What follows the six steps outlined in the decision making process * Do you think evaluation is always necessary * explain?

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Posted by: Lucid Content Team

The consumer decision-making process can seem mysterious, but all consumers go through basic steps when making a purchase to determine what products and services will best fit their needs. 

Think about your own thought process when buying something—especially when it’s something big, like a car. You consider what you need, research, and compare your options before making the decision to buy. Afterward, you often wonder if you made the right call. 

If you work in sales or marketing, make more of an impact by putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and reviewing the steps in the consumer decision-making process.

Steps in the consumer decision process

Generally speaking, the consumer decision-making process involves five basic steps.

The first step of the consumer decision-making process is recognizing the need for a service or product. Need recognition, whether prompted internally or externally, results in the same response: a want. Once consumers recognize a want, they need to gather information to understand how they can fulfill that want, which leads to step two.

But how can you influence consumers at this stage? Since internal stimulus comes from within and includes basic impulses like hunger or a change in lifestyle, focus your sales and marketing efforts on external stimulus. 

Develop a comprehensive brand campaign to build brand awareness and recognition––you want consumers to know you and trust you. Most importantly, you want them to feel like they have a problem only you can solve.

Example: Winter is coming. This particular customer has several light jackets, but she’ll need a heavy-duty winter coat if she’s going to survive the snow and lower temperatures.

When researching their options, consumers again rely on internal and external factors, as well as past interactions with a product or brand, both positive and negative. In the information stage, they may browse through options at a physical location or consult online resources, such as Google or customer reviews.

Your job as a brand is to give the potential customer access to the information they want, with the hopes that they decide to purchase your product or service. Create a funnel and plan out the types of content that people will need. Present yourself as a trustworthy source of knowledge and information. 

Another important strategy is word of mouth—since consumers trust each other more than they do businesses, make sure to include consumer-generated content, like customer reviews or video testimonials, on your website.

Example: The customer searches “women’s winter coats” on Google to see what options are out there. When she sees someone with a cute coat, she asks them where they bought it and what they think of that brand.

3. Alternatives evaluation

At this point in the consumer decision-making process, prospective buyers have developed criteria for what they want in a product. Now they weigh their prospective choices against comparable alternatives.

Alternatives may present themselves in the form of lower prices, additional product benefits, product availability, or something as personal as color or style options. Your marketing material should be geared towards convincing consumers that your product is superior to other alternatives. Be ready to overcome objections—e.g., in sales calls, know your competitors so you can answer questions and compare benefits.

Example: The customer compares a few brands that she likes. She knows that she wants a brightly colored coat that will complement the rest of her wardrobe, and though she would rather spend less money, she also wants to find a coat made from sustainable materials.

4. Purchase decision

This is the moment the consumer has been waiting for: the purchase. Once they have gathered all the facts, including feedback from previous customers, consumers should arrive at a logical conclusion on the product or service to purchase.

If you’ve done your job correctly, the consumer will recognize that your product is the best option and decide to purchase it.

Example: The customer finds a pink winter coat that’s on sale for 20% off. After confirming that the brand uses sustainable materials and asking friends for their feedback, she orders the coat online.

5. Post-purchase evaluation

This part of the consumer decision-making process involves reflection from both the consumer and the seller. As a seller, you should try to gauge the following:

  • Did the purchase meet the need the consumer identified?
  • Is the customer happy with the purchase?
  • How can you continue to engage with this customer?

Remember, it’s your job to ensure your customer continues to have a positive experience with your product. Post-purchase engagement could include follow-up emails, discount coupons, and newsletters to entice the customer to make an additional purchase. You want to gain life-long customers, and in an age where anyone can leave an online review, it’s more important than ever to keep customers happy.

Tools to better understand your customer

Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes can help you steer consumers towards your product. Here are some tools to help you analyze their decision-making process and refine your brand marketing and sales tactics.

Customer journey map

A customer journey map visualizes a hypothetical customer’s actions. Use it to empathize with your customers as they go through a specific process or try to complete a purchase. Map out the actions the customer is likely to take.

Learn how to make a customer journey map to understand the decision-making process for your product/service.

Empathy maps help teams understand the customer’s mindset when dealing with a product or service. They can be used for personas or specific customer types. Empathy mapping is often most helpful at the beginning of a new project. Collaborate as a team to quickly get inside the heads of your customers during every step of product development, testing, and release.

Learn how empathy maps work so you can understand your customers better and make customer-oriented decisions.

Based on user research or past user interactions, user persona cards construct fictional or composite personas that break down and organize your data into distinctive types of users. Build a more human picture of your users and understand your user base better by creating user personas for the various types of users for your product or service.

Understanding the consumer decision-making process is key if you want to attract more customers and get them to make that crucial purchase. Use this process and the tools above to tune in to consumers and genuinely understand how to reach them.

What follows the six steps outlined in the decision making process * Do you think evaluation is always necessary * explain?

