SKIMspiration blog

Uncovering more accurate and actionable consumer decision journeys

Nearly all consumer decision journeys have shifted over the past year – new journeys have emerged, while others have been reshaped.

You may be wondering how to best drive consideration and purchase of your brand. For many of our clients, the answer lies in untangling the messy omnichannel decision journey.

With an abundance of online and offline triggers, touchpoints, transitions, and interactions, that means an equal number of paths-to-purchases for consumers. How can you gain clarity here and take action to influence their decisions?

Psychographics offer brands valuable, but often overlooked, clues about how consumers make decisions online.

When looking to understand and influence the online shopper journey, there is often a tendency to focus on touchpoints, like social media, reviews and online retailers. However, there is another alternative view of segmentation digital marketers could consider – psychographics.

Because consumer journeys are highly personal – as they are dependent on traits, habits and context – consumer behaviors aren’t homogenous. Psychographic segmentation (personality traits, beliefs, values, etc.) can add another level of accuracy to predicting online decision behavior. Your digital marketing strategies and spend could be more impactful, generating greater online conversion and loyalty, when truly customized to “best fit” your audience.

Read on to learn how different personality traits can affect online decision making. Understanding and applying these insights can give you a competitive edge to ensure consumers choose your brand online.

2020 has seen a significant acceleration in the digitization of healthcare. Telehealth, in particular, is playing bigger role than ever before – impacting patients, healthcare professionals (HCPs), hospitals and pharma companies alike. To explore the effects and implications of COVID-19 on pharma marketing strategies, our healthcare team conducted research on how patients experienced this change to a more digital health system.

How do you best develop compelling B2B messaging that will motivate customers globally – in a crowded online marketplace?

Such was the challenge Google faced when it set out to improve its marketing communications for retailers last year – to make its messaging approach more consistent across its various channels.

In preparing for a global retail marketing campaign, Google realized it needed to make it easier for retailers to understand what the company could offer and why they were the best partner to help them grow.

Why do people choose one product or service over another? What needs or objectives are tapped into when you consider buying or recommending one brand over another?

Whether your brand targets consumers or professionals, understanding how decision behavior works and systematically applying its principles can help you build more effective strategies to drive customer acquisition, brand loyalty and continued growth.

We recommend you tap into “habitual” behavior to reinforce positive habits or break the ones that don’t benefit your brand and analyze “deliberate” behavior to assess how, where and when your brand can intervene.

Here we explain how decision-making works and the behavioral steps that are involved in making choices. Read on to learn how leveraging these insights to reinforce or disrupt habits can help your brand grow.

Online service providers have enjoyed a boom in sales over the past several months. Consumers have either increased their consumption or have been forced to try services ranging from media streaming and online subscriptions to food delivery apps.

As we gradually return to “normalcy,” many companies are wondering: which services will consumers continue to subscribe to, and which will be abandoned? Will these new habits stick?

The context for decision-making in the healthcare industry has been thoroughly disrupted – from patients navigating the world of telehealth to HCP’s increased reliance on online channels for knowledge gathering.

Despite this rapidly evolving environment, your mission as a pharma marketeer, continues: to enable value creation and product differentiation and empower both physicians and patients for improved outcomes. However, to do so effectively today, you need to understand how patient journeys are changing, and what new needs have emerged. Only by understanding the nuances of these shifts, will you be able to effectively adapt your marketing, communications and/or innovation strategies for greater impact now and in the long term.

People are poor predictors of their own behavior. Context changes corrupt their intentions. A context change may be as simple as a product discount, or as complex as a severe crisis. In both situations, the question is whether behavior changes, and particularly whether it will subsequently stick. We argue that, after the current crisis only a few new routines will establish. Trend lines from before a crisis will be similar after the crisis, maybe somewhat mitigated or accelerated.

Here we reflect on past crises and share 3 pitfalls consumer brands should avoid in preparing for the recession.

The digitalization of pharma was slowly underway pre-COVID, but there’s an immediate sense of urgency to make this shift now. As face-to-face sales calls are still a no-go, pharma companies are racing to accelerate their online sales and marketing strategies.

HCPs’ habits have been radically disrupted. Their attitudes, practice behavior, decision-making processes, and prescribing habits have changed. New needs are emerging.

As a pharma marketer you know you need to revise and reshape your multichannel strategy to these behavioral shifts, but restructuring to a digital-first communications strategy is much easier said than done.

The current crisis has triggered many changes in consumer behavior. Some of these behavioral shifts are obvious, for example, the growth in online shopping. While others, such as the impact on price sensitivity, are less certain. You may be wondering:

Should I conduct pricing or portfolio research now? Can I rely on study results in this rapidly evolving market?

The ultimate answer to these questions depends on whether you have the right information to inform your decisions.