Brands need a new model for path to purchase that better reflects consumers’ buying behaviour. May I present to you the ‘Hankins Hexagon’.
Marketing funnels have had a bit of time in the sun lately. Mark Ritson believes they are the cornerstone of every marketing strategy detailing their importance in prioritisation as opposed to literal application. Google has published The Messy Middle generating a lot of noise (it is 90+ pages after all), in which it concludes after several years of research and countless hours of work that ‘it’s complicated’. The model also avoids the non-linear aspect of pathways by forcing you through the middle therefore undoing the metaphor.
Finally, we’ve had Mike Follett at Lumen Research discussing the metaphors in marketing, why we use them and asking for more.
If you take these areas together you would probably conclude that funnels are useful from a conceptual/metaphoric perspective but not from a practical application perspective.
Ritson is right, they are useful but in a conceptual way. Google missed a trick by telling everyone what they already know and spoiling their own conclusions. And I haven’t seen anyone provide Follett with an alternative.
This is a problem. As a communications industry we should be helping brands make sense of the world, not confusing them with impractical concepts or telling them what they already know.
I’ve worked in this area previously, detailing a potted history of the path to purchase and there is a new option. A new model, practical in nature and with an associated change in metaphor that helps make more sense of the complexity inherent in human buying behaviour.
A new model
The first thing we need is something to help visualise the complexity of the path to purchase. One of my regular doodles is a pentagram star. My note pads are full of them. What’s interesting is that you can draw a pentagram without removing your pen from the paper. Each point is connected to every other point. This got me thinking, what if each point was classified as a ‘decision node’ or a point of inflection?
This interlinked model allows all points to be connected to all potential decision nodes. The benefit being there are no pre-formulated pathways or directions. As each node is linked to every other node this theoretically represents a vast number of potential paths to purchase.
This model is based on a fairly standard set of states – if all brands follow AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) then as an industry we are already comfortable with generalisations. However, like Ritson I believe this could be flexible (to an extent) with variability by category and product. Of course a practitioner would understand the specific consumer states for their business or category but these are broadly similar cross category.
Here is that proposed model based on six different states or nodes, I’ve notionally called this the ‘Hankins Hexagon’, slightly tongue-in-cheek of course.
How does it work?…
