Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Understanding Consumer Behavior
95
.
Figure 5.3. The four-stage buying funnel with definitions of each stage.
•
The final stage of the buying funnel is
Purchase
. This stage is when a consumer
knows what specific product and brand they intend to purchase, and they are typi-
cally comparing price, convenience to order, or similar aspects of purchase before
buying.
The gist of the buying funnel is that it models how advertisers can reach consum-
ers. This model states that consumers pass through the four cognitive stages as they
decide what product or service to purchase.
The buying funnel fits nicely with concepts of decision making [
23
]. In consumer
decision making, the decision maker goes through stages, including intelligence and
choice.
Awareness
aligns well with
intelligence
.
Research
and
decision
line up well
with
design
, and
purchase
aligns well with
choice
. So, there is psychological founda-
tional support for the buying funnel.
Although not without dissent [
24
], this model is widely cited and referred to in
the practitioner press [c.f., 25, 26, 27] and in marketing literature [c.f., 28, 29, 30].
For example, Nimitz [
31
] states that the buying funnel is crucial to better understand
the customer, giving the advertiser better chances of selling a product or service.
Laycock [
32
] stresses that the Internet makes it so easy for a consumer to research
a product before actually making a purchase that the buying funnel is critical to
understanding why some keywords perform well and others do not.
So, viewing the buying funnel as a query classification scheme, every keyphrase
will fall into one stage of the buying funnel.
Unfortunately, the buying funnel has not stood up to empirical testing, although
it may be a worthwhile paradigm for classifying aspects of individual consumer
searching behavior at the query level based on empirical searching decisions [
9
].
