Path to purchase: Yellow brick road or highway to hell?

This paper argues that purchase journey models do not help businesses and researchers understand consumer behaviour because they state the already obvious and lack key details and explanations.

Path to purchase: Yellow brick road or highway to hell?

Stephen Needel

View the presentation deck for this paper

Introduction

Marketing researchers are great at being early-adopters of catch-phrases and buzzwords. We excel at being fervent heralds of the virtues of such buzzwords. In the 70s, we all jumped on the "niche marketing" bandwagon, leading us into the age of product segmentation. This morphed into "brand personality" in the 80s, where we became fascinated with consumer segmentation. As scanner data became widespread, we became more practical in the 90s, with many working on variations of "efficient consumer response"....

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands