Companies that harness word-of-mouth effects, emphasize in-store execution, and get their brands onto shoppers’ short lists for initial consideration are more likely to capture the loyalty of emerging-market consumers.
As the rapid growth of emerging markets gives millions of consumers new spending power, those consumers are encountering a marketing environment every bit as complex and swiftly evolving as its counterpart in developed countries. Product choices and communication channels are exploding; so is the potential of digital platforms; and, as everywhere, consumer empowerment is on the rise.
The impact of these changes has been so profound in developed markets that three years ago, our colleague David Court and his coauthors proposed a new approach for understanding consumer behavior.1 On the basis of research involving 20,000 consumers across five industries and three continents, our colleagues suggested replacing the traditional metaphor of a “funnel” in which consumers start at the wide end, with a number of potential brands in mind, before narrowing their choices down to a final purchase. Envisioning consumer behavior as less of a linear march and more of a winding voyage with multiple feedback loops, our colleagues put forward an iterative framework, which they called the consumer decision journey, and identified four critical battlegrounds where marketers can win or lose.
These four battlegrounds are initial consideration, when a consumer first decides to buy a product or service and thinks of a few brands; active evaluation, when the consumer researches potential purchases; closure, when the consumer selects a brand at the moment of purchase; and postpurchase, when the consumer experiences the product or service selected. They are as relevant for emerging markets as they are elsewhere. As in developed markets, technology is unleashing the possibility of increasingly deep customer engagement at each phase of the journey, but with some important twists reflecting differences in the characteristics of emerging-market consumers, who generally don’t have the same level of experience with brands and product categories as their developed-market counterparts do. Many are still looking to buy their first car, first television, or first package of diapers, for example.
In this article, we highlight the implications of three key differences between emerging-and developed-market consumers that we’ve uncovered in our research (Exhibit 1). First, harnessing the power of word of mouth is invaluable, as it seems to play a disproportionate role in the decision journeys of emerging-market consumers. Second, getting brands into a consumer’s initial consideration set is even more important in emerging markets, because that phase of the journey appears to have an outsized impact on purchase decisions. Finally, companies need to place special emphasis on what happens when products reach the shelves of retailers, because the in-store phase of the consumer decision journey tends to be longer and more important in emerging markets than in developed ones.
Source: McKinsey Quarterly (http://goo.gl/v753W)
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