Page 20 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

20 CHAPTER 2 IDENTIFYING THE MESSY MIDDLE

To capture this broad spectrum of interaction and influence, we propose
“exposure”. Exposure is your awareness of the brands and products in a
category. Exposure is the sum total of all the advertising emanating from a
category that you’ve seen or heard. It’s the things you’ve learned through
word of mouth, the things you’ve read in the press and online. It can be
passively assimilated prior to a purchase trigger, part of the trigger itself,
actively sought or experienced post-trigger, and it can be a deciding factor in

the final purchase.

But crucially, exposure is not a stage, or a phase, or a step. It’s an always-on,
constantly changing backdrop that remains present throughout the duration
of the decision-making process.

And it’s not just made up of branding and brand perceptions. Broader
category exposure and related category exposure are also components of
the backdrop. This too is a vast territory, but these types of exposure are
often complicit in triggering a purchase.