Know Your Consumer: Behavior Marketing
First, an anecdote to define consumer behavior. As downtown Traverse City cautiously reopened indoor seating during the COVID-19 pandemic, one coffee shop didn’t open its doors at 7 a.m. as it had for nearly a decade before the shutdown. Competitors down the street stuck to 7 a.m. and inherited a raft of the first coffee shop’s customers.
Even when both shops eventually opened at 7 a.m. several months later, the “regulars” didn’t return to their original haunt—their habits changed.
Consumer habits are incredibly sticky, but by understanding underlying motivations and directly (and indirectly) addressing them in marketing, customer behavior can change to align with the business’s goals.
Understanding Consumer Behavior and Consumer Habits
Behavior is the broader term that defines spending influences, while spending habits are the day-to-day processes of consumers doing what they do best - spend money.
What Is Consumer Behavior?
Consumer behavior is the ongoing, metric-driven study of all factors influencing an individual’s purchasing decisions. While consumer behavior researchers (and your favorite local consulting company) primarily focus on a company’s primary and secondary customer base, they may also include “outside” audiences to explore new markets.
Consumer behavior is an infinitely complex study of the socioeconomic, geographic, emotional, and peer influences that drive spending habits.
What Are Consumer Habits?
Consumer habits are the ingrained decision-making processes that shape buying habits. And to be clear, shopping habits are incredibly hard to break. Experts divide consumer habits into two categories, mindful and automatic.
Mindful - Think of mindful spending as cautious spending in which consumers read reviews, look for deals, and shop for the same product at multiple locations. These tend to be bigger decisions, like buying a new stove or shopping for a new laptop.
Automatic - This is the everyday type of spending that requires little consideration. We tend to buy our groceries from the same store, we tend to buy the same products at that store, and we don’t spend considerable time comparing one kind of parmesan cheese to another.
Read more: How To Increase Organic Search Traffic (And Why It Matters)
Changing Consumer Behavior: What It Takes
Behavior marketing takes many forms across industries. Coffee shops, for example, may offer special pricing during the morning rush to incentivize a daily latte habit. Apps like Shipt offer free delivery to new users or offer steep discounts to get customers into the habit of ordering groceries. Any messaging, promotion, or business tactic that aims to influence behavior is essentially designed to make or break a consumer habit; that is to say, shaping behavior is marketing.
While it may look different depending on the business, market, or industry, behavior marketing is based on a few key tenets.
Reinforce positive beliefs. Whatever positives your brand offers, emphasize them to prospective new customers.
Encourage new habits with new products. Reward new customers with reasons to keep the habit. While this is often focused on promotions or incentives, brands also release new features that make the experience more valuable.
Help customers keep the habit. Use automated emails, apps, and discounts to reinforce repeat business.
Constantly adjust messaging. The marketing that first attracted customers won’t work indefinitely. Keep adjusting marketing campaigns to align with new priorities or problems.
Get the data. Customer behavior analysis can be as simple as a post-checkout survey - what brought you in today? Take the time to ask questions, send surveys, and make business decisions on what customers say, not your gut feelings.
Changing consumer preferences takes time, effort, and plenty of trial and error. Sometimes, it also requires a global pandemic.
How The Pandemic Changed Customer Buying Habits (Almost) Overnight
The pandemic dramatically changed consumer shopping habits in the US and abroad - our coffee shop regulars aren’t alone. COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of grocery delivery services like Shipt, food delivery services like DoorDash, and contributed to an initial shift away from travel and services business that led to record-breaking online shopping in 2020. Ecommerce as a share of total consumer spending increased from 11.8% to 16.1% in a single quarter as the pandemic intensified. Four years later, online shopping sits at 15.9% - it’s hard to break a habit.
More than 75% of US consumers tried a new brand or purchased products in a new way during the pandemic and many of those “forced” new habits shape current purchasing decisions.
Some of these companies simply had the right product at the right time, but those with lasting post-pandemic success made smart business decisions based on marketing and consumer behaviors that allowed them to retain new customers and keep their momentum well after restrictions eased.
Shaping Behavior Isn’t Easy. We Make It Easier.
From consulting to market research, Sovis Media offers a fresh perspective on your most pressing business challenges. We’ll learn about your business and industry to deliver exceptional marketing that drives real growth.
We’re ready to rock; how about you?