What Does a User Do

Online?
Consumers are moving to the online space for an increasing number of activities.
A few examples of these activities include listening to music, interacting on social
media, reading articles, searching for jobs and so on. This means that the focus of
marketers also needs to be changed. How do you think marketers have responded
to that? What are the steps that have been taken to keep up with this evolution?

According to the Dentsu Aegis report, digital media has been estimated to grow at
a rate of 10.1%, outpacing traditional media such as broadcast, outdoor and transit
marketing which is growing at 1%-2% or showing a decline annually. 

How is it helping marketers grow their businesses? 

India’s digital ad revenue is growing tremendously, which reflects the increasing

consumer affinity towards buying products online and the result of the Indian
market adapting to the brand digitally. As users use Facebook or Instagram most of
the time for social interactions, these platforms have introduced a shopping
element on their pages as well. You must also be routinely shopping for online
products from sites such as Flipkart, Amazon and Myntra.

 
 However, these are just a few examples. Let’s understand how and where the
consumer spends most of their time online in the next video and see where the
marketers can place themselves to attract the customer in making a purchasing
decision

In this video, you learnt the importance of knowing what users are doing online.
Most users show similar patterns of behaviour when consuming online content.
Whether it be using search engines to get information, social media to interact, or
even buying products via e-commerce, the online space has become an integral
part of today's consumer life.

Some of the traits of the modern consumer are as follows: 

1.  They prefer a higher standard of living.

2.  They are likely to search for a quicker alternative.
3.  They like to stay trendy.
4.  They love customised products.
5.  They will look for price performance value, that is, a brand which provides them
all.

Now that you have understood what the significant characteristics of modern
consumers are, you are in a better position to understand their motivations. This
means that you need to know the right questions to ask while strategizing your
campaign objectives.

 
 Here are the key questions that one needs to ask as a marketer in response to the
growing trends as the market evolves.

1. Are you actively adjusting to new consumer behaviours?

2. Are these changes actively monitored?
3. Is there a clear understanding of the trends and changes that are most relevant to
the industry?
4. What are the implications of these trends for the business?
5. How can you adapt your content to reach new audiences?
6. Is there a roadmap that will increase value for money by customising
products/services or adjusting the content to reach new audiences?
Consumer centric approach for the modern consumer
Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign actively encourages a positive community of
people. You can order Coke cans with customised names on them, meaning no one
is excluded from its community.
For Southwest Airlines, brand loyalty starts with its employee-first regime. 

IKEA designs products based on their customers’ needs. They do not just conduct
surveys; they visit people's homes to see how they live and provide them with
whatever each one prefers. 

Whether it is building a sense of belonging by offering customisation or providing

outstanding service, each of these brands has built a community of loyal customers.
Can you give some more examples of such modern brands which have successfully
built loyalists by being consumer-centric?

Answer
Tesla disrupted the traditional business model of distribution through car dealerships
by  selling directly to consumers online through its website. The company uses social
media platforms, such as Twitter, which allow customers to interact with the
company freely and even communicate directly with its CEO. 

Netflix collected a large pool of insights to understand its customer inside out.

Exclusively, it has been able to add preferences and suggestions of friends with its
strategic alliance with Facebook to refine user recommendations.

Modern consumer behavior

 
Ananya Sahu decided to get some food and drinks for her friend’s farewell party. She
was on her way to the shop when she saw an ad for a home theatre system. It was
marked with a big red sign that read, "This week only, Rs. 15000." 

Ananya had wanted a home theatre for a long time. She wasn't familiar with this
brand, so she asked the salesperson some questions. He said it was an excellent buy
—so good, in fact, that there were only two systems left. He also explained how he
could easily charge it on a credit card and she would only have to pay in instalments.
She thought for a very short time about the system and decided she couldn't give it
up. Soon she was on her way home with the home theatre system tucked carefully in
the trunk of her car. Ananya made an impulse purchase. Have you ever bought
anything on impulse? Did it turn out to be a good impulse purchase? What
differently would you have done differently in place of Ananya?

