Tools like the purchase funnel and the Consumer Decision Journey are useful, but Marc Binkley, fractional marketing leadership, Quantical, and president, Calgary Marketing Association, argues that a “share of triggers” approach should be at the core of marketing strategy.
Popularity is fickle in the marketing world, but if there were such a thing as a mainstay in the industry, the marketing funnel is probably it. Developed in 1898 by advertising executive Elias St. Elmo Lewis, it was originally intended to explain the four steps crucial to a successful personal selling process via the “AIDA” model: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.
And, some 126 years later, the majority of the sales and marketing world have accepted the usefulness of this tool and applied it as a way to understand consumers’ shopping behavior. More than that, the funnel has become so popular that we’ve used it as a tool to develop a common language, structure teams and deploy our business systems and resources.
The funnel’s popularity and influence is remarkable. Sales and marketing teams are commonly organized into functional groups like top-of-funnel (ToFu) brand awareness and demand creation teams; middle-of-funnel (MoFu) consumer engagement teams; and bottom-of-funnel (BoFu) performance marketing teams.
This situation can perhaps best be summed up in a quote from media scholar John M. Culkin: “At first we shape our tools, thereafter our tools shape us.”
Learning from the consumer decision journey
That quote was running through my mind as I compared the funnel to a relatively new tool known as the consumer decision journey (CDJ). In 2009, the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company published the CDJ based on its findings from a global survey of 20,000+ consumers designed to better understand how they make purchasing decisions.
At first blush, there are quite a few differences between the two. To start, the two tools are shaped differently. The one-way funnel suggests that all consumers enter the buying process at the top and many will leak out through the various stages before a few convert to purchase at the bottom.
Unlike the funnel, McKinsey’s circular diagram acknowledges the role of customer experience after purchase which is to say that some people don’t restart the buying process from scratch every time they buy.
The Consumer Decision Journey v. The AIDA Funnel
Source: McKinsey and Adobe Images
Despite these differences, there are a lot of similarities between the two tools, too.
If we flip the funnel on its side, the two tools start to look more alike. The awareness stage of the funnel closely matches the initial consideration set of the CDJ; the funnel’s interest and desire stages match closely with the CDJ’s active evaluation stage; and, finally, both the funnel and the CDJ resolve in a purchase in the final action stage and moment of purchase respectively.
The power of “triggers”
As corny as this sounds, it’s a true story. In 2021, I was comparing the CDJ to the funnel when suddenly I felt as though I was struck by a bolt of lightning. In an instant, I had a revelation. After 12 years of looking at the CDJ, there was an element that I’d never given any thought to. Right in front of me, hiding in plain sight, was the trigger.
A feeling of awe, excitement and wonder washed over me. Strangely, McKinsey’s original research barely mentions triggers. In fact, the only sentence that uses that word is this “But what happens when something triggers the impulse to buy?”
All at once, I realized that consumers don’t make purchases based on general awareness of a product or service. Instead, consumers have specific triggers that initiate a decision journey – and each trigger may lead to a different consideration set.
For example, just about everyone knows that Coca-Cola is a fizzy soda. That’s general awareness. What matters more than knowing that Coke is a fizzy soda is that I remember the brand when I’m thirsty, when I’m buying drinks for a party, when I need a caffeine jolt to pick me up, when I want to treat myself to a sweet treat on a hot day, etc.
For every brand, there are dozens of these triggers.
My hunch was that purchase triggers followed long-tail patterns of popularity. If that were true, then I also guessed that the size and frequency of purchase triggers could be measured. Even better, I realized that brands could measure their mental market share to each trigger and to all triggers overall.
In the years since my discovery, I realized I hadn’t discovered anything at all. It turns out that Jenni Romaniuk, and her academic colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, have published a mountain of evidence supporting this idea, which Romaniuk calls Category Entry Points. This supporting evidence is reassuring, since it validates many of the hunches I had.
There’s even more evidence to support this. McKinsey’s original CDJ research highlighted that brands with top-of-mind awareness in the initial consideration set have a 3x advantage to be chosen at the moment of purchase over brands that weren’t on the initial consideration list.
More recently, evidence suggests that the same advantage is true for business-to-business (B2B) brands as well, given that 90% of B2B tech buyers choose a brand from their day one list.
Implementing SEO for humans
All of this leads to the conclusion that brands can gain a competitive advantage by investing resources to improve a human brain’s search engine optimization (SEO). Looking at a market through the lens of the funnel, we think that a general level of awareness is all that matters. As a result, creative for brand campaigns may focus on building general awareness of a brand, but is often disconnected from the purchase triggers that lead to future cash flows for a business.
In comparison, a “share of triggers” approach enables us to segment the market by the buying triggers of our targeted audience then strategically choose which purchase triggers matter most to the future cash flow of our businesses.
Baileys Irish Cream brand is a great example. For decades, Baileys enjoyed massive brand awareness as an alcoholic liqueur. Despite consumers knowing what Baileys is, the brand suffered from years of declining sales.
In 2014, the brand management team at Diageo, the owner of Baileys, put a share-of-triggers plan into action. Through the Pursuit of Pleasure (PoP) campaign, it aimed to expand the awareness, usage and, ultimately, sales of Baileys.
The big idea behind the PoP campaign was brilliantly simple: Baileys is part cake, part booze and pure pleasure. It thus expanded Baileys from a single dominant trigger – an after-Christmas dinner liqueur – and developed multiple triggers instead, be that adding it to other drinks (from martini to coffee), giving a flavor kick to ice cream, using it in baking, and so on.
As the new campaign platform improved mental availability, Baileys was then able to harvest this increase through product extensions designed to reflect the adult treats such as apple pie, churros, birthday cake featured in the campaign. This physical manifestation of the campaign messaging helped Baileys meaningfully and measurably deliver on their new Promise to the Customer.
As a result, the brand managers increased the potential market size for Baileys from US$89 billion to US$350 billion. The resulting global campaign generated impressive business results, too, as revenues for Baileys increased by 23% from 2015 to 2019. Its sales results outpaced both the growth of the liqueur category and Diageo’s other brands.
Making tools work for us
In summary, there are a lot of tools we use to do our jobs. Tools like the marketing funnel, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Unique Selling Proposition, and so on, were all developed with good intentions – and, indeed, can be very useful when used in the right way.
However, over time they begin to act like an invisible hand that shapes how we think and see the world. Left unquestioned, the popularity of tools can end up as decision-making shortcuts that replace our independence and critical thinking.
