In this article, I share my conclusions about the main sources of influence on consumers' purchasing decisions, so that we can exchange ideas about the role of advertising in the era of customer experience, since it still accounts for more than 70% of all advertising budgets for companies.
To write the article, I invited my friend Jailson de Sá , one of the most experienced marketing and communication professionals in Brazil, owner of the Acontecendo Aqui portal, a reference in the market when it comes to advertising, marketing, communication and innovation.
I'm passionate about advertising, so much so that I started my professional career working in agencies and have always worked in the field, until I started my business with Harmo.
Advertising has an incredible power to capture our attention and awaken almost unconscious desires to engage with brands.
We, consumers, see ourselves in brands and, therefore, want to purchase and use the products they represent.
Who hasn't been moved by watching an ad? How many campaigns have left their mark on our lives and stayed with us forever?
When it comes to building a brand's image and the values it represents, advertising is undoubtedly the best way to achieve this goal. And we all know that a brand is extremely valuable and takes years and years to build.
But as society has evolved, traditional advertising, which previously had a great influence on the decision to purchase products and services, has seen its influence diminish .
But that doesn't mean, in my opinion, that it's no longer relevant. Quite the opposite. The point now is to understand what role advertising plays in the new landscape we live in .
The role of advertising in the new scenario we live in
A recent survey by the Qualibest Institute revealed the main sources of influence when purchasing a product. Below are the final results of the survey.
Friends and relatives, the traditional word of mouth among acquaintances, continues (and will always continue) to be the main source of influence.
Next come “ digital influencers ,” who are currently divided into several levels and categories and have been gaining increasing importance and space in the marketing plans of companies of all sizes, precisely because they generate value for the brands with which they associate, whether by attracting qualified leads (potential customers) or by directly converting sales.
And in third place are reviews , the famous public customer evaluations , shared about products and services, generally on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, on sites like Google, Trip Advisor, Facebook, Yelp and apps like iFood, Uber, Rappi, among others.
This type of evaluation quickly became popular because it is easy to interpret and answers consumers' questions about the reliability of what they are about to purchase .
Tip: Why are Google reviews important for your business?
Personally, I consider reviews to be a kind of long tail for digital influencers .
If we think about it, we are all digital influencers these days.
Every review that a customer writes online, publicly, about a product, service, store, restaurant, etc., is helping to influence the decision of potential customers .
Therefore, we have, in the top positions, as sources of influence for purchasing products and services, three strategies directly related to good old-fashioned word-of-mouth advertising. Fact.
But it wasn't always this way. Let's go back a century to understand how communication and advertising have evolved to this day.
The evolution of communication and advertising
During the first half of the 20th century, cinema became a form of family recreation. The first films were made in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then, in the 1920s, home radio was introduced, and 20 years later, home television.
The first official radio station began operations on November 2, 1920, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By mid-century, radio began to expand throughout the United States as additional devices were dispersed through automobiles. There was widespread penetration of various forms of radio.
In the early 1960s, television also began to expand. By the 1970s, television was virtually ubiquitous. Later, new media such as cable TV and VCRs were added.
With the advent of mass media, mass advertising emerged . This involves large-scale advertising campaigns with a single message, created by a company, promoting itself (the brand) to the general public, with the aim of arousing desire and persuading them to buy the product or service .
Advertising campaigns broadcast in mass media (radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and cinema) reached millions of consumers, without much distinction beyond some basic characteristics such as social class and age, depending on the type of advertising space where they were broadcast.
Their greatest advantage was their ability to reach an entire population quickly and with the same information. It was a gigantic cannon shot that, in the end, reached a few thousand consumers. But mass media has always faced a major challenge: measuring results .
The challenge of mass media today
Until the 1980s, this was reasonably calculable. Because back then, only mass media existed to disseminate advertising messages. The internet didn't yet exist.
So when we only have one way to receive the message, it becomes easy to determine where an increase in customer flow is coming from.
Mad Men fans , like me, know exactly what I'm talking about.
At that time, word of mouth was also quite limited, as we, consumers, did not have at our disposal ways of recommending products and services en masse, as we do today .
Another fundamental point is that, when the internet didn't exist, the power to express our dissatisfaction about our experiences with brands was completely limited to the customer service of the companies that owned these brands.
In other words, it was practically null. We had no power over the brands' reputation .
We can conclude that, in the past, traditional advertising, because mass media was basically the only form of distribution of existing communication, had great reach and influence, while word of mouth had little reach and influence on the decision-making power of purchasing products and services.
But nowadays it is very different.
Mass media versus experiential marketing
Now, we consumers have enormous power over brands, and what enabled this shift was undoubtedly the internet. And this shift in power is visibly transforming marketing.
In the current digital era, where we are all connected and sharing our experiences with brands, marketing has begun to see the customer in a new light, because now, the one who has the greatest power over the influence during the purchase decision process is the customer and no longer the brand..
