The Connected Consumer and the New Decision-Making Cycle

IBM ExperienceOne
The Connected
Consumer and the New
Decision-Making Cycle
by Brian Solis

The Connected Consumer and the New Decision-Making Cycle
Gen C will challenge your entire approach to
customer engagement today.
1 2 3 4 5
Gen C weaves an
interesting web
Generation C and
the dynamic
customer journey
Customers get buy
with a little help from
their friends
C change in
consumerism:
A new bi-directional
approach is needed
In summary: The
connected marketer
2

With every day that passes, it seems that we’re
introduced to yet another mobile device or new social
network or must-have mobile app. Welcome to the
digital lifestyle. Your price of admission, though, isn’t
inexpensive. You’re connected, always on, and that’s
OK. As part of Generation C, you’re a connected
consumer, and one of the benefits of membership is
that you’re not only connected but also incredibly
informed and empowered.
Generation Cers are among the most important
customers to the future of business, and they will
challenge your entire approach to customer
engagement today. Unlike previous generations,
Generation C is not a group bound by age, but
instead by connectedness.
Gen C weaves an interesting web
Generation C
weaves an interesting web
Generation C and the
dynamic customer journey
Customers get buy with a
little help from their friends
C change in consumerism:
A new bi-directional approach
is needed
In summary:
The connected marketer 3
Gen Cers can be likened to digital exhibitionists:
everything they do, think and experience is shared
through multiple networks. Online connections and
shared experiences factor in to the decision-making
process. Gen Cers place value not on friends and
family but on strangers and authorities in their social
networks who share similar interests. They see the
world differently and share all experiences, whether
it’s in the real world or online through their social and
mobile networks.
Gen C is building an efficient human network where
information and experiences serve as the ties that
bind relationships. Therefore, it seems only fitting that
a human touch is applied in marketing.
Gen C is building an efficient human
network where information and
experiences serve as the ties that bind
relationships. Therefore, it seems only
fitting that a human touch is applied
in marketing.

Meet Mary. She’s Hispanic, age 35 – 44, with an annual
income of $80,000 – $100,000. She is married, has 2.3
kids, and has attended some college.
While informative, this is not enough to engage real
people in human networks.
In July 2012, I attended the Social Media Marketing
Commerce Summit in Amsterdam, hosted by
MicroStrategy. Chief analyst of Business Intelligence
Group Peter Gentsch took the stage to demonstrate
a poignant example of how demographics often fall
short for designing effective social media strategies.
First he showed a slide with the following
demographic data:
• Born in 1948 and grew up in England
• Married twice
• Two children
• Successful in business
• Wealthy
• Winter holidays spent in the Alps
• Likes dogs
Peter then asked the audience if anyone cared to guess
who it is. Someone yelled out, “Prince Charles.” He
was right.
To prove his point, Peter then showed another slide to
introduce another customer:
• Born in 1948 and grew up in England
• Married twice
• Two children
• Successful in business
• Wealthy
• Winter holidays spent in the Alps
• Likes dogs
Yes, it’s the same data. He then asked the audience if
anyone could guess who he was referring to this time.
Guesses were abundant, but none were correct.
His next slide revealed a picture of Ozzy Osbourne.
Demographic data only gets us so far. In a human
network, where Gen Cers rule their egosystems,
personal insight and interests will reign supreme in
your work going forward.
Generation C
is needed
In summary:
Demographic data only gets us so far. In a human network, where Gen Cers rule
their egosystems, personal insight and interests will reign supreme in your work
going forward.

In your quest to become a connected marketer,
studying demographics and psychographics is crucial.
Let’s take one more step back to see Generation C for
what it really is: a connected group of customers who
friend and follow others with similar interests. A move
toward Generation C is a move toward what I refer to as
interest graphs rather than the widely accepted notion
of engaging social graphs. These terms might sound
like social media buzzwords, but they do have distinct
and important meanings.
One easy way to look at the differences between
social graphs and interest graphs is to compare
them to the notion of demographics (social graph)
and psychographics (interest graph). It’s the
difference between finding and reaching people
based on gender, age, income, education, and
geography and connecting with people because
of the interests, behavior, and resulting relationships
they share.
As you start to explore Generation C, you’ll learn that it
is by uncovering common interests, people, and
patterns that you will form your strategies beyond
typical demographic data. In 2011, I set out to
demonstrate the scope and promise of interest graphs
by studying Starbucks’ top 1 million followers on Twitter.
Naturally I could assume that one common interest that
these followers shared was an affinity for the Starbucks
brand. I could also organize the data by demographics.
But instead, I worked with PeopleBrowsr and its
ReSearch.ly team to visualize what else captivated the
people following Starbucks and how they connected
with one another outside of the Starbucks relationship.
The results were enlightening, to say the least.Social graphs
vs
Interest graphs
Demographics Psychographics
Gender, age, income, education
and geography
Interests, behavior
and resulting relationships they share
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