Decision making process PDFDownload

You might be wondering, “What is the decision making process?” and “How do I use it to make great decisions??”

In this article, I’ll outline the 7 steps of the decision making process that will guide you to great decision making.

I’ll also provide examples along the way, so you know how to apply each step of the process to any problem you encounter.

I use these 7 steps for all my important decisions.

Actually, this process has helped me achieve many successes to date, from building 5-star apps on the iPhone and Android to maintaining a loving and fulfilling relationship with my wife for 7+ years.

Let’s dive right in!

The 7 Steps of the Decision Making Process

There are a couple different decision making (or problem-solving) processes used by leading companies and taught by best-in-class universities, but they all in one way or another mention the 7 steps we’ll go over right now.

Step #1: Describe the problem, challenge, or opportunity

What follows the six steps outlined in the decision making process * Do you think evaluation is always necessary * explain?

What is the specific problem you must solve, or challenge you must overcome, or opportunity you wish to take advantage of?

Being able to describe your objective succinctly is a sign you truly understand it.

Try to notice if you’re having trouble describing your objective, or your answer to the above question is long-winded and meandering.

Pause at this step until you have confidence you know what you should focus on.

Sometimes writing can bring clarity. If the thoughts in your head are meandering and disconnected, writing them down will force structure and connection.

Describing your objective out loud can be a great check for understanding.

Ask a friend or colleague to listen in. If they understand what you’re getting at, and more importantly you do too, you’re on the right track.

Example

Remember the last time you had a problem to resolve with your boss?

Did you describe the problem more like this:

“I never know what to work on. My boss sends me stuff to do at random times, and I’m not sure what’s most important. When he walks over to my desk, I’m afraid he’ll interrupt what I’m doing to have me work on something totally different.”

Or more like this:

“I need to be able to prioritize what I’m working on at any given time.”

The second description is more specific and clear.

Compared to the first description, the second description makes me feel more confident about solving the right problem if I go through the rest of the process.

Step #2: Create a set of potential solutions or responses

What follows the six steps outlined in the decision making process * Do you think evaluation is always necessary * explain?

For those decisions you’ve made before, you might have strong intuition about the best response.

In many cases, going with your gut can save time and energy.

But for those hairy decisions in uncharted territory, can you come up with some creative ways to achieve your objective?

Your first idea is rarely the best option.

Asking people for help is a common way to generate potential solutions or responses. But whom to ask?

Ideally you ask an expert. They can be a subject matter expert, or they can be a trusted confidant who is an expert on you.

Yes, your mom is pretty much an expert on everything, because she will come up with ideas that are well-suited to you.

Ideally you talk to both kinds of experts.

Difficult decisions are rarely one-size-fits-all. The right solution requires understanding the situation, but also understanding where you or your company fits into that situation.

Example

For many people, choosing which college to go to is one of the most important decisions in life.

It sets the trajectory for your entire career, and can even influence what type of person you marry and how you’re able to raise your family.

The valedictorian of my high school class got into Stanford, but she turned it down.

At first I was shocked, until I learned how she made her decision.

Just talking to career experts, Stanford would’ve been the obvious choice. According to US News College Rankings, it ranks in the top 10 nationally.

But she didn’t just refer to expert lists and class counselors. Our valedictorian talked to her family and to her pastor too.

From these conversations, she slowly realized how important it was for her to be close to family and church.

She chose to apply to some colleges closer to home, and was accepted into a pretty good one.

She’s doing fine by the way, having graduated from a prestigious medical school to become a doctor.

Step #3: Collect data

How can you collect data for each of the potential solutions / responses? The best decisions are usually data-driven.

Both quantitative and qualitative data are useful to make decisions.

Quantitative data is expressed in numbers. It tells you what is happening.

Qualitative data is expressed in words. It often tells you why it’s happening.

There are many ways to collect data.

Some of the most useful and easiest to implement are surveys, interviews, and observations.

Online research is also an important way to gather information for your decision, but be sure to check that your sources are credible.

Example

A couple of years ago, I was helping a technology startup boost their customer growth.

First, I wanted to understand the customer acquisition funnel.

How many people were visiting the site? Of those visiting, how many were signing up for the service?

Of those signing up, how many were staying on? And for those who left, how long did it they stay on?

This quantitative data told me what the problem was. Lots of people were leaving the service after a short time.

It was great to know where to focus our attention, but we still didn’t know how to fix the problem. For that we needed to collect qualitative data so we could understand why people were leaving.

We implemented a survey, asking people why they were leaving the service. We noticed a trend: most people were leaving because the service was too slow.

For the next six months we focused on speeding up the service and scrapped plans to add additional offerings. As a result, fewer people left and we boosted customer growth by 27%.

Step #4: Evaluate each option

What follows the six steps outlined in the decision making process * Do you think evaluation is always necessary * explain?

After collecting data, we can use it to measure the pros and cons for each of the potential solutions / responses.

Once we measure the pros and cons, we can rank the options.

