Consumer Decision Making Process

The green boxes are the stages in the consumer decision making process, and the corresponding yellow boxes are the internal psychological processes the consumer experiences along the way. This was a recent topic in my Integrated Marketing Communications class last week.*

As the professor was talking my mind wandered and I started to think web startuppy thoughts. Who gets paid for contributing to these stages and who doesn’t? Online advertising is broken. It over-rewards late stage contributors, and barely rewards the early stage influencers.

Think about that Purchase Decision box. Let’s say I decide I want to buy a digital camera, and I’ve already gone through all the preceding boxes and I’ve done my homework and decided the Nikon D5000 is for me. Easy! I’m going to Google. Here are the ads I see at the top:

And here are the ads on the side:

If you know anything about the camera category and Google AdWords, you know these ads earn Google very high CPCs because there are a lot of retailers bidding on these placements, driving the prices up.

I have no issue with Google making money helping users find retailers to buy stuff. But I think there’s a real opportunity for whomever figures out how to innovate the advertising model for those earlier boxes. Websites that contribute to Need Recognition/Motivation and Alternative Evaluation/Attitude Formation barely get compensated at all! Yet motivating users to want a brand, a model, a product category, is arguably the most difficult thing of all.

And if you as a content creator are successful at this? You get bupkis.

Someone’s going to figure out a model where:

• Advertisers are confident that their ad dollars are contributing to real purchases, even if those dollars are spent earlier in the conversion funnel
• Content sites are rewarded for capturing the attention of valuable audiences
• Users are happy because there will be more high quality content around for them to consume

And whoever figures this model out gets to be the next Google. Get busy!

*I made those boxes but they were inspired (i.e., stolen) from my prof’s slides. My boxes are prettier