The 2 Critical Stages of the Shopper Journey that Drive Retail Mobile Phone Use

Every marketing and brand manager knows that shoppers use their mobile devices during the shopping journey – but unfortunately few have insightful data about where, when and why.  Online market research companies put out charts about the 4-5 mobile phone use cases:  price checks, user reviews, product popularity, etc.  This data can be helpful, but doesn’t help identify 3 critical insights at the shopper emotion level.  These are:

• Why they use them – what core problem are they trying to solve
• When shoppers encounter these core problems that trigger phone use
• The critical information shoppers need to accelerate them on their path-to-purchase

Recently, Gold Research in different retail formats and categories identified 8 stages of the retail shopping visit and the shopper information needs in the 2 stages that drove the most frequent and critical mobile device uses.  Shoppers were fitted with eye-tracking glasses and asked to go through their normal shopping journey, interacting with sales associates, checking out sale racks, even trying on clothing and accessories.  After the shopping experience, they were interviewed and shown their shopping video to fully understand what they were thinking along the journey.  (Many shoppers weren’t even aware of their thought process or actions until they saw themselves).

This research identified that phone use was less frequent – and non-critical – at the earlier stages of the journey.  As the shoppers entered the “Information Gathering” and “Evaluation & Decision-making” journey stages their information needs increased dramatically and shoppers counted on their mobile devices heavily for trusted information. 

Having easy access to trusted information for 6 key elements was essential:

• price check / comparisons
• inventory/stock availability
• product comparisons
• product application (will it work for me?)
• user reviews & expert evaluations
• compatible and complementary product information

In addition, the ability to send pictures with critical product information to friends, family and other “experts” was necessary to validate selections – or affirm their decision. 

Many emotional factors were captured along the journey:  Anticipation, motivation, inspiration, disorientation, frustration, temptation, validation and disappointment.  The emotional roller-coaster told the story of their journey – and provided the keys to designing a high-productivity path-to-purchase journey that led to this client reporting an immediate (and significant) increase in sales and shopper loyalty. 

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 experience 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.