Chapter 7: Industry Archetypes and Best Practices
Customers normally behave differently depending on what type of good they are buying and in this sense, the customer’s path-to-purchase is made even more complex making it hard for companies to transform its customers from the awareness stage up to the advocacy stage. Nevertheless, even though the path-to-purchase of customers are different, a large volume of data for a particular industry is enough to generate common patterns of behavior among these customers. The four general patterns known to exist across industries are the following:
1. Door Knob – customers are highly committed to buy despite their low curiosity level.
2. Goldfish – customers have high curiosity level which makes their path-to-purchase lengthy and thorough as they search for more information about the product that they are going to buy.
3. Trumpet – customers are willing to advocate brands even if they do not buy or use those brands.
4. Funnel – customer’s purchases are well planned as they go through each stage of the customer path-to-purchase and they are highly involved in purchase decisions.
Another pattern known as the Bow Tie is a pattern ideal to the customer-path. It reflects the key traits of a perfect brand where everyone who is aware of the brand is also willing to recommend that brand. Knowing all these patterns, marketers are will now be able to analyze the problems that their brands are currently facing.
Take for example the SM Department Store. The SM Department Store is major business part of the SM Supermalls which is a chain of shopping malls in the Philippines with at least 63 malls located across the country as of mid-2017. The SM Department Store is large player in the retail industry of several product categories such as shoes, bags, shirts, perfumes, and many others. In a recent study commissioned by Visa International in 2014 revealed that 9 out 10 Filipinos prefer shopping online. The top reasons why Filipinos move to online shopping is because of its convenience (58%), price (47%), and deals (46%). Given such increasing customer preference to online shopping, The SM Department Store is now faced with even more competitors such as Zalora, Lazada, OLX, and many others. With the SM marketer’s understanding of the situation, the company released its online retail store known as The SM Store. This gives the company an edge for omni-channel presence by giving all its customers more touch points where they can buy the products that they need, anytime and anywhere across the country.
On a personal perspective, such industry archetypes can be attributed to my personal or professional excellence wherein the Bow Tie pattern is what I want to become in the future. My attitudes and behaviors are one of those factors that can contribute to what type of pattern I am currently in and being aware of such concepts will allow me to decipher the proper procedures and steps to align my current self to my ideal self.
