Consumer Journey Tracking

Video Transcript: Consumer Journey Tracking

Do you want to understand why it's so hard to track and trace a consumer journey? We'll answer that in this video. Welcome to episode number 104 of The Great Reset.

My name is Robert Brill. I'm the CEO of Brillmedia.co. We're an ad firm that drives sales and leads with the best data targeting and tech available on the market.

We are here five days a week talking about marketing and advertising so you can be a better marketing practitioner. In yesterday's video, we talked about the theoretical consumer journey that they teach in textbooks and a whole lot of content creation marketing blogs. So the purchase funnel is demand creation, consideration, purchase, and reaction.

But in reality, there isn't a clear delineation on how consumers actually connect to a brand unless you're a fully digital brand. And there are a few reasons to this. Number one, brands don't have direct connections to consumers in many cases.

So let's say, for example, you sell your Hershey's and you sell chocolate bars at brick-and-mortar retailers like CVS and Walmart. So Hershey's doesn't have direct access to consumer data for the individuals that buy from CVS and Walmart. So as a result, Hershey's has to work with the intermediary, the channel partner, to collect top-line data without having a direct connection to the end consumer.

And this is important because you have a gap in your knowledge on why and how people buy. Many different people have very different motivations and needs. So let's take two different circumstances.

Two people buy the same Hershey's chocolate bar at the same CVS. One person buys it for themselves. Another buys it for their family.

Another buys it because they just came off a diet and they want a reward. In each of these cases, the same exact product at the same exact store fulfills wildly different needs with that singular purchase. Let's look at another example.

The product fulfills on different value propositions for different types of consumers. So let's look at two families. One is a family and they buy Hershey's for their kids.

The Hershey's bar is an affordable little treat for good behavior from the kids. The kids are happy when they get a Hershey's chocolate bar. They see it as a reward for good recognition, for good behavior.

Separately, you have a single man at college far away from home and they have a bad day or they miss home. And the Hershey's chocolate bar fulfills in them a need to connect to their family's love because they're homesick. And when this person was a kid, that would be the treat of choice when he was on good behavior.

So for a mom with a four-year-old throwing a fit for the third time today, now this time at the CVS, the chocolate bar is a pacifier for mom's frayed nerves and the child's temper tantrum. So in all these situations, people are buying the Hershey's chocolate bar for vastly different reasons. It's really hard to understand how consumers interact with brands since consumers a lot of times don't even realize it themselves.

Like you can literally ask the consumer why they actually purchase and a lot of them will tell you a reason that is actually inconsistent with the reality, the scientific reality of why they end up making specific buying decisions. So brands must do a lot of sleuthing around to really hone in on the most important elements of the consumer journey. We can't know every part of the consumer's journey and every consumer's journey is going to be unique, but we do have the ability to map out commonalities across the consumer journey and control the parts of those journeys that will have the most outsized impact on sales.

So we'll stop there. And in the next videos, we'll take a deep dive into two types of consumer journeys that brands have to deal with low consideration purchases and high consideration purchases. Now, if you found this video helpful, please give us a like and let us know that you like what you're doing, what we are doing for more videos like this to help you be a better marketer.

Subscribe and hit that notification button. If you want to bypass all the learnings and go straight into lead generation, the first step is our $497 marketing diagnostic. We interview you about your marketing, economics, and clients and map out the strategy that turns your company into the inevitable choice. That's it for this episode of The Great Reset.

We will see you tomorrow.