The Latest Consumer Shopping Research w/ Lesley Chou | builders podcast

0:00What we learned for the brand discovery process was consumers who filled out the lead form they're three and a half times more likely to ultimately purchase from brands that were discovered during the journey than those that were not.

0:18Today I speak with Leslie Cho. She's a research lead at Google. We talk about some really interesting findings her team has come up with on how consumers are researching and buying products and services. And in my weekly chat with Marty Beckerman, we talk about the silver economy, how much it would cost to buy the 12 Days of Christmas song items, and loneliness at work.

0:47Hey, Marty, how are you this week? Hey, John, good to drop in. I don't have the Christmas decorations up yet, but next time. No prob, take your time. People are doing it earlier and earlier, but you can go against the grain if you like. You know, it's before Halloween, I think, is the time to put up your Christmas decorations, it seems like. Well, you know, we're going to talk about some holiday stuff today. But before we do, you know, everyone's talking about, like, who's the future, who are the future consumers, you know, Gen Z, the youngsters, et cetera. But in the latest issue of the newsletter, you're talking about a different demographic, right?

1:26Yeah, we're talking about the silver economy. Marketers have always chased 20-somethings. They're kind of the ones who set what's cool. But our population is getting older. One in six people will be over the age of 60 by the end of the decade. And they're going to be spending$15 trillion globally, up from$8.7 trillion a decade ago. So marketers are actually starting to look at chasing older consumers because that's where a lot of the money is. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, and the other thing is people in their 60s have generally a lot more money than they have in their 20s. So all kinds of industries, not only is the population growing, but the amount of money is growing too.

2:14Right. And they shop online a lot. Seniors are tech savvy now. They know how to order things. You know, senior citizens are Gen X. Gen X technically, you know, can belong to AARP now. So I think some of the stereotypes of whether seniors know how to use the Internet maybe are from 20 years ago and are no longer relevant. I don't think we can call Gen X the slacker generation anymore, huh? No. No, the slacker generation always seems to be whoever wants to punch down on. Whoever's younger than you is the slacker. Right. Yeah, exactly. Take that time, magazine. Okay. All right. So I'm interested to see what you have to say about that in the newsletter.

2:58Also, a really interesting finding is you took a look at, or PNC Bank anyway, took a look at the 12 Days of Christmas, that song, you know, Five Golden Rings, et cetera, et cetera. and how much those items would actually cost if you tried to buy them at the store. What'd they find? Sure. This was pitched by actually our new writer, Jason Roeder, who used to be editor-in-chief of The Onion. Oh, nice. He had the idea to calculate how much would the 12 days of Christmas actually cost. Turns out PNC Bank had already been crunching these numbers, and they do it every single year. They update with inflation how much is it, so great minds think alike.

3:37But what PNC found is this year to get all of the lines in the 12 days of Christmas, it would be$46 ,729 and 86 cents up 2.7 % from last year. The two turtle doves are a whopping 25 % of that amount due to their increased rarity. um but the 10 lords like an endangered species yeah apparently yeah you might need some permits for that uh but the 10 lords a leaping are the biggest expense at 14 000 because entertainment gifts are more expensive than uh than physical goods to hire people to do things is always going to be uh you got to pay for services all right well i'm excited to read the breakdown and then And the last story covering is loneliness.

4:33And it turns out that most Gen Z employees say they feel lonely at work. Yeah, there's been a couple of studies that have asked this question, and it seems to be somewhere between half and even up to 80 % of younger employees feel lonely in their jobs. Some of them saying they're lonely all the time. So we wanted to tie this in in a little bit of a lighthearted way to our segment, Hollywood Business School, looking at how the Grinch stole Christmas and how the Grinch is up on a mountain by himself. And when you're isolated, you're not part, you're not feeling part of a community. You're probably not going to be your best self.

5:15so we we tied it to christmas in encouraging uh managers to send out reminders of companies mental health policies um to have more going on in the office around the holidays a lot of people tend to feel the winter blues around this time of year and also just encouraging people at the at their office holiday parties to maybe reach out to the wallflowers people who might be a little bit less comfortable socializing and just make sure everybody feels included in the festivities and eggnog. So your heart might even grow a few sizes by reaching out to them. All right, Marty, on that note, thanks a lot.

5:54And we'll tune in this week to read the newsletter. All right. Thanks, John.

6:06Hi, Leslie. How are you? Good to see you. Good to see you too, John. I'm doing well. How are you? I'm great. And I'm really great because a few weeks ago, I had the chance to see you present some research on stage at a Google Think event that I attended in New York. I found the content really interesting in describing how consumers are making purchase decisions and framing that up in a way that's really helpful for marketers. So thanks for coming on to talk about it. Yeah, of course. I'm glad you enjoyed the session. Yeah. So let's set the stage here. What's your role at Google? And then what are you and your team, what topics is your team trying to understand?