It can be difficult to rank options when the basis of ranking is not obvious. Sometimes it can feel like you’re ranking apples and oranges.

In these situations, a rubric is really effective. Simply choose a few important factors for your decision, and give each option a score for each factor.

Then add up the scores, and rank based on score.

Check in with your intuition too, though.

Our intuition translates the learnings of our entire life into emotions and physical “gut” feelings to aid our decision making.

If the rubric and your intuition are pointing to the same solution, that’s worth paying attention to.

Example

After we got married, my wife and I planned our honeymoon. For 3 weeks we could go anywhere in the world.

We soon were caught in a paradox of choice. We listed 10 different regions of the world to visit, everywhere from Southeast Asia to Scandinavia.

To help us choose, we created a rubric with the following factors: weather, distance from home, romantic quality, outdoor activities, and food.

We scored each factor out of 10 points, so each destination could get a maximum score of 50.

Southeast Asia got 45 points, and South Africa got 42 points.

While these scores were pretty close, our intuition had been telling us Southeast Asia the entire time. We chose that destination, confident that our intuition and the data were aligned.

Step #5: Choose a solution or response

What follows the six steps outlined in the decision making process * Do you think evaluation is always necessary * explain?

Which option is the best? For which option do the pros outweigh the cons the most?

Choosing is an art, since there is almost never a silver bullet solution that guarantees success at no cost.

How carefully you choose should be driven by how reversible the choice is.

Basically, if you can reverse your decision easily and at little cost, then it matters less which decision you make first. You can try something to see if it works, then try something else later if it doesn’t.

But if the decision is permanent and a matter of great consequence, then you need to be very careful choosing.

Example

Zappos famously found success by offering insanely easy exchanges and returns for their shoes.

Buying shoes online can be tricky because you can’t see how they fit.

If Zappos didn’t offer easy and free exchanges, your purchasing decision would be permanent and you’d need to be sure of which pairs of shoes to buy.

You might never buy anything, because critical data to make your decision would be impossible to collect before purchasing.

The reality is that your purchasing decision is reversible and low cost, so you can buy shoes at Zappos without being 100% sure of your decision.

Millions of people have no trouble making purchasing decisions at Zappos every year, resulting in over $2 billion in annual sales for the company.

Step #6: Take action

What follows the six steps outlined in the decision making process * Do you think evaluation is always necessary * explain?

How can you most effectively execute on your decision?

Choosing is hard, but carrying out that choice can be just as difficult.

For complex decisions, it’s worth spending the time upfront to figure out how to take action. It can save headache down the road.

In some cases, speed and efficiency is important. The early bird gets the worm.

In plenty of other cases, however, speed works against you. These are cases when waiting has an advantage, because it gives time to gather more info or for the situation to change for the better.

Example

In the world of building software, there are many ways to build the same thing.

That’s part of what makes software engineering fun, but it’s also what makes decision making difficult.

A couple of years ago my team was building technology to livestream classroom whiteboards to students learning math on their phones at home.

The engineers researched ways to build this really cool software, and voted for an approach that would take 3 months.

It was March, and we didn’t need the new software until back to school season in September. We resolved to put off deciding an approach for a couple months.

In April, an engineer found an alternative approach while researching a totally separate project.

This alternative approach would shave 2 months off of the original timeline.

Because we spent time upfront thinking about the best plan of attack, we realized waiting had an advantage.

Because we waited, we saved a boatload of time to spend on other exciting projects.

Step #7: Evaluate the impact of your decision and course correct if needed

What follows the six steps outlined in the decision making process * Do you think evaluation is always necessary * explain?

Did your actions achieve your objectives? If not, why not?

It’s easy to overlook this critical step and move on to the next problem, but don’t let that happen to you.

Instead, plan ahead and think of how you’ll evaluate whether the problem was solved.

Usually measuring a symptom of the problem and noticing whether it’s disappeared or greatly reduced works well.

A symptom could be anything from joint pain after a workout to a key performance indicator like customer churn rate.

Example

I’ve shared docs on Google Drive a million times.

Yet last week one of my investment partners didn’t receive something I shared with him.

I shared the doc again. Sharing usually works, so I figured it was just a fluke and there wasn’t any need to double check.

The next day, I find out he still didn’t get the doc. It’s a contract he needs to sign, and with every day that passes there’s a chance someone else scoops up the investment opportunity.

Finally I take a closer look at how I’m sharing. I notice that there’s a typo in the email address I’m using.

I share it again, but this time I tell him to check right away. He sees it in his inbox, signs it, and we close the deal the same day.

Decision making skills

Now that you’re comfortable with the decision making process, here are some resources to help you upskill.

Now it’s your turn

I’ve said a bunch, now I’d like to hear from you!

How useful was this article? How could I do better?

Which step of the decision making process do you have the most trouble with?

What’s a skill you think is important?

Upskill Nation is a community, so make your voice heard by leaving a comment below.