 Answer
 

We all have made impulse purchases either because of a friend’s suggestion or

we couldn’t have gotten a better offer elsewhere. What Ananya could have
done was to enquire about the brand and features of the product before
buying on impulse. She should have made a price performance comparison and
then proceeded with the purchase.

In the next segment, you will look at the key stages involved in the consumer
funnel and mapping the stages to the marketing funnel to better understand and
create robust marketing strategie

Consumer Journey in the

Consumer Funnel
The consumer funnel illustrates the consumer's journey towards the purchase of a
good or service. In the next video, you will understand this in detail with the
 analogy of a boy-girl relationship progressing further in each stage just like a user
through the purchasing or consumer funnel

In the next video, let's see how the consumer's journey has significantly shifted
from the offline journey to the online landscape in the consumer funnel with the
help of an example in the B2C domain, Amazon

To summarise what you just learnt — generally, there are four stages an individual
goes through before becoming a consumer. These three stages are together called
the ‘consumer purchase funnel’. The four stages are as follows:

1. Awareness: When a user becomes aware of the need. (From a business side, the

user becomes aware of the brand) 
2. Consideration: When the user considers various options to buy from. (From a
business side, the user engages with and considers your brand)
3. Purchase: The user buys the product. (From a business side, the user makes a
decision about purchasing your product)
4. Delight: The user continues to buy the product from the same brand. (From a
business side, the user becomes a loyal consumer and an advocate for your
product)

Please note that customers would generally go through both the online and offline
consumer funnels when making the purchase decision. For example, he/she might
read reviews and product information online and at the same time ask his/her
friends about their reviews.

Given below is an image of a modern consumer in the online consumer funnel

  

Consumer Funnel
 

Mailchimp is a free email marketing tool. To promote itself, the company decided to
watermark every email created on its platform. This made an easy and effective
marketing strategy and also helped the company increase its user count significantly.

Match the following efforts with their respective stages on the consumer funnel.

1. Awareness Stage
I. It shows ads of the ongoing offers on its premium services with a specific call to
action to push customers to purchase its premium services.

2. Consideration Stage
II. At this stage, the company draws customers by making them sign up for free, so
that they can start using the product immediately and buy a premium service later.

3. Purchase Stage
III. To make consumers aware of its existence, Mailchimp used outdoor marketing,
blogs and email marketing, which proved to be the best strategies for the company.

4. Delight Phase
IV. Mailchimp offers free analytics to all of its mailers who successfully create 10,000
emails on the Mailchimp platform.
1-III, 2-II, 3-I, 4-IV
✓ Correct
Feedback:
Correct. The promotions shown here match their respective stages of the
funnel.

Consumer Funnel
Ishaan is planning to buy a cruiser bike on the occasion of his 25th birthday. He has
heard of various brands on online social media posts by friends, but he does not
have a clear idea about the technical differences, pricing, etc. So, he visits a Harley
Davidson showroom where the salesman hands him a product brochure. The
brochure has a side-by-side comparison of all the leading cruiser bikes with respect
to their features. Happy with the interaction, he decides to keep the brochure to
finalise the bike from the available options. Which of the following statements stands
true in the case of Ishaan?

The brochure was able to convince him to make the purchase.

✓ Correct
Feedback:
Correct. Ishaan is already aware of the Harley Davidson store because of the
brand’s online presence. The salesman at the store helped him understand the
various features of different brands so that he has more information in hand
and can consider a limited set of options before selecting and buying a bike. He
is a lead to the dealer at this stage. The comparison brochure is basically
converting him, the potential customer, from a store visitor to a lead.

Consumer Journey in the

Marketing Funnel
So, you are a customer who is at a particular stage in the consumer funnel and in
the process of making a purchase decision at a particular step, that is, on a
particular journey in the digital market. As a marketer, you need to identify each of
these correctly and create a message that adheres to that particular stage or step. 

