User purchasing behavior path analysis

Some time ago, I started to develop the habit of keeping accounts, and then found that shopping expenses accounted for a large proportion of my total expenses. So I became interested in how people develop the desire to buy, where the demand comes from, why people shop, and what influences our purchasing decisions.

As a product person, only by understanding factors such as users’ motivations, methods, and psychological changes in purchasing products can you clearly define, design, and promote products so that users will ultimately pay for them. So I built a model called "User Purchasing Behavior Path" and tried to find the answers to these questions from the user's purchasing behavior process.

What is the user's purchasing behavior path?

It can be simply defined as the timeline of user behavior from the time a user generates a demand to the time a user completes a purchase, which is called the user's purchasing behavior path. For e-commerce products, the user's purchasing behavior path can be roughly summarized as follows:

For example: I was walking on the road and suddenly felt thirsty, so I walked into a convenience store and bought a bottle of Yilibao mineral water. This process involves a complete behavioral path from the generation of demand to the completion of purchase, namely:

We can analyze this step by step.

1. Generate demand

What is demand?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory divides human needs into five levels: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, respect needs and self-actualization needs. Here we will temporarily classify the needs into physiological needs and psychological needs. Physiological needs are the first needs of human beings and are human instincts, while psychological needs come from the most basic desires of human beings.

For example, if you don’t quench your thirst, you will die. This is the most basic physiological need.

Many needs in life are driven by desires. For example, the booming medical beauty industry is the result of the love of beauty. If you want to become beautiful, you will go for plastic surgery and buy various beauty care products.

Let’s try to ask, why do people want to be beautiful?

Some people would say that becoming beautiful is not for others, but just to make yourself happy. But if you were the only one left in the world, would you still want to be beautiful? In fact, human beings are social animals. When we become more beautiful, we will attract more attention and gain recognition, thus satisfying our self-esteem or vanity.

Why does that person have self-esteem or vanity?

From the most primitive genetic level of human beings, this is just like people pursuing a stronger body, more profound knowledge, more wealth, and higher status. It is all for the purpose of better demonstrating individual attractiveness, competing with the same sex, attracting the opposite sex, winning better mating opportunities, and allowing individual genes to reproduce. Therefore, self-esteem or vanity is a psychological state deeply hidden in human genes.

How does this help us make products?

This is a society that is constantly developing and changing. Policies will change, platforms will change, hot topics will change, but human nature will not change. In the end, almost all needs are human nature, so we must understand these unchanging needs in order to see the essence in the rapidly changing social trends.

For example, in the fiercely competitive tea industry, Heytea positions itself as "tea of ​​inspiration", focusing on tea, emphasizing originality and inspiration, and sharing a cool tea drinking experience. It satisfies people's emotional needs. Nayuki’s Tea is positioned as “a sip of good tea and a bite of soft European bread”, with a rich product category that extends the consumption scenarios and satisfies people’s social needs.

For example, the product price is not high, "half cup is full of ingredients" Shuyi roasted grass jelly is cheap and large in quantity, satisfying people's greed. It can be seen that understanding human nature can help discover market segments in a highly competitive market and create brand and product differentiation.

2. Find solutions to your needs (products)

In the example above, when you are thirsty you will look for a solution, and drinking water is one of the solutions. However, each product is a solution devised by the manufacturer or designer, which means that there can be many different ways to solve the same demand. For example, if you are thirsty, you can drink water, tea, or eat fruit, all of which are solutions.

It should be noted here that even for the same product category, the product's form of existence will be different depending on the usage scenarios. For example, when we use drinking water to quench our thirst, we usually drink mineral water on the road, bottled drinking water in the office, and boiled water at home. The form of existence of water as a product changes with the changes in the scenarios.

Why does the form of a product vary depending on the scenario?

Because different environments bring different constraints, the product will exist in a more suitable form.

For example, the same need for brewing health-preserving tea can be found in the form of a health-preserving pot at home and a health-preserving cup at the office. It is also because the product is constrained by the office environment. We cannot use a large health pot to make health tea in the office. It is too high-profile. The health cup is small, low-key and easy to use, which is suitable for the office scene, so this new product form naturally came into being.

Health pot and health cup

What inspiration does this give us for product development?

In the e-commerce industry, we often use whatever solutions others have come up with, and we use whatever product forms others have used. If you keep running after others, you can only look at the back of their heads and you will never catch up. So for the same demand, we can try a different solution, a different usage scenario, to differentiate our products.

3. Understand product information

After generating a demand and finding a way to meet it, we will learn about the information of this type of product. Only when we approve of the product will we make subsequent purchases. Product information usually includes the product’s price, brand, reputation, product attributes (such as function, color, size), product-related information (such as reviews, tutorials), etc.

The channel through which users obtain information is also the marketing and promotion channel for merchants. In the past, it was TV advertising or poster promotion, but now the emergence of new media has provided new ways to promote products. Everyone can promote their products on their own social media, such as WeChat Moments, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Bilibili, Zhihu, Weibo, etc.

In the past, promotion channels and sales channels were usually different. Consumers would learn about a product through TV commercials and go to supermarkets or Taobao and other platforms to buy it. But now, users can plant grass on Xiaohongshu, pull grass on Xiaohongshu, and buy directly. The same is true for Douyin, which also has a Douyin Mall. The advantage of this is that it can reduce consumers' decision-making costs. Facts have also proved that the more convenient people's purchasing method is, the more motivated they are to pay.

I believe that in the future there will be more and more platforms that both bring and sell goods, and both promote and sell. Because the ultimate purpose of almost all online platforms is to sell goods. What inspiration does this give us for product development?

We need to learn to use new marketing media. We should do promotional marketing wherever the users are. We should ask ourselves more often: who are the users of our products? What platforms are they active on? Who influenced them? How do we find the people who influence them? Let people who can influence them bring goods and promote our products.

4. Make a purchasing decision

It is not enough to understand the product information and approve the product. Users need to have the ability to buy it. It is like a user who wants to buy a house and has taken a fancy to a certain property, but does not have the ability to purchase it, so he will not take action. Therefore, when consumers buy a product, the first thing they look at is the price.

In addition to price, there are many other factors that influence user decisions. All the product information mentioned above (price, brand, reputation, product attributes, experience, etc.) will affect the user's final decision.

However, if a good product does not have brand effect or marketing promotion, it will be difficult for users to be discovered among a huge number of products. Therefore, in order to make users attracted to the product, recognize and buy the product, it is necessary to influence users through various marketing methods. The most common way is to influence consumers' psychology and encourage them to buy.

For example, herd mentality, authority psychology, taking advantage psychology, comparison psychology, scarcity psychology, anchoring effect, loss aversion psychology, goal approach psychology, etc. There are many such consumer psychology. There is a book called "Influence", which also mentions the six principles of influence. I can also share them in future articles.

The user purchasing process is a strange process. Sometimes they just follow the crowd and buy, but sometimes they have to compare and think from multiple perspectives before making a purchase. Regardless of the process, from the perspective of product developers, we must take users as the core, understand human nature, meet user needs, and make products that users really need, with products as the main focus and marketing as the supplement.

Author: Deng Xiaohong

Source: Deng Xiaohong