6:46What's your remit, if you will? Yeah, of course. So as an industry research lead, the one liner I typically give to folks is that I help manage custom research for many of our Google teams in the US. And my focus is more on the services sector, which covers the lead gen space. But I also have counterparts in other sectors as well. Just to name a few examples, retail, CG &E, finance. And ultimately, I think our team's goal is to understand the latest when it comes to market trends and consumer behavior. And we like to think of ourselves as the voice of the consumer. So many of our sales teams, they work closely with marketers who want to know what's top of mind for their customers.

7:29Questions such as what are the latest purchase journey trends? How are consumers feeling about things like AI? And our ultimate hope there is that we can help unlock these additional opportunities for growth with our partners. I love the expression you use about voice of the consumer. I really felt that seeing you present the work. And so my function is marketing. I'm trying to better understand how consumers make decisions. so I can put together a plan to influence those consumers and have them choose me or the brands that I work with. One of the most interesting pieces of data that you shared was the number of touch points or websites or things that a consumer will do before deciding to purchase or deciding to fill out a lead form.

8:21So like, you know, an example that I think we're all familiar with is, you know, maybe we're going to take a family vacation to Hawaii. We're going to go to a bunch of websites to understand like what, you know, what sites I'm going to see, what restaurants I'm going to go to, what hotels to choose, et cetera. Everybody gets that for travel. But I was kind of blown away by how people are doing this across every category. So can you kind of share what you found? Yeah, definitely. So actually remind me, John, I know you were in the audience when we polled the audience about that question originally in terms of just getting a sense of what folks thought in terms of the number of touch points.

8:59Do you recall what your answer was? I think so. I think I said 10, but that's not because I necessarily thought that was going to be the answer. I held up both hands. I think it's because I've been in the marketing space before and I was anticipating it to be big. No, no, that makes sense. And it was also awesome to kind of just see how engaged the audience was and see the range of answers there. But back to your original question. So what we found is consumers are using more than five unique touch points before they fill a lead form with the context that this is an average for the brands they looked into.

9:40So we can easily see if someone's considering multiple brands in their purchase decision, these touch points can easily be in those double digits at any given point in time. Yeah. And so I think about like, you know, we're taping this during the holiday season. I'm thinking about holiday gifts. And, you know, it's not just I'm going to decide on what, you know, whatever for my son or my dad or I'm going to go to one site wire cutter, look at three options and then go. You know, it's very likely I'm, if I'm using Google as my starting point, I probably am. I'm looking at what's there. I'm looking at ads.

10:21I'm looking at organic results. I'm going to a lot of places to make an informed decision. I was kind of blown away that that number is an average considering how many things I would think are maybe simpler decisions. um you know i and we'll get in a little later to why consumers may be going to so many places but um something else that really blew me away by the research was the role you might not be using this phrase but the role that of of like brand discovery and so to set to set this up like like i'm searching for a service of some kind it could be a refrigerator it could be pizza delivery.

11:02It could be a moving service. And I'm going to compare. And I see some brands or I see some services there. And there are a couple that I recognize that I'm going to look at reviews. And there's one that's brand new, one that I haven't heard of or haven't considered in this way. What did your research say about the role of brand discovery? Yeah. And definitely know that you're not alone in that. I think comparing and making sure we do due diligence in the research process is something we found as a common theme amongst the consumers. I mean, even when we asked them just in general, like pulsing, like what influenced their decisions, right, to fill out a lead form, about half said they wanted to just get more information about a company and its offerings.

11:45And then over a third say they just needed more time to make their decision and they wanted to remain in contact during that process. But what we learned for the brand discovery process was consumers who filled out a lead form, they're three and a half times more likely to ultimately purchase from brands that were discovered during the journey than those that were not so i think the main takeaway there is you need to get more people in the funnel to begin with probably not too surprising um but that starts really with being where they're researching because if you're not there you're likely leaving an opportunity on the table wow so um that's that's that's even even i'm hearing it the second time that's even more impactful, I think, than hearing it the first time.

12:28So I've discovered something and then I take an action. There's something, well, what do you think it is? There's something about me seeing like a brand being trusted or promoted in a new way. And I'm like, and if I take the action to check it out, I'm much more likely to purchase than the brand I've just already know about? It's a great question. So I think ultimately, the main thing there is you just have to be present throughout all stages of the funnel. I think a lot of us and a lot of partners we work with, ultimately very performance driven, right? At the end of the day. But if you're not there in the beginning, when the consumers are doing their research process, when they're maybe even just remotely considering about a product or purchase decision, then you're missing out the opportunity to begin with entirely.

