Consumer Decision Journey (CDJ)

Based on the model developed by McKinsey back in 2009 that is entitled Consumer Decision
Journey (CDJ), we will model our objectives on this framework. The CDJ reads as it is shown in
3following figure:

Figure 07

10.1. Scenarios

The focus of this analysis will be based on three possible scenarios:

1. Audiences that visit Boschtools.com, look at a power tool (for example a drill), but do

not visit Grainger.com.

2. Audiences that visit Boschtools.com, look at a power tool, and then visits

Grainger.com, logs in to Grainger.com, and visit the power tools category.

3. Audiences that visit Boschtools.com, look at a power tool, and then visits

Grainger.com, logs in to Grainger.com, and visit the plumbing category but not power

tools.
 10.1.1. First Scenario

In this scenario 1,we may venture and say that they can be placed in the initial consideration
stage especially for new visitors who are checking the brand and reviewing and collecting more
information about Bosch tools. Here, there is not a trigger since the need has been already
created and customers are likely to look for solutions to cover it. The possible second audiences
are returning visitors and secondary customers who are rather actively evaluating the pros and
cons of what they are going to buy and here they must be aware of the brand, already having
considered it but they want to dig deeper. However, for the sake of keeping things more
consistent, they can be placed at active evaluation. The concerns and questions of customers at
this stage are mainly knowing the reliability of the products being offered and their
characteristics along with the pricing that is being offered.

10.1.2. Second Scenario

In this scenario 2, in fact reflects that they’re rather in the borders of active evaluation and are
entering the moment of purchase or in other words they’re going back to ZMOT13 but with less
tension where other competitors have almost lost hope to attract them. Here, the customers are
likely to make the purchase but they still leave a room for hesitation and for final change of
thought. The concerns of customers with this scenario is maybe looking for more proofs and
credentials in order to endorse their decisions.

10.1.3. Third Scenario

In this scenario, we see that if we put these stations they have visited and put on CDJ
we will be able to imply that this audience is initially considering their options and
alternatives and then actively visiting Grainger Plumber category

Scenario CDJ Stage Customers concerns

Scenario 1 Active evaluation Reliability of the brand and

whether it’s better than other
products and pricing.

Scenario 2 Moments of purchase Looking for more proofs to

endorse their final decisions
and starting to proceed the
purchase

Scenario 3 Initial consideration Comparing other products.

 10.2. Analysis of Scenarios

10.2.1. First Scenario

It is necessary that the company performs a competitive intelligence through evaluating

what other competing brands are offering and how they are offering their products along with
the platforms they are most active in. Also, it should concentrate on experimenting and testing
with the aim of brushing up on the journey of active evaluators. Some of the metrics that need to
be looked at are for example: average time spent on page, exit rate, and so on.

10.2.2. Second Scenario

Here in order to have more accurate insights on what is going on, the analysis should be based
on outcome analysis and also conversion. Some of the metrics that help us in this matter are for
instance: visitor recency, add-to-cart conversion rate, shopping cart abandonment rate, etc.

10.2.3. Third Scenario

Here, the company should also run experimentation along with some clickstream
analyses to able to guess what is attracting customers to plumbing category. There are some
metrics we adopt here such as: CTR, CPA, CPC, etc.

10.3. Business Objectives of Scenarios

What seems clear at first glance is really the overlap between the business objectives in terms of the
available data and also the scenarios that were provided where it is really challenging to find a
consensus over a mono-behaviour that you can capitalize on in order to come up with a single
business objective to base the marketing strategy upon. Here my humble trial in order to come up with a
sound outcome

10.3.1. First Scenario

The business objective here should be the striving to influence consideration for this
category of clients since they seem to be looking for information about this brand and they
are actively looking for information about it
 10.3.2. Second Scenario

The business objective for this scenario should be finding ways how to improve the sales process by
making the purchase decision quicker and leaving no room for hesitation in customers since
hesitation opens the doors for last-minute change of thoughts.

10.3.3. Third Scenario

The business objective for this scenario would be striving on to create a brand awareness of
customers in order to attract them to the Bosch power tools category by presenting and
making them recognize the the brand of Bosch tools at Gcom

Business Objective Key Questions Data--- source

Influence consideration Are the customers satisfied - Average Time Spent on

with the products in terms of Page, Exit Rate, Page Per
quality, reliability and pricing? Visit.
Source: Web Analytics
Platforms.

