Path to Purchse Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
Case Study: Keurig/Green Mountain Coffee Company and the K-Cup
Categories; Single Cup Coffee and Possibly Small Appliances from NPD
Path to Purchase
There is no question more central to the practice of marketing than what makes people buy things. We have plenty of metrics and models, but confusion still prevails.
Most probably, a lot of the befuddlement is due to the fact that there is really no one true path to purchase. Different people at different times will interact with different brands and categories in a variety of ways. We might agonize over the choice of a candy bar and rush through the purchase of health insurance. There is no law that prevents us from doing whatever we want.
However, just because consumer decision making behavior is often complex and capricious is no reason to just throw up our hands in despair. There are effective and systematic ways of thinking about how people interact with brands and and metrics to help guide us.
The Path to Purchase
It has long been known that the purchase decision is much more than an event, it’s a process and therefore brands must develop over time. The evidence for this is overwhelming and there are a wealth of frameworks to describe it (the agency that I work for uses 7 stages in their model).
The following is my own summary, which is probably no better or worse than any other.
Awareness: Awareness may be the most overused term in marketing, so much so that it is often meaningless in common parlance. In actuality, it is a blanket term that covers a variety of metrics, including aided and unaided awareness, awareness of brand attributes, etc.
Nevertheless, awareness is quite important and has been linked to brand usage. Although some skeptics point out that brand usage itself promotes awareness and the relationship is somewhat reflexive, awareness is something we can directly control and raising it increases sales.
Another issue is that many brands have nearly total brand
Categories; Single Cup Coffee and Possibly Small Appliances from NPD
Path to Purchase
There is no question more central to the practice of marketing than what makes people buy things. We have plenty of metrics and models, but confusion still prevails.
Most probably, a lot of the befuddlement is due to the fact that there is really no one true path to purchase. Different people at different times will interact with different brands and categories in a variety of ways. We might agonize over the choice of a candy bar and rush through the purchase of health insurance. There is no law that prevents us from doing whatever we want.
However, just because consumer decision making behavior is often complex and capricious is no reason to just throw up our hands in despair. There are effective and systematic ways of thinking about how people interact with brands and and metrics to help guide us.
The Path to Purchase
It has long been known that the purchase decision is much more than an event, it’s a process and therefore brands must develop over time. The evidence for this is overwhelming and there are a wealth of frameworks to describe it (the agency that I work for uses 7 stages in their model).
The following is my own summary, which is probably no better or worse than any other.
Awareness: Awareness may be the most overused term in marketing, so much so that it is often meaningless in common parlance. In actuality, it is a blanket term that covers a variety of metrics, including aided and unaided awareness, awareness of brand attributes, etc.
Nevertheless, awareness is quite important and has been linked to brand usage. Although some skeptics point out that brand usage itself promotes awareness and the relationship is somewhat reflexive, awareness is something we can directly control and raising it increases sales.
Another issue is that many brands have nearly total brand