13:22Oh, okay. I gotcha. So when I'm doing initial research, when I'm asking some questions, when I come back a week later, being like omnipresent in all of those cases, that's one of the real, real keys. Definitely. Okay. All right. All right. Got it. But one of the things to juxtapose those things. So someone goes to five and a half websites or touch points, and then if somebody discovers a brand that's throughout the journey, they're more likely to purchase it. You also had a really interesting insight about at the end of the day, people are considering roughly two brands or slightly less than two brands.

14:12Can you talk about that and how the whole the whole picture comes together? Yeah, definitely. So I think in general, consumers like ourselves, as we're navigating the research journeys, we'll ultimately narrow down our choices to what we consider a short list, right? And what we discovered was that on average, and great memory on the fewer than two brands, consumers who fill out a lead form or they made a purchase, they consider only 1.8 brands during their journey. And I know you kind of mentioned this, but initially when you heard that, John, what was your reaction? My reaction was people are going to five places, let's say.

14:56I think they're seeing more than two brands. I think they are. They're probably seeing three or four or five, but only a couple meet the bar. And in some cases, only one meet the bar if the average is less than two. So I was trying to think, what can I do for my business to be one of those 1.8? Yeah, definitely. So if I were to put our research kind of into a nutshell from a takeaway standpoint, there were three. The first being consumers just being more active in general in the research phase. The second, that they're favoring sort of top of mind brands in what they're considering. And the third is that they're just being more decisive overall in their purchasing behaviors.

15:45So sort of connecting the dots earlier about the five unique touch points, then going down to sort of the consideration phase where they might be only comparing between 1.8, so less than two brands. and it ultimately goes back to the point we kind of made earlier about being omnipresent almost in the beginning phases when they're starting their research journey maybe sometimes even before they know they even have a need so that they're considering you in their short list ultimately when they're making that final purchase yeah and and um and the place where i was going you know whether it's for our own brand or the brands that we represent, you know, what are our consumers keying in on?

16:38Like most brands we work with will say they have a competitive price or a good deal in market. And they'll also think or believe that they have the highest quality or unique features or they're innovative in some way. But we all know as marketers, consumers aren't going to give us the space to read all 10 messages we have, all 10 differentiators. We kind of got to choose and lean in. I think about the intersection of price and quality as being value. Do you have any data or leanings or inclinations about how consumers are thinking about price versus quality, particularly in uncertain economic times?

17:16Yeah, and that's a great question. So I would say the overall, I think, takeaway and theme that we've seen, not only from this year's research, but also prior research, is that consumers, usually they say they haven't made a purchase because they haven't found the best value, kind of to your point earlier, John. And reputation and trust, they're often drivers in that process. But that's this, I think, question about how they're thinking about price versus quality versus service. That's something that we're actually thinking, diving a bit deeper into next year because we're definitely going to be doing a refresh of this research.

17:52Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I love that you're going to research that. I think when I say no to purchase or when somebody, maybe we don't get business or whatever, then we're getting that kind of answer. I'm giving that answer. It's not as simple as like, you know, it wasn't cheaper. You know, there are vibes and those vibes come from my perception of quality and my perception of price, what I've read about reputation, branding, et cetera. So that's cool. I wanted to ask you outside of the, well, let me first close out this part of the research. Is there anything else that you haven't mentioned that was a really interesting takeaway for you as part of this entire research that you conducted in preparation for this event and for 2024?

18:51Yeah. So I think ultimately what I found, and I think, I mean, we hypothesized this initially when we were starting the research was we very much live in an environment now where we've conditioned the consumers to sort of get what they want, when they want it, and customize, right, to their expectations. And what we really wanted to understand was, aside, you know, touch points aside and in their kind of journey, like, what are they looking for? And I think ultimately, knowing that there's always an opportunity to engage. So back to that, I think, point about making it into the consideration set, the brand discovery, um the importance of brand discovery that was one thing that i think was really insightful for me because i think a lot of times we have a lot of maybe go-to brands um when we're making a decision but knowing that there is that sort of opportunity for maybe many of the teams like the markers that we work with to really be able to get into that consideration set um i think was helpful to share with our teams.

20:00Yeah, I had the same reaction about, and I was thinking in my head of like challenger brands. Like the data that you shared tells me that a challenger brand can get in the conversation through reaching consumers every step of the journey. And maybe you don't, maybe you can't reach a million consumers. Maybe you don't have the budget for that, but you can still be targeted. You can still get on folks' radar. And then when they reach out to you, it sounds like there's a real chance that they're going to buy your service. So that was really cool. I wanted to ask you about, away from the research, about your role.

20:40And I think a lot of us in marketing and business or as GMs, we're exposed to market research. We're asked to think critically about the findings of market research. And so I was hoping you could talk about your approach or your team's approach to understanding consumer behavior? Things like, you know, how do you think about sampling? How do you think about number of respondents? How are you satisfied with the results? And then also, how do you convince others to be satisfied with the results, given that a layperson may look at a study with 500 or 1000 people, and they might come to the conclusion, well, that doesn't really tell me anything.