Research indicated that people who follow Starbucks...
...tend to describe themselves
with expressive words. Top words
included:
• Love
• Life
• Music
• Friends
• World
...describe what is important to
them on Twitter. Top of mind:
• Family
• People
• Mom
• Wife
• Husband
...(top users) are tweeting from:
• California
• New York
• Texas
• Florida
• Washington
...have commonalities in Twitter bios. We found that:
• 42 percent express strong ties to family, religion and love
• 29 percent boast special interests, which is further discernible
• 22 percent are professionals who state their current place of employment and position
• 7 percent are students
...are fascinated by and do the following:
• Identify themselves as enthusiasts, geeks, addicts, junkies and creatives
• Define their most popular areas of interest as music, food, coffee and fashion
• Potentially favor dogs over cats (2:1, as per their mentions)
• Work in either social media or marketing (note: if we were to change the scale of followers, we would open up the
sample to a much broader set of professions)
• Are still in school. Despite accounting for 7 percent of stated occupation or focus, students account for more than
any single professional field
The interest graph is defined by
connections, but it is brought to life
through self-expression.
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

The interest graph is defined by connections,
but it is brought to life through self-expression.
When we combine brand-centric relationships
and conversations, the interest graph essentially
becomes a brand graph—a set of strong ties or
direct relationships where the shared interest is the
brand itself. Within each brand-related graph is a
group of highly connected individuals that serve as a
company’s network of influence.
The ReSearch.ly team extracted 50,000 of the most
recent tweets that included a mention of Starbucks.
We then analyzed the connections between people
and identified the top 100 individuals and the number
of their followers who also mentioned Starbucks
within those 50,000 mentions. Doing so revealed
Starbucks followers who could be viewed as leading
the interest/brand graph and the conversations
about Starbucks itself.
When we combine brand-centric relationships and conversations, the
interest graph essentially becomes a brand graph — a set of strong ties
or direct relationships where the shared interest is the brand itself.
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

Setting out to discover the balance of Generation
C compared to your traditional and digital customers
is only the first step. What we’re talking about here
goes beyond social media listening as well.
This isn’t about how many times your brand is
mentioned in social networks, how it compares to
your competitors, or whether or not your sentiment is
mostly positive. This is about intelligence. It’s about
learning how to engage Gen Cers based on what
and who is important to them and how they con-
nect with each other and your business (or how
they don’t connect with your business) as a result.
What you learn could be the difference between
meaningful engagement and everyday marketing.
Gen C isn’t as elusive as we might think. Social and
mobile media offer the gift of data, and data requires
study and interpretation. To become a connected
marketer and ultimately a connected business
requires a new methodology for how this data is
gathered, packaged, and made actionable in the
right parts of the organization.
In this case, we learned what’s important to Starbucks
customers as it relates to brand identity and visualized
segmented networks, or nicheworks, around each
topic. But this experiment only scratches the surface of
what’s possible.
• Reveal customer sentiment using research
• Include customer feedback in product
development
• Use insight to improve cross-channel marketing
• Humanize customer data to improve engagement
By studying interests, businesses no longer have to
guess which campaigns or ideas will have relevance
to their audiences. They can now study conversations
and connections to inform global, national, and
hyper-local campaigns and initiatives that resonate
uniquely with desired segments and with the audience
as a whole.
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

The gold mine of insight that can be tapped by
studying Gen C will expedite your transformation
from a great marketer to a great connected marketer.
This is a tremendous coup for your business as it
will benefit from relevant and compelling marketing,
promotional, and advertising strategies. Further, your
customers will take delight in the refreshing and
humanized approach your business will exude.
These newly relevant strategies will further optimize
what many sales, marketing, and service strategies
and processes are already designed to optimize:
the customer funnel. There are many different
versions of this funnel, but among the most basic
and widely accepted is attention, interest, desire, and
action (AIDA). This model describes the likely steps a
customer may take in making a decision.
Generation C and the dynamic customer journey
This spiral path documents the importance of
earning customers’ attention early in the decision-
making process to benefit from that awareness
when customers are ready to think seriously about
buying. Naturally, websites, representatives, marketing
materials, and the like contribute to the shepherding
of customers as they travel down the funnel toward
action—hopefully in your favor. From there, depending
on their experience, customers will then move toward
a state of loyalty and, ultimately, advocacy.
In many ways, marketing, sales, and service are
designed to act as sherpas through customer
engagement, guiding people along this delicate path,
because, at any moment, consumers could fall off
the path to a purchase with your company without
direction or support.
Attention
Interest
Desire
Action
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