 
In this segment, you will look at the different stages in which a consumer
progresses in the persuasion framework or the marketing funnel. The marketing
funnel talks about each stage of the consumer from a marketer’s perspective.

This will be explained very well in the next video with the help of Club
Mahindra’s example

To summarise, you saw the different stages involved in a consumer decision

process. On integrating it with the consumer funnel and marketers objectives at
each stage of the funnel and the consumer's journey, you will see that each part of
what you studied till now is connected. Let’s see the given consolidated table to
understand this correctly. 

Consumer Funnel Process for Making a Consumer Marketers’ Objective at Each

Stage Purchase Decision Journey Stage/ Marketing Funnel

Recognising a need Strangers to

Awareness Phase To attract visitors
gap visitors

Searching for
Visitors to
Consideration Phase information and To convert leads
leads
evaluating alternatives

Making the purchase Leads to

Purchase Phase To close sales
decision customers

Improving the post- Customers to

Delight Phase To delight customers
purchase experience advocates

 
 Now that you have understood the persuasion framework that you must follow as a
digital marketer, you will next learn how marketers actually influence their
potential customers throughout the consumer journey. These are the things that you
can do to drive consumers through each stage of the marketing funnel.

 Converting a Stranger into a Visitor

1. Attract stage: Create awareness

  Search engine optimisation (SEO)

  Word of mouth
  Blogging
  Social media posts
  Website promotions

Converting a Visitor into a Lead

2. Convert stage: Acquire leads

 Track number of website visits

 Track number of landing page visits
 Track conversion rate
 Calls to action
 Roll out forms to fill

Converting a Lead into a Customer 

3. Close stage: Drive sales

  Send emails
  Customised promotions
  Scoring your leads
  Relationship management

Converting a Customer to an Advocate 

4. Delight stage: Create loyalty

  Customised calls to action

  Monitoring social media
  Personalised emails
  Smooth customer experience

Marketing Funnel
Suppose you are the marketing manager at Zendesk Inc., a leading customer
relationship management software provider. From the given options, choose the best
combination of blog post or article titles that are most appropriate for messaging at
the respective stages of the marketing funnel.

Funnel stages:
    a. Attract a potential client in need of setting up customer service
    b. Convert an already engaged customer to your lead
    c. Close a lead by making a sale
     d. Delight an already existing customer
Article titles:
1. A blog post titled ‘How Zendesk is Revolutionising the Online Customer Service
Industry’.
2. A blog post titled 'Zendesk is Offering the Most Affordable Economy Package
that is Free for the Next 15 Hours — Check Out the Pricing Here!'.
3. A blog post titled ‘All the New Features You Said You Wanted in Zendesk Are
Here Now!’.
4. A blog post titled ‘The Guide to Serving Your Customers the Best is Here -—
Download It Now!’.
5. a-1, b-4, c-2, d-3
6. ✓ Correct
7. Feedback:
8. Correct. The first blog’s title is about identifying potential customers
looking for online customer service platforms such as Zendesk. Since the
second blog post talks about the pricing plan of Zendesk, it maps to the
close stage of the funnel. The third blog post addresses a different set of
customers, possibly based on the feedback that it took from them,
thereby mapping itself to the delight stage. The fourth or the last blog
post offers an ebook (or guide) for download in the end; this is targeted
at a user who is already aware of Zendesk and is aimed to showcase more
value and most importantly, to encourage them to fill out the lead form,
thereby converting them into a lead.

In order to successfully drive the campaign, it is not just important to follow the
persuasion framework at the right stage but also follow it at the right time and
place. It is also important to set the right budget to achieve the right metrics for the
campaign objectives

Non-Linear Nature of the

Funnel
In the last segment, you learnt about the linear funnels which describe four stages
of the buying process. Another modern theory about the consumer’s decision-
making process is that the consumer does not necessarily think in a linear way.
The decision-making process is more complicated and non-linear in nature. Given
the amount of information available, they can go back and forth across the stages.

