Shopping is really about decision making

Shopping is really about decision making and so when we think about shopping rather than think about it as the person who goes and does the grocery shopping or maybe your sister who likes to go and buy clothes or who likes to go to the mall, we think about it as this idea of decision making.

So if shopping is decisive, making them so many of the things that we do each day could be encompassed in that it could be where to go to school what classes to take, what to do with our financial future what kind of insurance to sign up for a selective medical procedure and so if that is if all of those things are shopping.

Then what we wanted to understand is what does it take to get someone to say yes and if you think about all the moments in your life where you have this journey where you've got to go from undecided to decide.

What things, but what is the information sources that you include to sort of get you to a place where you feel comfortable and say yes, whether it's a trip, what's the inputs that you use and if you think about the inputs that we used to have let's see if we were to have bought an appliance ten or fifteen years ago, what would you have done.

Could have asked your father in law for information you could have gone to the store to buy an appliance we can spend months. Today, If we choose reading reviews talking to other shoppers online, we can ask for input on Facebook and we might get depending on the category we're looking at we might get you dozens or hundreds of emphatic responses.

How do all of those sources go into our brain go into our minds and help us get to a place where we say yes,  I'm gonna go ahead and purchase. So if you are familiar with marketing have worked in marketing have worked for brands or retailer, you might have heard of this thing called the purchase funnel, fortunately most of us haven't heard of that which if you have it just leave it that way.

But the purchase final the concept here is that when we're making a decision to purchase to hand over that money we go through this sort of process right, we learn about something and get a we get sort of an awareness going and we sort of become educated and then eventually we crossed the finish line and we do what those marketers want us to do and if they could just expose to enough ads certainly we would get over that finish line.

We had a hypothesis that this was actually an outmoded way of thinking about decision making, particularly in a world in which we have so many different inputs coming in from all of these places got our mobile phones are apt to film media, video games right all these different inputs we felt like this idea that decision making was linear was really not the case anymore, it didn't seem like decision making has ever been really a logical process and it didn't seem like we were kind of moved bumping along just in the sort of straight path.

We felt that it was actually more or something like that or like a neuron firing in the brain that's what maybe decision making might look like this is actually real data that we use to sort of create this this idea of where people were going for information where how long were they thinking about their decisions for where were they going for information what sources of information were most influential.

Best in class customer service and the reason is that our expectations of what good service means are changing.   We didn't have an answer to say what influencing people to buy.

“I want you to know the products that I care about and you should have them in stock and you, should you should recognize my buying patterns and don't give me a coupon for dog food I don't have a dog.  Why are you doing that stopped it”.

This is what “customer service in this new era this future of retail”. I don't want new shopping experiences I want a better shopping experience.

In the past this idea of the general store, where they reserve the product, they knew that you came in on Thursdays and they'd set aside your favourite product. As morale, retailer, still knows your name. And sometimes the shop keeper,  will reserve your favourite product of choice and brand, even years later the products and the brand that you care about what matters to you.

We can't do that at skill at retail any retailer who has, you know more than a store or two will tell you it's incredibly challenging. But we can do it through data.

If we can apply some of the data and some of the learnings that we're starting to understand about shopper behaviour across thousands and thousands of shoppers maybe we can create the sort of a new golden era of retail.