For our major B2C research initiative this year, we’re looking into changing consumer purchase processes. So much has changed in the b2c world – economic downturn, increasing options, new information and influence sources – that we had to believe the way people buy has changed as well.

We’ll be talking a lot more about our findings at our executive meeting series and webinar series starting this summer, but we certainly have found some surprising things, a few of which we’ll talk about here.

First off – the purchase funnel is dead, or at least a lot less common than we think it is.

We surveyed nearly 6,000 US and UK consumers about recent purchases across all categories: the remembered purchases were anywhere from under $10 to over thousands of dollars, including ongoing and one-time services, cars, luxury goods and apparel, and the results were definitely surprising.

You’re probably familiar with the purchase funnel, invented in 1898 by the colorfully-named ANA founder St. Elmo Lewis (that’s his attractive photo we’ve included here): he proposed that consumers go from awareness to interest to desire to action, gradually reducing the number of options or brands they consider along the way.  This has been adopted with some changes as the standard across industries.

Well, even though we tested pretty much every category out there, in none of those categories was the funnel the majority way consumers purchased.

We found that purchases generally fell into three categories, in roughly equal proportion across our sample:

1. The traditional funnel, where consumers consider many options and then choose one
2. The ‘tunnel’ where consumers only consider one brand before purchasing
3. The ‘spindle’ or reverse funnel, where consumers add and subtract options as they go along, then make a decision.

While they were roughly equal in proportion, they were definitely NOT equal in outcome. Tunnel buyers have stronger brand intent and are more likely to repurchase. In fact, a ‘tunnel’ process was the top driver of repurchase across everything we tested.

Meanwhile the ‘spindle’ purchasers were less likely to recommend and repurchase, and more likely to be anxious along the way and do post-purchase research to confirm they made the right choice.  (As a side note, our survey found a shocking 1 in 5 customers perform post-purchase research – perhaps a sign of lack of confidence overall as the number of choices increases).

You may be thinking to yourself, surely people buying cars or luxury goods don’t just consider one brand?  Shockingly, over a quarter of them do – 28% for cars, 26% for luxury goods.  You must know some families that only buy Fords, or only buy Toyotas.  It turns out there are a lot of them. On the other end of the spectrum, over half of sub-$10 purchases are ‘tunnels’– showing how great the opportunity for consumer packaged goods to cement those routines.

In our upcoming meeting and webinar series Compressing the Decision Journey we’ll be looking into the implications of these findings (and more): how do we help more people follow a ‘tunnel’ process?  How do we prevent customers from over-thinking the purchase and ending up unhappy?

In the meantime, what do you think about our purchase funnel findings?  Was the funnel ever an accurate way of describing the majority of consumers?  Has the abundance of choice (or other factors) changed the way customers buy?

Related posts:

1. Sneak Preview – Consumer Purchase Disruption Findings
2. Losing Customers in the Purchase Funnel? Try Bite-Sizing.
3. The Mind of the Luxury Consumer
4. Foodies Are Dead; Long Live Foodies
5. Shifting the Purchase Decision