Comparison Shopping and the Pursuit of Trust
Consumers begin the purchase process with search, but it rarely ends there. Search marketing plays a pivotal role in ensuring good service throughout the Consumer Comparison Cycle.
Consumers begin the purchase process with search, but it rarely ends there. Search marketing plays a pivotal role in ensuring good service throughout the Consumer Comparison Cycle.
No one study can sum up the complexity of consumer behavior in the digital space. But a bird’s eye view of various studies can reveal a pattern that says a lot about the roles of both consumers and marketers. Let’s start with a few truths.
What Has the Research Told Us?
All the studies that contribute to this narrative were conducted under unique circumstances and subject to their own individual biases. Acting on the assumption, however, that each study’s sample is sufficiently balanced to reflect the consuming population (at least in the United States), a path emerges — we’ll call it the Consumer Comparison Cycle:
Once the awareness of a particular need has arisen, there is little upside in further solicitation of consumers. Their desire to compare is driven by a need to position products and services side-by-side — and once they begin pursuing alternatives, the need for trust drives a consumer away from search engines and toward other destinations.
At the time of validation, and ultimately transaction, consumers can be enticed by attractive promotions, but marketers must beware of two potential downfall of these tactics.
First, the promotions cut into the top line of profit potential.
Second, they require additional advertising expense to get the word out.
The result is an increase in marketing expenditure, at a time when the consumer’s opinions are likely to be already formed. This is the basis for the ongoing battle between persuasion and confidence.
Finally, the consumer makes a purchase and broadcasts the experience, contributing to the initial awareness of other consumers.
Lessons Learned
As marketers, we need to continually remind ourselves of the value of service over solicitation. The search channel provides an ideal model for this philosophy. We can geotarget our ads and write ad copy which will attract a certain type of consumer, but ultimately it’s hard to solicit outright in search: the entire search query process revolves around the consumer’s proactive desire to be served.
As the research indicates, consumers begin the purchase process with search, but rarely do they end it with search — and the pursuit of trust is the turning point in that evolution. We know all about the stigma of the pushy salesperson, and “trustworthy” generally isn’t an adjective that comes to mind when describing one.
One of the pillars of good customer service is making the answers to consumers’ question easy to find. Beyond conversion volumes and strong ROI, search marketing plays a pivotal role in ensuring good service throughout the Consumer Comparison Cycle. With steady commitment to service at all points of the cycle, we put ourselves in a position to leverage consumers’ energies in search, social media, and other marketing channels — and create a self-propelled machine for demand generation.