In an era of connected consumerism, one in which
Gen Cers are empowered to guide themselves through
the decision-making cycle, new strategies are required
to engage and inform. At any moment, customers can
ask questions in social networks, compare prices
through mobile apps, read real-time reviews by trusted
sources, and watch videos with product information
and customer experiences. In theory, they could decide
to buy from you without ever visiting your website or
speaking to a company representative.
Customers get buy with a little help from their friends
In Capitalizing on the Smarter Consumer, which
studied new customer expectations, IBM learned that
smarter consumers want to feel empowered and are
therefore empowering themselves with access to
information and people. According to the report, “They
want to use mobile technologies to make the shopping
process easier and more pleasurable. And they want to
take possession of the purchases they make in the
ways they choose.”
Connected consumers dwell in their own egosystems;
therefore, earning attention becomes paramount.
Without awareness there can be no consideration.
Hence, businesses today invest to varying degrees and
effectiveness in marketing, advertising and communi-
cations strategies. These are the traditional ways
businesses have reached out, and are not new today.
“They want to use mobile technologies to make the shopping process easier and more
pleasurable. And they want to take possession of the purchases they make in the ways
they choose.”
Capitalizing on the Smarter Consumer
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

Earning customer attention isn’t toggling a switch
on and off through traditional marketing campaigns; it
is perpetually engaging them. The blaring noise that
customers continually experience has forced them
to adapt how they spend their attention. Second
nature acts as a defense mechanism to tune out
the constant barrage of marketing messages and
clever campaigns. Awareness at the top of the
funnel is more elusive but critical.
For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that
everyone understands the value of the funnel to attract
customers and invest in long-term relationships. What
happens if businesses are investing their time and
resources in the wrong places? What if where we think
we can impress upon customers or get them to notice
us is not at all where their attention is actually focused?
What happens if businesses are investing their time and resources in the wrong places?
Generation C
is needed
In summary:
What if where we think we can impress upon customers or get them to notice us is not at all
where their attention is actually focused?

Engagement is as much art as it is science. But to
better understand the behavior of Generation C takes
practice with the social sciences, including digital
anthropology, psychology, sociology and ethnography.
When we understand behavior, we discover patterns
in consumer activity that in themselves reveal new
touch points.
IBM also observed in Capitalizing on the Smarter
Consumer that not only are connected customers
smarter, but they also shop differently. According to one
of the report’s findings, “They use technology to start
and stop the shopping process and take days or even
weeks to complete the various steps in the process,
instead of shopping in a continuous linear flow.”
These are important and timely questions to answer,
as they will reveal a new funnel of sorts—one that
more accurately reflects the connected customer
journey. The truth is that what we know and what we
need to know are separated by an unfolding reality
that requires immediate intervention.
Your market has already been disrupted. Through an
unforgiving series of technology revolutions paired
with an era of individual empowerment, not only are
your customers more informed, but their expectations
have matured as well. Spiraling steps have evolved into
something much more dynamic.
C change in consumerism: A new bi-directional approach is needed
The sea change in consumerism has ushered in a
genre of connected consumers. As a result, your
customers are learning about you or your competitors
differently. How they make decisions does not follow a
linear path at all. How they are influenced and, in turn,
how they influence others are profound in their reach
and effect. What was once a simple process is now a
complex customer journey that is much more dynamic
and connected.
Through an unforgiving series of technology revolutions paired with an era
of individual empowerment, not only are your customers more informed,
but their expectations have matured as well.
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

Marketers must research how customers form and
make decisions and what inspires empathy and
creativity. This research will specifically point to what
Altimeter Group refers to as the dynamic customer
journey (DCJ). What you’ll learn following your research
is everything. Most notably, your business will now
clarify how and where to focus efforts on shaping
decisions and experiences before, during and after the
purchase. Additionally, you’ll learn the specific factors,
people, technologies, communities and resources that
affect every stage of your customer’s journey.
Generation C
is needed
In summary:
Source: Altimeter Group, 2012
The results of studying the DCJ will contribute to a
far more accurate point of view that tailors marketing,
sales, service and loyalty strategies to be more
effective and engaging. But it won’t stop there.
Inspired by McKinsey & Company’s work and my own
research during the writing of The End of Business as
Usual, Altimeter Group reimagined the traditional
funnel into a constant and very public elliptical path
that often repeats itself.

