It seems like the advertising sands have shifted again. Once upon a time, attention was the holy grail. Then it was engagement. And for some it still is. But for others – particularly many of the speakers at Advertising and Consumers 2008 - it’s now all about influence.

 

Leaving aside the semantics, here’s an account of what a really impressive roster of speakers currently think about how to get advertising to do what we’ve always tried to get it to do, albeit in a very different environment.

 

 

Getting to grips with social influences

 

Stephen Phillips (Spring Research) opened the day with a presentation on how marketers can understand and tap into the myriad of social influences (particularly word of mouth) that act on consumers’ purchase decisions.

 

Using a methodology of in-depth, regressive interviewing, his research findings challenged the traditional “purchase funnel” model of buying, typically based around the following linear – and rational – process:

• Consumer need
• Develop long list of brands
• Reduce to a shortlist of brands
• Test select brands from shortlist
• Purchase brand

The reality, he has found, is far more complex and unpredictable. “Sometimes people just find stuff they like and buy it, or hear negative stuff about a brand that they’ve used for 20 years and stop buying it”.

 

Need, he says, might funnel behaviour into a rational process, but often purchasing is driven by desire, which brings a different set of rules – or, seemingly, no rules at all. Comparative shortlists of brands often don’t exist; instead, people identify a brand that they might have an emotional reaction to and investigate further.

 

His resulting concept of “Snakes and Ladders” (adapted to “Snakes and Chutes” for US audiences) is used to illustrate how consumers are now often routinely missing out or reordering whole stages of the old purchase funnel.