Understanding the key moments in a shopper’s path-to-purchase or customer’s product usage journey is the foundation to designing the on-brand experience that leads to the growth and profitability of every company. Virtually all research and insights departments at companies perform a great deal of primary research and invest in secondary research to help them understand and improve this experience.

However, it is our experience that most of this research is performed after the fact, with little insight being captured in-the-moment. And it is also our experience that “after-the-fact” research can be either non-illuminating or blatantly misleading as compared to “in-the-moment” insights.

One example is a CPG firm selling through traditional retail channels – Big-box stores like Walmart and Target, home improvement stores like The Home Depot or Lowes as well as grocery stores. Their historical research showed that “brand switching” was a serious challenge – that despite their investment in advertising, coupons and price promotions to build brand preference with shoppers, these same shoppers were selecting a different brand “in-the-aisle” and their investment was lost.

Our customer journey research used several collection approaches over a 4-week research process – and indeed determined that brand switching in the aisle was a huge problem. And that the 25% brand switching on in the aisle they “thought” was going on in (based on previous research) was really over 70%. Our research also determined the key segments that were more/less likely to brand switch and the key drivers of sustaining brand preference – as well as the exact impact of messaging, packaging, pricing, assortment and promotional levers for each shopper segment and in each channel.

These insights turned into a new sales and marketing approach that resulted in immediate sales lift and retailer commitments. We were left wondering about the success of the brand if they had known this years before.

There are several affordable and easy-to-execute ways of capturing in-the-moment customer behavior:

• Shopalong – walking with shoppers along their buying journey, observing their behavior and following it up with an in-person interview after the experience to probe on key moments
• Eye-tracking – monitoring eye-movement, timing and sequence by having shoppers and customers wear eye-tracking glasses
• Biometric monitoring – this can be as simple as wearing a GSR-device on a finger to measure the intensity and positive/negative emotion of different stages of the shopping, buying or product use experience.
• Video capture and analysis – capturing video of retail store movement and evaluating behavior patterns and actions
• Facial analysis – computer-analysis of their facial expressions as they watch a video, try a product or read packaging information
• Mobile ethnography – having shoppers and customers record their actions, emotions and decisions by being prompted along the journey

Connecting “Research-to-Results” with proactive customer journey management delivers powerful business outcomes:

• Revenue growth of 30% – 50%
• Retention improvements of 30 points • NPS increases of 30-50 points

But these results need to start with In-the-Moment research – a great return on investment.

Call 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com for a free consultation on this topic. Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Management firm with extensive experiences in B2C and B2B journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.