Tip: The New Experience Marketing: Total Customer Focus
For this reason, communication increasingly needs to be based on sincere purposes and connected to the brand's DNA.
This movement ranges from the public behavior of its shareholders and key executives to engagement in social impact actions.
One of the main consequences of this shift in power is that the customer has now become one of the main channels for acquiring new customers. The customer is now a decisive influencer in the final stage of the sales funnel .
The customer as a channel for acquiring new customers
Marketers, on the other hand, whose mission is to create consumer experiences, are increasingly challenged to break through the behavioral bubbles created by algorithms, which only release content based on each person's online consumption.
The power of influencers would be limited to these behavioral bubbles created by this content targeting based on browsing preferences.
In this new scenario, brands need to create and implement strategies that focus on constantly increasing new reviews from their customers, publicly recommending their products and services.
Brands also need to pay close attention to negative reviews and provide immediate, public, and accurate feedback to these customers to regain the trust not only of the customer who complained, but of the thousands of potential customers who will read the company's response.
Marketing now needs to focus on the customer experience. Customer experience is definitely the new marketing..
Good experiences throughout the journey generate positive reviews, which help attract more customers.
Not to mention the huge additional benefits related to improving the experience, such as lower CAC and the customer's willingness to pay a higher price for the product/service offered.
And there's more. There's a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) issue that's intrinsically connected to the issue of reviews.
Search engines prioritize businesses and products with the highest number of positive reviews in their results. Search engine algorithms also increase the relevance of companies that respond to their customers' reviews.
In other words, the more publicly recommended your company is online, the higher it will rank, precisely when consumers are searching for products with purchase intent (bottom of the funnel). Fact .
Therefore, we can conclude that, currently, online word of mouth has a gigantic reach and a powerful influence on consumers' purchasing decision-making power, while traditional advertising, as proven by the Qualibest Institute's research, despite still having a large reach, has lost influence .
The purchasing process has changed
Now we, consumers, buy what we want, when we want, where we want, and we make our decisions based on reviews shared by other consumers who have already purchased and used what we are researching, be it a product or service.
When it comes to the bottom of the funnel, reviews and digital influencers are much more decisive than advertising, as Qualibest's research has proven.
But again, this doesn't mean that advertising is no longer important, quite the opposite.
We understand that, in fact, advertising now, more than ever, needs to be used as “THE” tool for brand building, awareness, and creating emotional bonds.
After all, why do internet giants advertise on television? You've probably been reached on television by ads from Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, Mercado Livre, and many others.
Television delivers a greater media return than the internet in the long run. There's no comparison to TV when it comes to brand reach. TV and other mass advertising media are capable of building a future audience for a brand .
We often read that over 80% of tweets about content refer to television. When we read that people consume information through two or more screens, one of them is always the television.
TV commercials convey emotion, empathy, and engagement with the brand and the characters used in the communication.
These are people seeking leisure or broader information and are open to 30 or 60-second commercials, unlike content consumers on social media where message lengths are much shorter, 6 seconds, given the speed imposed by the platforms used by this audience.
What is recommended, therefore, are cross-media actions designed according to the strategy of each product or service..
However, I have the impression, and I could be wrong, that there is still, in general, a very deep-rooted belief that advertising campaigns broadcast in mass media need to be responsible for increasing sales and customer flow in stores.
In my humble opinion, expecting this from traditional advertising today is using it for the wrong purpose .
Where Traditional Advertising Fits into Your Customer Acquisition Strategy
It's virtually impossible to measure the results of traditional advertising, broadcast through mass media, and it's expensive, very expensive. To me, this is a strong argument for using mass advertising for brand-building purposes rather than for increasing sales, especially in the short term .
There are much more effective, measurable, and cost-effective strategies for increasing sales and generating more customer flow in stores, whether physical or online, than mass media.
On the other hand, brands are beginning to see “customer experience” as an actionable strategy, whose main objective is related to customer acquisition.
And when we talk about “customer experience,” it’s crucial to include the final action in the tactical plan, which is what will attract new customers to the company: asking your customers to positively and publicly recommend your brand online .
The new experience marketing
In short, the new experiential marketing works in the following sequence:
Whereas:
- Advertising no longer has as much influence on consumers when it comes to purchasing a product.
- Recommendations from influencers and customer reviews greatly influence consumers when purchasing a product.
- The best advertising is the satisfied customer who does it (online word of mouth), using new technologies that allow us to share our experiences with brands.
I leave you with the following provocation: in the age of customer experience, how do you view the role of traditional advertising? Do you believe it still works effectively as a customer acquisition strategy?
⭐Extra Content:
Watch our webinar on experience marketing . In the Experience Age, consumers choose products and services based on experiences shared publicly in the form of reviews on Google or TripAdvisor, or through Facebook Recommendations. If your customers are choosing to do business with you based on the experience they receive, that's where you should focus your efforts and investments . Learn everything you need to know in this webinar!
