Page 16 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

16 CHAPTER 2 IDENTIFYING THE MESSY MIDDLE

In between those two points there is a winding, scrawled squiggle, which
seemed a reasonable way to represent our first significant discovery: there
are no typical journeys. Instead there is a confusing web of touchpoints that
we likened to spaghetti, not least because it was clear that this would be a
real mess to clean up.

The different sites and touchpoints visited by the shoppers who took part in
the shopping observations included, but weren’t limited to, the items listed in
figure 2.

Figure 2

Shopping touchpoints observed

search engines, review sites, video sharing sites, portals,
social media, comparison sites, forums, interest groups /
clubs, retailer sites, aggregators, blogging sites, voucher /
coupon sites, branded sites, publishers, noticeboards

Having arrived at these sites, of which there are multiple to choose from,
many of the shoppers spent significant amounts of time navigating back
and forth, switching between sites across multiple browser tabs and apps. In
fact, in some of the sessions we observed, the product under consideration
actually changed mid-search, as a new option became preferred.

Exploring and evaluating

Taken together, the literature reviews and observed shopping tasks started
to reveal some of the core characteristics of the new reality of consumer
decision-making.

We began the first chapter as shoppers browsing an infinite high street,
moving effortlessly between vendors until something catches our eye. If we
like what we see on closer inspection, we can check out immediately, but if not
it hardly matters – there are plenty of other stores to visit on internet street.