I attended a “Driving Sustainable Conversations in the Automotive Sector” seminar earlier this week. I had an interesting time but what that stood out for me was the opening presentation from TNS's Andy Turton. It focused on tracking consumers’ path to purchase. In this case it used the automotive sector in China as an example, but I think most of the lessons can be placed into other markets, both geographical and vertical. TNS called this project TAPPS. TAPPS was designed to track a panel of consumers who, as I say, in this case were thinking of buying a car in China through a four month purchase research process. Where this gets interesting is that it tracked consumers’ physical touch points with brands over this period and also the digital touch points. The digital touch points were measured by consumers downloading an app onto their laptop; this tracked all the websites they visited. (I thought that was pretty dangerous too, but apparently the panel all agreed it was fine!) As a result of this approach, all (or nearly all anyway) of the online and physical touch points that potential car buyers had with different car brands, both through the media and direct, were tracked. TNS reckoned that the real life purchasing decision process they identified of consumers (Figure 1) was markedly different to the traditional approach (Figure 2). Clearly this has huge implications for brands and communicators.

The consumer purchasing process according to Tapps (Figure 1):

The traditional way brands have considered consumers' processing decision (Figure 2):

That said, the devil is in the detail and the insight that family and friends play a key role in deciding which car to purchase, while not surprising, is probably not enacted upon sufficiently by most car manufacturers. At the same time, the research showed that the websites of the brands were used by consumers all the way thought the buying process, not just at the beginning and at the end. This has implications for the type and amount of content that car manufacturers have on their own sites. One interesting stat that stood out for me was that premium car brands have a shorter research time than other cars. I guess this is because of the power of the brand and the consumers' pre-disposed position of wanting the status of the car, rather than being interested in the finer details like value for money and whether the car is any good! Another very important part of the purchasing decision is previous purchaser feedback. What customers say about a brand has a decisive affect on the purchasing decision of potential customers.

Here is the split of the different touch points over the four month buying process:

All interesting stuff, and clearly there are lots of implications for other markets here. What it also says though is that there is a need for brands to produce content for their own websites, for customer reviews and within the printed and digital media. And this content has a massive impact on the consumer purchasing decision. Ah, the power of PR!