The Multi-Channel Consumer & Their Influences To Purchasing

A few days ago I gave a presentation at workshop at Strathclyde University's Business School on the subject of 'The Multi-Channel Consumer & Their Influences To Purchasing'.

I do expect to go into my presentation in more depth over a series of subsequent posts here, but in the meantime I thought I would share it here:

Hayden 26feb2013-final from Hayden Sutherland

Obviously this deck does need a bit of a voice-over to explain what some things mean, but hopefully it should be of some use... Especially to those who attended.

The problem with collecting data

Data gets collected all over the place these days:

• Customer feedback questionnaires regularly request and assess views and opinions
• Website analytics capture everything from machine preferences through to individual clicks on each page
• Audience research shows the number of adverts watched in a single evening and the retention of those products the following day.
• In-store ethnographic research identifies trends in purchasing behaviour and the effects of pricing, product selection, promotion and placement.

But businesses and their agencies need to move away from the habit of just retaining data from single channels (e.g. website analytics. TV viewing figures, etc.) and transcend the basic online only attribution models that are currently out there.

They now need to understand the entire user journey that leads not just to a transaction, but to a longer-term relationship. Only then can business truly understand the influence that different devices, channels, proportional activity and other factors (such as peer recommendations) have on purchasing and subsequent behaviour.

But who is linking these sources and others together? Who is trying to pull together the collective understanding from each of the different communication and commercial channels?