Many factors converge to influence customers’ ultimate decisions – anything from attitudes, personal experience and brand perceptions to key opinion leaders, word of mouth, and more. Marketing’s mission is to find where and how those factors influence customers along their decision pathway. Understanding these critical touch points and their interactions is fundamental to develop effective marketing programs and messaging.

Touch Points and Triggers

Determine how your target customers make decisions, particularly if the decision process is long, infrequent, or involves multiple influencers.

• Utilizes an immersive platform and ethnographic techniques to map the pathways customers take.
• Encourages self-reflection through tailored exercises and critically timed probing questions, using vehicles like discussion boards, journaling and blogs, and conventional qualitative methods.
  • Through this process, dive deep below the surface to learn:
  • Which touch points are critical to shape customer opinions and behaviors.
  • What customers expect, need and want.
  • What experiences or factors are emotional triggers that lead customers to or away from your brand.

Business Outcome: Manage your customers’ decision pathway, determining where to best invest resources to drive favorable results. Clarify your priorities at each stage of the purchase process and develop targeted marketing campaigns and messaging.

More Information About CMI’s Immersive Insights

Concept and Message Refinement

Break through the clutter with impactful messaging and new product ideas by gaining unique insight into often unexpressed concerns.

• Allows you to listen to customers (of yours and of your competitors) reveal their needs in your product category and reveal underlying emotions, fears, and concerns, using CMI’s creatively tailored qualitative approaches (both in-person and online).
• Specific approach is customized to reflect your product category and the most effective way to engage your target audience.
• Goes beyond rational reaction to connect new product ideas and messages to customers on a deeply personal level – clearly speak to what matters most.

Business Outcome: Prioritized new product ideas, based on what resonates with customers; identify critical messaging elements, themes and language to demonstrate you understand your customers’ needs; differentiate your brand.

Simulated Conversations

Capitalize on your intermediaries, such as agents or representatives, and optimize the messages they deliver.

• Simulated conversations between intermediaries and customers allow you to hear communications and reactions that you would typically never be able to access first-hand.
• Arranged as dyads (paired participants, such as an agent and customer or physician and patient) or triads (three participants, such as a financial advisor and spouses).

Business Outcome: Improve supporting materials and messaging for intermediaries to make them better ambassadors for your brand, deliver your desired message and brand experience.

Decision Pathway Modeling^TM (DPM)

Uncover the paths customers take to purchase and learn how to guide them to choose you – again and again.

• Identify critical points and their relative importance along the decision pathway through an effective model; discover the influences, considerations, emotions, and alternatives affecting customers at those points.
• Pinpoint the decisions early in the path that impact important choices later in the decision process.
• Understand which decisions your team can influence along the way with advertising campaigns and marketing programs.
• Prioritize your resources, based on which marketing activities have the greatest impact on customers’ decisions to choose your brand.
• Understand your brand’s performance at critical touch points and identify potential competitive advantages.

Business Outcome: Identify key factors that influence customer satisfaction and represent potential brand differentiators; guide investment decisions; inform and integrate your marketing plan and strategy development; simulate the impact and ROI of future changes.

More information on CMI’s Decision Pathway Modeling