21:21Yeah, definitely. So I think a bit behind the scenes, when we're thinking about research and also executing on a study, there are some basics we'll go into. First, I think it's a lot of times it's deciding between do we want to go in with, let's say, a quantitative survey, right? Or do we want to do more in-depth interviews with that, add a layer of, I think, just like a personal touch to our data. But with sample sizing, it's a great question. I think every researcher might give you like a slightly different answer in terms of what we feel is, I guess, representative of the total population. But I think that's like a basic is that do we feel like from a sizing standpoint, it's representing the target audience that we want to look into.

22:10But I think more so than sample size, a lot of times we value the quality of respondents, right? And that's where screening the respondents in the beginning is super important. And that's ultimately to ensure that one, we're getting to the folks that we want to survey. And then we're also representing our client's target audience. But even with that, I think that's just sort of the behind the scenes table stakes of anything. Once we have like our sound methodology and everything in the surveys, the survey or the research has concluded, I think what's personally very exciting for me, and I think my fellow research leads feel the same way as well, is our role really then is to take that data and take it to the next level, right?

22:56A data point really in and of itself doesn't tell you much, but understanding how to frame it and telling the story behind it, and also ultimately what action folks can take from it, sort of the next steps. That's really, I think, the most exciting part about the research process. Yeah. And just to go back to your presentation, I mean, ultimately, my takeaway was three data points. And I'm sure your study surfaced hundreds or thousands of things. And so you needed to distill what was going to be most interesting, impactful, and lead people to want to take the next step and dive deeper. Maybe you can talk about, as a research professional, some of the attributes or skills you need to be successful at your job.

23:50I think a lot of folks who are interested in research would be curious to hear that. Because 10 people might look at raw data and come to 10 different conclusions. So how do you form a point of view, make sure yourself it's the right one and convince others to kind of get on board? We'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yes. So I'm happy to share more. Actually, before I share my personal perspective, I was really curious what Bard had to say about this. Oh, yeah, yeah. I would like to know too. Just to prompt and see like, what do you need to be successful as a research professional? And a few things came back.

24:29You know, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, storytelling, project management, and then translating the research findings into actionable insights. So I have to say some of the, you know, highlights from Barb were pretty accurate. I think for me, generally speaking, and we touched on this a little bit earlier, is the story, right? And like being able to, to your point, 10 different researchers looking at the same thing might come away with different insights. But ultimately, and this is something that I actually learned from a former team when I first started my career, is think about your audience, right?

25:10And think about the end story you want to tell. So even if, let's say, I'm collaborating with multiple other team members and looking at research results, I think the first thing that I ground us in is what is our, I guess, ultimate action here we want our audience to take? What would be most helpful to them? So that, I think, then takes a good first pass at what story we want to tell. And then I think it's easier to, of course, like digging and sifting through the data, it's going to take some time. But then if you go in with this maybe like hypothesis or the story that you're hoping to tell this narrative, you're able to pick out the insights that help you tell that story well.

25:50Yeah, I really like what you said about storytelling and understanding the audience. I feel like that connection needs to be made for folks to feel like the data is for them or they use it or they're not being preached to about what data says. It's really insightful. um let's see what you mentioned it a little bit a little bit uh when i was asking about value but what are you focusing on on 2024 anything else you want to share you're really excited about yeah um and it's a really i feel like timely question because we are heads down in 2024 planning i'm sure your team probably is in a similar boat um but i mean you might recall hearing this from us at bank leach and but it seems like everyone's you know favorite two-letter of work these days is AI.

26:38So not surprisingly, that'll definitely be one of our deep dive areas for 2024. And I had mentioned earlier, there are some areas we're looking into for a lead gen study in terms of a refresh. I think for me as a researcher, I know it goes back to some of your prior questions. One thing that I find is really relevant is to be able to trend things over time, Right. Data point being relative to something, being able to make that comparison. So we're going to be doing extensions of certain areas of our Legion research next year. And I expect that we'll probably have a Think Legion event next year as well.

27:17So excited to kind of share the latest and greatest with our audience. Yeah, I hope you do. And I hope anyone who's who's listening and wants to can figure out a way to get an invite because it was really great. If someone wants to read the research, where can they find it? Yeah, of course. I'm glad you asked. So it is available on demand, the content on our ads on air website. So feel free to go and search there for Think Lead Gen 2023. And I, of course, wanted to give a special shout out to all the global teams that helped make the event happen, including marketing and also my awesome teammate and co-presenter Marissa, who's a fellow insights lead.

27:55Love that. And we'll put the link to the research in the show notes as well. Leslie, thanks so much for talking with me today. Yeah, of course. Thank you, John.