Let us learn more about this in the next video

Now that you understand the non-linear funnel, let’s see what can be used to
explain the consumer journey in such a case. This is a concept called the ‘Moment
of Truth’. You will learn more about this in the next segment.

Moment of Truth Model

(MOT)
A ‘Moment of Truth’ can be considered an experience with the product that will
influence buying behaviour, just like the ones we saw with one stark difference –
this is a non-linear funnel. Moments of truth are the touchpoints where customers
form an opinion or change a perception about a brand.

Let’s understand the four steps in an MOT model with the help of a B2B example
of a user looking to buy an automated marketing software

In the video, you saw the steps involved in the MOT Model for purchasing a
marketing automation software. These are summarised below. 

1. Stimulus: Triggering purchase

 2. The zeroth moment of truth: Researching online

3. The first moment of truth: Conveying the intention to purchase 

4. The second moment of truth: Experiencing the product
Let's see some more examples to understand the MOT Model better in the next
video

The following graphic will help in providing a summarised view of the decision-
making funnels discussed and how they overlap

Please note that both the consumer funnel and the MOT model are not the same.
Do not try to draw resemblance between the two. Awareness and consideration
together are a part of the zeroth moment of truth. The moment a person makes a
purchase decision is when they have entered the first moment of truth and the
purchase and the delight stage together end up becoming the second moment of
truth. This will only make it more difficult to understand and confusing to answer
questions. The given image is only for a reference and not to be considered as a
standard template for answering questions related to the MOT model.

Moment of Truth Model

Consider that you would like to install an internet broadband connection at your
home. After hours of research, you have shortlisted a local broadband dealer and
contacted him/her to purchase a package. A team from the broadband dealership
arrives at your place and installs the router. After this, you make the payment online
and within 2 days you start using their service.

Which of the following activities is the first moment of truth for the broadband
dealer?
 When the installation team arrives to process the request
✓ Correct
Feedback:
Correct! The first moment of truth is when the user first makes physical
interaction with it.

Moments of Truth in User Journey

Consider a situation where you wish to buy a new pair of headphones. Map your
decision making journey in terms of the Moments of truth model we just discussed.

Stimulus: Old earphones stopped working

Zeroth moment of truth: Research about latest and high quality earphones.
Visit websites for comparing technical specifications and performance of
various options available.
First moment of truth: Visit the nearby electronics shop to buy a pair or
when the earphones arrive first when bought online.
Second moment of truth: Come home and use the earphones.

Session Summary
So, what did you learn in this session?

Additional Reading Links:

1. How to create an effective customer journey map?:  Learn how to create an
effective customer journey map to get into the minds of your consumer. 
2. Consumer behaviour in marketing:  Get an in-depth understanding of consumer
behaviour by learning about the factors that affect consumers' behaviour. 
3. Zeroth moment of truth:  This article talks about a new model of consumer
funnel explained by Google.
4. SEO and the zero moment of truth:  This article discusses ways to reach
customers at each stage of MOT through SEO. 
5. Winning the zero moment of truth in Asia:  This magazine talks about winning
the ZMOT focused especially on Asia, female shoppers and the consumer
packaged goods industry.
  

Disclaimer: UpGrad does not endorse or advocate the use of any product/service

covered in the session and the examples are solely meant for illustration purposes. 

Consumer Funnel
Choose the correct option from those given below.

Each of the four campaign ideas from MakeMyTrip can be associated with a different
stage of the consumer funnel. Which stage does each campaign belong to?

