What's less clear, however, is how shoppers process all the information and options they discover along the way. And crucially, what we set out to understand with this new research, is how that process influences what people ultimately decide to buy.
☛As the Internet has grown, it has transformed from a tool for comparing prices to a tool for comparing, well, everything. That’s evident in how we’ve seen purchasing behavior change over the years on Google Search.
We took the terms “cheap” and “best.” Worldwide, search interest for “best” has far outpaced search interest for “cheap.”
The same dynamics are valid in countries around the world, such as Germany, India and Italy, for example, when “cheap” and “better” are translated into local languages.
Global search interest for “best” vs. “cheap”
A line graph illustrates the upward trend of search interest in “best” as search interest for “cheap” declines over the same period. The exact meaning of “cheap” can vary between individuals, but it still has a singular meaning. “Best,” on the other hand, can have a wide range of meanings, including value, quality, performance, or popularity.
☛This is the kind of research behavior that happens in the “messy middle” between trigger and purchase. And since Covid-19 has accelerated online shopping and research around the world, it’s more important than ever for brands to learn to understand it.
We conducted literature reviews, observational shopping studies, search trend analysis, and a large-scale experiment. Our goal was to understand how consumers make decisions in an online environment of abundant choice and unlimited information.
☛What we found was that people deal with scale and complexity by using cash app database cognitive biases encoded deep in their psychology.
Since these biases existed long before the Internet, we were curious to know how they affect people’s purchasing decisions today.
►What happens in the messy environment? Two mental modes
Through research, an updated model of decision-making began to take shape. At the center of the model is the messy middle: a complex space between triggers and purchase, where customers are won and lost.
People search for information about products and brands in a category and then weigh all the options. This amounts to two different mental modes in the messy middle: exploration, an expansive activity, and evaluation, a reductive activity.
Whatever a person is doing, across a wide variety of online sources such as search engines, social media, aggregators, and review websites, can be categorized into one of two mental modes.
