In 2005, A.G. Lafley, CEO of the world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, launched the idea of “moments of fact” to the advertising world. As he wrote within the P&G Annual Report that 12 months:
“The very best manufacturers constantly win two moments of fact. The primary second happens on the retailer shelf, when a client decides whether or not to purchase one model or one other. The second happens at house, when she makes use of the model — and is delighted, or not.”
P&G shortly adopted up with the concept of a 3rd second of fact targeted on post-purchase phrase of mouth. Later, in 2011, Google VP (and P&G alum) Jim Lecinski coined the concept of the zero second of fact, when customers realized they want one thing and do pre-purchase analysis (typically, after all, by Googling it).
Twenty years after A.G. Lafley launched the idea, moments of fact nonetheless carry an amazing quantity of affect in how we take into consideration advertising. Entrepreneurs now create elaborate buyer journey maps oriented round these and different “moments that matter” in a client’s path to buy and focus their advertising on “successful” these moments.
So why does buyer expertise nonetheless so typically fall flat? Regardless of having extra instruments, know-how, and knowledge than ever, the precise buyer expertise not often lives as much as the potential. Recently, I’ve been giving a brand new keynote discuss on this subject titled “The Buyer Journey to Nowhere” (right here’s a recap and video of a latest one).
Buyer journey mapping has skilled us to consider customers primarily as consumers on a linear path to buy, moderately than as complicated human people with ever-changing wants who don’t take into consideration our manufacturers practically as a lot as we predict they do.
It’s simple for entrepreneurs to develop “Funnel Imaginative and prescient” — shedding sight of the particular client as a result of we’re so targeted on the basic linear advertising phases of Consciousness, Trial, Repeat, and Loyalty.
I’ve all the time like HBS professor Theodore Levitt’s warning to keep away from Advertising and marketing Myopia. As he famously stated,
“Folks don’t need to purchase a quarter-inch drill. They need a quarter-inch gap.”
Listed here are a couple of associated cartoons I’ve drawn through the years:
“If advertising saved a diary, this might be it.”
– Ann Handley, Chief Content material Officer of MarketingProfs