For example, IBM offers a suite of IBM ExperienceOne
solutions that helps you engage customers in
highly relevant, interactive dialogues across digital,
social and traditional marketing channels. Gen C is
obviously not the only customer group that’s important
to your business today. When developing a cross-
channel management strategy, expect your
marketing mix to account for the various behaviors of
your customers as they go through the decision-
making journey…their way.
As customers begin their journey, your marketing and
service strategy must align with the various steps Gen
C takes to make a decision. Additionally, your channels
and the messages within them must also align with
expectations and search and consumption patterns.
The steps in the DCJ are familiar, reflecting method-
ologies in the traditional funnel. However, each step
has unique contributing factors for how consumers
discover, analyze, choose and share. The screens
they use to search and purchase, the people who
influence them, the content that informs them, the
social networks they rely on, the collective experi-
ences of others, and the real-time conversations that
shape impressions introduce guidance, doubt and
validation that works for or against you.
Developing your strategy requires a channel
approach that considers and impacts the
following stages:
1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Evaluation
4. Purchase
5. Experience
6. Loyalty
7. Advocacy
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

To simplify the approach, think about dividing the journey based on these four key pillars:
In its report exploring the evolution of digital
consumerism, IBM found that without research and
understanding, smarter customers are much more
difficult to reach than their traditional or digital
counterparts. “Smarter consumers are harder to
‘read’ than their predecessors,” according to the
report. “They are also more cautious about
spending their money and more resistant to
marketing because they have other ways to get the
information they require.”
The most important revelation in the DCJ is how
every step feeds into a discoverable online repository
of shared experiences that influence all those who
embark on a similar journey. This journey rotates
around a powerful influence loop. This information
loop represents the social and mobile networks,
conversations, reviews, videos, infographics, Pinterest
boards, check-ins, and so on, as well as the questions
and shared experiences that unite Gen C and power
informed decision making and relationship building.
Studying the influence loop will reveal what people are
asking and how those questions are answered. You’ll
learn where they go for information, what they find
when they get there, and what next steps they take.
Most notably, you’ll learn what is working for or against
you. At a minimum, it will force—and inform—revisions
to your overall digital marketing strategy, from content
to campaigns to networks to direct engagement.
Without positive influence, there is no hope for
preference. And without positive experiences,
there can be no chance for loyalty or advocacy.
Cross-channel campaign management Marketing performance optimization Digital marketing optimization Web analytics
Engage customers in their preferred channels
with dialogue that speaks to their preferences
and behavior.
Create a mini journey of your own by studying
and managing performance and introducing
efficiencies in real time to optimize initiatives
and engagement in each stage of the
customer journey.
Understand who your customers are
(traditional, digital and connected), how they
click, and where they click to develop and
deploy engaging ads, search campaigns,
emails, and recommendations through
online, social, and mobile channels.
Study how customers interact with your digital
presences and convert insights into personalized
and optimized actions and experiences.
It is only by traveling in your customers’ digital footsteps
that you can uncover a new landscape for engagement
and a new reality for your business. Embracing your
connected customers will help them embrace you
in return. At a minimum, the gifts you receive by
embarking on this journey and investing in engagement,
education, and meaningful experiences are empathy,
relevance, and ultimately reciprocity—all of which are
measurable by traditional business metrics.
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

Everything you’re learning today helps set you apart
from other marketers. Your journey to becoming a
connected marketer is beneficial to both your career
and the business that employs you. By studying Gen
Cers and learning how to engage them, you are
investing in an invaluable strategy of relevance that
helps your business matter to influential, connected
customers. You are competing for the future right now.
As consumerism evolves, so do sales and marketing.
And as sales and marketing evolve, so does spending.
You are becoming a connected marketer, and by
default you are on the right side of the budget.
Those who continue to support traditional marketing
efforts will find their work on the side with an ever-
shrinking budget.
To find success in an era of connected consumerism
requires focus, genuine intentions, and resolve. Every-
thing begins with asking the right questions, starting
with “What are we trying to solve for?” and “Why?”
In summary: The connected marketer
To lead the dynamic customer journey requires much
more than a technology, social or mobile strategy.
As a connected marketer, your efforts must be those
of an enabler of business objectives and business
transformation. Gen C is not a trend. For the next
several years, you will be pursuing a new breed of
consumer in addition to your traditional and digital
customers. Your work will have a sweeping impact
on the organization, one that will inject meaning,
substance and relevance not just to your connected
customer but to all customers.
Lead the way. Customers will follow.
Generation C
is needed
In summary:

Generation C
is needed
In summary:
About IBM ExperienceOne
IBM ExperienceOne helps you attract, delight and grow
the loyalty of customers by enriching the ways you
engage each of them. IBM ExperienceOne provides a set
of integrated customer engagement solutions that
empower marketing, merchandising, commerce and
customer service teams to identify the customers and
moments that matter most, and to rapidly apply those
insights to develop and deliver personally rewarding
brand experiences.
IBM ExperienceOne ignites innovation by leveraging
patterns of success from more than 8,000 client
engagements, original industry research, and products
consistently recognized as industry leaders in major
analyst reports.
IBM ExperienceOne solutions are delivered in cloud, on
premises, and in hybrid options.
For more information
To learn more about IBM ExperienceOne, please
contact your IBM representative or IBM Business
Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/
experienceone.

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Generation C
is needed
In summary:

The Connected Consumer and the New Decision-Making Cycle

The Connected Consumer and the New Decision-Making Cycle

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