Chapter 4

The anatomy of a choice

Cos Luccitti and I started CXA in December 2015. Not long after, I drafted a model of the customer journey in five stages: Discovery, Deliberation, Decision, Delivery and Devotion. Five Ds.

I took it to Cos and we worked it over together. We changed a few words, but mostly we just looked at it and liked what we saw. We both fell a little bit in love with it.

It made sense of everything we did as an agency, which until then had looked like a list of services. And it gave clients a reason to get excited about marketing and customer experience again. Customer experience in particular had shrunk to a satisfaction score and how well the service desk performed. We wanted it to cover the whole life of a customer, from the first time they heard of you to the day they decided to stay.

The sixth came later, once we'd started asking one question first: what problem is this solving? If every product and service is really a solution to a problem, then the natural way to grow with a client is to solve more of their problems. So we added Design, and put it at the front of the journey, ahead of Discovery.

We didn't get everything right. The irony is that we underplayed Delivery. The rest of the CX industry was so fixated on service delivery that we'd pushed hard the other way, and in doing it we gave too little weight to the stage where you actually keep your promise.

The model in this chapter is that one's descendant. Ten years on, I've rebuilt it around a single question: what has to be true for a buyer to choose you? And this time, Delivery has a stage of its own. It's called Kept.

A choice isn't one event. It's seven things a buyer comes to say about you, and being seen earns only the first two.

Seven statements

The seventh is the first six asked again, when a customer decides whether to stay.

Each one can fail on its own. A brand can be known and impossible to find. It can answer every question and not be believed. It can even be the favourite and still lose the sale to a clumsy checkout or a slow contract. Preferred isn't the same as Bought.

This is not a funnel

Marketing has drawn staged models for a century, from AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) to Robert Lavidge and Gary Steiner's hierarchy of effects in 1961. They say buyers climb the steps in order. The evidence doesn't support that. Demetrios Vakratsas and Tim Ambler reviewed more than 250 articles and books on how advertising works. They found "little support for any hierarchy, in the sense of temporal sequence, of effects" (Vakratsas and Ambler).

So the seven stages aren't a sequence. They're conditions. Each has to hold at the moment of choice, in whatever order the buyer meets them. That's why each stage gets its own chapter and its own measure.

One buyer, seven stages

Take an operations director choosing scheduling software. She's an illustration, not a case.

• Known. Four names come to mind before she looks anywhere.
• Found. She searches and asks an assistant. Three of her four turn up, and one new name joins them.
• Answered. Two suppliers publish prices and integration details. The others make her book a call to find out.
• Believed. Reviews and a peer's word back up both of the two that answered.
• Preferred. Her team favours one, for a reason she can repeat to the finance lead.
• Bought. The favourite's contract takes six weeks of legal back-and-forth. The runner-up offers a 30-day pilot she can sign this month.
• Kept. A year later, she asks the first six again at renewal.

The favourite won five stages and lost at Bought, and nothing on a visibility report would have shown it.

Seen is two of seven

Every visibility number measures the first two stages. Awareness is Known. Rankings, impressions and AI mentions are Found.

Both are necessary. But a supplier that makes the shortlist and loses has passed both. It lost somewhere in the other five.

Visibility is the door. The choice is made inside the house.

Three things around the stages

Three other things define the choice itself.

• The chooser. It isn't always the end buyer. A retailer chooses what to stock, a broker what to recommend, a committee what to approve. An AI assistant is the newest name on that list.
• The moment. Every choice starts with a need arising.
• The offer. What you sell, what it costs and where it can be bought: the old marketing mix. No marketing makes a poor offer preferred for long.

A loop, not a line

Buyers don't walk the stages in order. A repeat customer goes straight from Kept to Bought. A happy one tells a colleague, and Kept becomes someone else's Known.

That's why the experience after the sale belongs in a model of selection. Whether you deliver what you promised decides whether you're kept. What your customers say decides whether the next buyer believes you.

What AI changes here

Each statement now has two audiences: the buyer, and the machine advising the buyer. A person remembers you or doesn't. An AI model has its own version of memory, built from what has been written about you.

So you can ask the adviser directly whether it knows the brand, what it says, and whether it recommends it. Several of the seven can now be inspected at any time, not inferred from surveys.

My reading of the evidence so far is that AI acts most on Found, Answered and Believed, and mostly in purchases that take real thought. For habitual and quick buying it's too early to know.

Every activity has a home

I mapped ninety marketing and sales activities against the model. Sixty-five sit inside one of the seven stages. The rest belong to the chooser, the moment, the offer, or the groundwork that serves them all. The full mapping is in the toolkit at rocmode.com/playbooks.

How the pieces fit

The ladder is what has to hold. The mode says which rungs carry the weight. The foundations are what every rung stands on.

Seven stages, then. The next question is when they happen, and the answer is earlier than most marketing assumes.

Whose evidence this is. There's no vendor data in this chapter. Peer-reviewed source: Vakratsas and Ambler, in the Journal of Marketing.