase. The goal here is to identify any and all opportunities to positively impact the consumer.

In this post, I will detail the three main aspects of consumer behavior: key levers, the purchase process, and the decision-making journey.

Key levers of the consumer behavior framework

There are six levers that command how the consumer will behave and engage with your product or business. This applies to both individual consumers as well as enterprises.

You may have heard that consumers do not know what they want and, while there is some truth to that, consumer’s wants are decided mainly by these six aspects. If you pay close attention to these levers, you will be able to define archetypes of consumers and find that the majority of consumers will fit in one category or another. You’ll still have to keep that remaining 10 percent margin for emerging factors, which may fall in one of these categories:

• Marketing — This is the 7 Ps (product, price, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence), which leave a mark on the consumer
• Demographics — The consumer’s age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, and vocation are factors that can impact their behaviors
• Psychological — As the name suggests, this is about probing deep into the consumer’s mind to be able to influence their purchasing decisions
  • Perception refers to the interpretation and understanding of given information
  • The motivation of the consumer may be coming from one of the layers of the hierarchy of needs from Maslow’s theory
  • Attitudes and beliefs are also formed over time based on exposure
• Situational — The environment framed by the physical and social surroundings of the consumer also guides their behavior. Additionally, the time of the purchase plays an important role
• Social — A consumer’s family, social status, peers, and reference groups often define how they will attribute value to a particular product. If the consumer is parent or spouse-oriented, this will also make a difference in their purchase or engagement behavior
• Cultural — Values, norms, media, and lifestyles in different cultures all create influences on the consumer. Religion also falls into this category

A good communication strategy from your marketing team can help leverage these factors by playing in shaping consumer behavior. The contexts will vary depending on each country, as well as by region and local contexts. Lately, hyper-local products are doing well because businesses display the understanding of the context of the consumer up-close.

Stages of the consumer purchase process

There are four stages in the consumer buying process: pre-purchase, purchase, consumption, and post-purchase. These stages are highly affected by the levers we talked about above, which play a key role in shaping the needs of a consumer.

Let’s take a look at this purchase process using the lens of an ecommerce product:

Pre-purchase

This is when the user engages with the marketplace and explores the product’s different inventories. The user takes multiple factors into consideration before going to the next phase, such as the seller/brand, reviews and ratings, product specifics like size or material, minimum purchase quantity, delivery time, return policies, payment methods, etc.

Purchase

At this stage, the user makes a decision by going through the purchase experience of adding items to a cart, entering their payment information, delivery address, and contact details, choosing a payment method (such as installments or lump-sum), and placing the order.

Consumption

The user typically tracks the order as it gets shipped out and, once received, evaluates its quality against what they expected. Upon consumption of the product, the user decides to take a few actions, which brings us to the next step.

Post-purchase

At this stage, the consumer will evaluate whether they would like to repeat the purchase or buy other items from the brand. They form an opinion on the brand based on the product they received, and perhaps will share the benefit or review via word of mouth within their immediate circle.

If the user had to reach out to customer care for the product, they will expect a seamless post-purchase experience from support or grievance redressal to return and refunds.

The consumer decision-making journey

Now that you know the four stages of the consumer’s purchase process, let’s see how the decision making journey of the consumer shapes up through multiple stages. You’ll find four stages in the decision making process of the consumer, explained below:

1. Problem identification

Consumers identify a product or service requirement to solve a problem they may have faced before, are currently facing, or expect to face in the future. Sometimes, social factors like status may drive this step.

2. Search for information

In this stage, the consumer actively seeks information. They may gather inputs from sponsored sources, including digital media advertisements, websites, social media pages, etc. They also may seek non-sponsored opinions from friends, family, and third-parties such as social media reviews.

3. Assessing alternatives

Now that the requirements are clear and information has been organized, the customer has landed at a decision. Do they go with the first solution they found or consider alternatives? Oftentimes, consumers who are more price-sensitive will go through this process to make sure they’re not missing out on additional features from other brands at the same price.

4. Purchase (finally!)

The consumer has discarded the alternatives and finally picked up the product or service they want. They have been influenced by marketing, emotional connections, or have made a practical decision.

5. Post-purchase evaluation

Ever wonder how word-of-mouth happens? This is mainly generated by the quality of the product or service, as well as the satisfaction it’s provided the consumer. The consumer can either become a brand ambassador or a negative influencer.

Conclusion

Product design and marketing is a critical component in the consumer decision-making process. They establish a strategic connection between the product and its potential customers. In the course of the customer purchase journey, both of these factors have to function effectively to cater to the three major aspects of consumer behavior.

To effectively utilize and apply learnings from the article, you can build user personas, user journey or consumer journey maps. Thanks for reading!