Understanding the 5 Stages of the Buyer’s Journey and Its Impact on Marketing (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Do you remember how you got your computer? Most of you probably made this decision because you don't have a computer or your old computer wasn't working well. So not having a new computer created some problem for you. Later you start getting advice about computers from your tech-savvy friends. At the same time, you browse some electronic stores or do research on the Internet. In the final step, you identify several computers that you can buy and compare them with each other in terms of price, quality, functionality, and so on. So you decide which computer is best for you and buy that one. After shopping, we sometimes have a negative or positive thought, such as, I wonder if I made the right choice. Maybe I could find this model cheaper at another store. Some of us even think that we didn't make the right decision, and we take advantage of the 14-day return policy. This scenario is probably familiar to many of us. Now let's take a look at the practical case that I talked about, which stages a buyer goes through before buying a product. As in the example of a computer, any buyer goes through 5 stages before buying any product. These stages are as follows. The first stage is problem recognition. The second stage is information search. The third stage is alternative evaluation. The fourth stage is purchasing decision. And fifth, the post-purchasing evaluation. So, how does understanding the buyer's journey through these stages benefit companies? The important point here is that businesses know this process and choose appropriate marketing strategies for each stage. Businesses should know what stage they're in when communicating with customers and exhibit appropriate presentations and behavior. More precisely, it should implement appropriate advertising campaigns. Now let's take a closer look at these 5 stages. In the first stage, i.e. the problem recognition stage, the consumer discovers that he or she needs or wants a product. At this point, the communication message of companies can play a big role. For example, a person who feels sleepy every day and has low productivity at work may perceive this as a problem. After discovering this problem, he may think that if he drinks a cup of coffee in the morning, his productivity will increase, and he decides to buy a home coffee machine. For this reason, the consumer moves to the second stage, the information search stage. At this time, he asks his close friends if they know a place that sells coffee machines of good quality and reasonable price. He also searches online. As a result, he finds a shop selling coffee machines with three different names. Then the buyer goes to the third stage, i.e. the comparison of alternatives. Finally, he compares these three brands and decides to buy one. This is the fourth stage, the decision-making stage. The decision made can be both rational and emotional. The effect of these factors, of course, varies from person to person. For example, in the decision-making process, someone may praise brand A more, and the buyer will be influenced by this and make a more emotional decision to buy brand A. On the other hand, based on complete rationality, he can buy the B brand by examining all the product's indicators and making a final decision. It depends on the psychological state of the buyer at the moment. Let's say that the buyer buys brand A, and after going home, he thinks, Did I really make the right decision? Or he is completely satisfied with this product and makes his next purchase from the same store. Sometimes, after buying a product, the next day he thinks he made a wrong decision and replaces that product with another product. It should be noted that you can experience this process while buying each product. But these stages are imperceptible and fast when buying cheap products and more noticeable when buying expensive products. For example, imagine that you buy a house that's expensive for you versus a sparkling water that's very cheap. You spend seconds buying water, but maybe months buying a house. This means that you go through the stages we listed in the video faster when buying water and slower when buying a house. Buyer stages take longer in B2B businesses and less time in B2C businesses. Here B2B means business to business, and B2C means business to customer. As an example, the company Animators, which provides animation support to the Easy Marketing Project and offers various animation services to businesses, can be cited as an example. Animators offers animation services to small and medium businesses to promote themselves or their products or services. This is considered a B2B sector. An example of the B2C sector is one of the most well-known companies in the world, the chain of clothing stores, Zara. In this case, Zara's customer group is not individual companies but ordinary people. Sometimes it happens that a company provides both B2B and B2C services. As a note, we plan to talk about B2B and B2C topics in more detail in the next videos.