1. An email campaign that includes reminder emails and descriptions with

relevant CTAs to continue making a purchase
2. A celebrity campaign to narrate incidents of the trip experiences through an
online show to encourage other users
3. Targeted creative keywords such as “I need a break” so that when the target
audience searches these keywords on Google, the MMT Life campaign meta
tags and display ads appear
4. A UGC campaign where the users can click pictures, make boomerangs or
videos and post them with a cool hashtag on their social media pages for a
feature on MakeMyTrip’s page, to win prizes 
5. Purchase stage, consideration stage, awareness stage, delight
stage 
6. ✓ Correct
7. Feedback:
8. Correct! The celebrity narratives offer a good hook for a visitor to
become a lead and get to the consideration stage. Keyword mapping
enables him/her to become aware of the campaign. The user-generated
campaign serves as a delight stage for the lucky winners who win the
campaign.
Clicking on the CTA for payment is associated with the purchase stage.

Marketing Funnel
 

Consider MakeMyTrip, an online travel booking portal that has changed the way
people book their travel tickets and plan their vacations. Now, you need to match the
strategy used by it for various digital marketing channels to the different stages of
the marketing funnel below.
1. MakeMyTrip is trying to attract customers (who are otherwise booking
elsewhere) to its website.
2. MakeMyTrip is looking to convert the customers who visited the website,
browsed, but bounced without becoming a lead.
3. MakeMyTrip is aiming to close the leads it had captured earlier.
4. MakeMyTrip is hoping to delight the customers.
Match the funnel stages listed above with the strategies given below:

A. Using search engine optimisation, you can improve the discoverability when
the prospective customer is searching for a similar product/service.
B. Using social media to engage customers with content around
product/services
C. Using email marketing to deliver personalised offers such as product
discounts and other such services
D. Using its app, to nudge and trigger the customer into going on a tour or
booking a hotel again and again to ensure that the customer keeps coming
back for repeat purchases.

1-A, 2-B, 3-C, 4-D

✓ Correct
Feedback:
Correct! At the attract stage search engine optimisation will help users to find
the specific service for their requirement. During the convert stage social media
can be used to to share information for customers to further funnel down their
choices. For the close stage email marketing can help to deliver personalised
offers to speed up the conversion and in the delight stage, use its app to ensure
that the customer keeps coming back.

Moment of truth
Match the following three marketing activities with the part of the consumer
purchase journey (the three moments of truth) targeted by each -

1. Amazon delivers the product four days before the intended arrival date. 
2. Snapdeal introduces the no-question asked 7-day return policy if the user is not
satisfied with the item quality, size or delivery.
3. Lenovo through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) optimises the search results for
the keyword ‘professional laptop’
4. 1-First moment of truth, 2-Second moment of truth, 3-Zero moment
of truth
5. ✓ Correct
6. Feedback:
 7. The user experiences the product for the first time after purchase. Therefore,
first moment of truth. Through the 7-day return policy, Snapdeal addresses an
unsatisfactory post purchase experience, therefore, second moment of truth.
By optimising the search result for professional laptops, Lenovo brings itself
under evaluation as an option the user is looking and searching for. So, zero
moment of truth.

Moment of Truth Model

Ravi was in dire need of a new refrigerator as the one he had stopped working after
just 6 months of purchase. In order to avoid the same problem again, he spent some
time researching online about the various options and comparing their reviews and
specifications before visiting the showroom or buying it online.

According to Moments of truth model, Ravi is experiencing:

Zeroth moment of truth

✓ Correct
Feedback:
At this point, Ravi is researching about the product online by himself. This is a
characteristic of the Zeroth moment of truth.

Consumer funnel
According to linear consumer funnel, Ravi is at:

(Choose the most suitable option according to the info given.)

Consideration

✓ Correct
Feedback:
At this stage, Ravi is comparing the technical specifications of the  various options
available to him. Hence, it can be safely said that he is at the consideration stage as
of now.

Moment of Truth Model

According to MOT, for Ravi, the poor quality of his previous refrigerator served as
----------- for the old refrigerator.

Second moment of truth

✓ Correct
Feedback:
Here, the poor quality of product relates to Ravi’s post purchase experience as a
customer. Hence, it is serving as the second moment of truth for him.