NOBODY KNOW WHEN THEY SAY YES

There’s one magical moment, in between late night scroll, friend’s recommendation, a glimpse of billboard view on ride home, or on fine tuesday morning commuting to the office – when do our customers decide to buy something. Honestly we don’t know and neither do our customers.

We surely love the idea of a clean customer journey, from awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, advocate et cetera. A neat funnel with logical steps and measurable exits. We love the idea of control, but actually the real buying decision is happening in real life. Might be somewhere in or between our funnels, or probably not.

Someone sees our ads today, forgets about it, hears it again in a podcast months later, half-pays attention, then bumps into our products on the shelf at a mall and decides to buy them. It’s not about the ads, podcast, or the neat and wide shelf area we have, but the quiet accumulation and over time of them all that tipped at exactly that moment. Is it the color of the packaging, the creativity that stops them to view or listen, or choices of words that we decide to wrap our USP on? Yes! Probably all of it and we never know.

This may be uncomfortable, we get it! Everyone wants to know which action/ campaign moves the needle. But chasing that is like wanting to know which drop of water fills the glass. Every drop matters. Our customer does not sit down and write down or imagine their decision path. They just know they want it, they get it and what feels right. It’s layered, emotional, contextual and largely invisible even to themselves.

So what do we have to do? We need to start positioning communication as a presence. Not obsessed with one converting touch point and forget about the others. Remember the term “Satpam BCA” or when Shell Indonesia decided to be the first to clean their customer window? That’s communication through field operation. It’s not just about one big touch point. It’s everything that builds familiarity until it becomes preference.

Build with consistency. Since we can’t control the moment of decision, we can control the quality of every moment before it. We need to show up clearly, often, and in a way that feels the same in every touchpoint, so when that magical moment arrives we are already there in their preference.

Lastly, instead of asking which touch point is the most effective, how about we change the question with, are we shown enough across all of them? Which one did we miss?

– The writer is writing inside a room that’s too cold for a regular asian.