Page 6 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING THE MESSY MIDDLE

Instead, this report is about the mental processes that have been activated
by the abundance of the web. It’s about how consumers deal with scale and
complexity using cognitive biases encoded deep in our pre-digital history.

If behaviour has evolved, as we believe it has, then it is crucial that marketers
understand how consumer decision-making has changed so that they can
continue to uncover new growth opportunities and defend existing brand share.

What does the consumer journey look like?

This is among the questions most frequently asked of Google’s insights
team. There are a couple of variations involving phrases like “purchase
funnel” and “path to purchase” but, for the most part, they’re all asking the
same thing. There’s a lot of value in questions like these, but we’ve come to
realise that there is another aspect of what shoppers are doing that needs

to be considered. The other question we need to answer is this: how do
consumers decide what they want to buy and who they want to buy it from?

It isn’t surprising that businesses are keen to outsource this question. It’s
probably the most important in all of advertising, but also the hardest to
answer. Often, research in this area will focus on the journey, resulting in a list
of touchpoints that people hit along the path to purchase. But while such lists
offer valuable insight into the places people go during their online journey,

they can’t address the equally important question of why a shopper ended up
making the decision they did.

We know more about advertising performance than ever before, and can
measure outcomes with amazing granularity. And yet, understanding
consumer decision-making is more difficult than it’s ever been. In 2020,
following the outbreak of coronavirus and subsequent restrictions on
physical retail, the proportion of purchases happening online has risen to
record levels. And while the majority of purchases are still made offline, the

media and information that inform those purchases are increasingly online,
and the complexity of potential decision-making pathways has grown
considerably. If we don’t update our thinking about consumer behaviour to
account for this huge expansion in choice and attendant complexity, we’ll be
trying to account for 21st century behaviour with 20th century models.

1 ONS Retail Sales Index time series (DRSI), UK, May. 2020