Does the Website help visitors - Exit Page, Bounce Rate,..etc

find what they’re looking fo? Source: Analytics platforms,
Usability studies.

Improve Sales Process Do the pages show the - Add-to-Cart Conversion Rate
products in a convincing Source: Google Analytics.
manner that lead to sale?

How does the customers fulfill - Cart Abandonment Rate, Exit

Increase Brand Awareness
the purchase process and how
to make it quicker and without
hesitation
How do the customers find the
category and do they
recognize it
Rate.
Source: Google Analytics.
Trends, New visits--- Google
Trends.
Direct traffic--- alexa,
similarweb.
Social media metrics--- tools of
the trade.
Reviews on business--
websites of the trade.
Other competitors strategies---
CI websites ( E.g: alexa)
Data Collection and Analysis

3.1. Data that will be Used

In order to reach reliable outcomes from the analysis and for the sake of staying within SMART
objectives that do not go beyond what we have as data resources, it is more preferably to conduct a
descriptive analysis given the small amount of data access we’ve been granted which includes
looking at raw data and therefore, giving basic foundation to conduct more advanced analyses. We
will also refer to inferential analysis for the sake of identifying more traits of the personas that we’re
going to construct here. Within that context, we will be needing to extract data from Google
Analytics, especially those related to average session, bounce rate, page depth, etc. Also, we will be
collecting data from OpenTracker in terms of social media analytics. Added to that, we will be
frequently analysing the results from Google Trends to gauge their interests and what they’re talking
about.

3.2. Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

The objectives that we have set forward which are respectively: influence consideration, improve
sales process, and increase brand awareness; the key performance indicators that we will adopt as
signposts to measure flow and success of the strategy will be as follows:
- Influence Consideration: Average page depth, average session, CTR, ROAS,
amplification rate,
- Improve sales process: shopping cart abandonment rate which is calculated by
dividing the number of people who don’t complete check-out on the number of
people who start check out, customer lifetime value(CLV)
- Increase brand awareness: Rate of new visitors compared to returning visitors,
conversion rate from social media. Bounce rate= number of visitors who leave
immediately divided by the total number of visitors. Direct traffic, amplification and
applause rate, CTR, Unique Opens, ROAS,

3.3. Bias and how to Avoid it

One of the challenges that we may face here while collecting data from these different resources if
we don’t pay a close attention about the methods on how we’re collecting data, is bias. Bias may
alter or may result in results that are contradictory to what we have expected beforehand. It is clear
in our case that one of these issue is the sample bias where we may have a sample that doesn’t
qualify to statistical significance and therefore cannot be applied or generalized to the remaining
states knowing that Excel data provided by Grainger have been already altered for commercial
reasons. Added to that, one of the pitfalls that we will try to avoid is to exclude some customers or
audiences that may look as a reason for the decline of our business objective, yet they are
necessary for us in order to conduct an objective data collection that allows us to have sound
insights that help us in the content strategy..
Having said that, our task seems to daunting with incomplete data; however, we can compensate
for that lack and mitigate the potential outcomes if we strive to adopt an array of data resources
from different sources and engage into what Avinash termed multiplicity 14 where he advocates the
use of a diaspora of tools in order to have sound data after comparing them others. As for the
sampling bias as well as the number of the sample and whether it would be of a statistical
significance or not, the most likely approach we have to trigger here is to look at the patterns and
statistically analyze it to see whether there are any redundancies, controversies or not. As for
interpreting issue, it is true that the data are incomplete, but we may bypass that by building a mini-
model that is based on the data provided and offer a way to test its reliability through test and
control. This seems to be theleast that can be done when offered with incomplete data set and
getting around that needs art and craft.
Adopted Analysis

As we have already quickly touched on the possible analyses that we are likely to conduct, it’s time
here to go deeper about the other categories that we will use sporadically depending on the nature
of the business objective under investigation. In this regard, we are going to focus on descriptive
analysis as a first fashion to delve deeper into the analysis. This allows us to take a snapshot of the
web traffic, clickstream, and also competitive intelligence. The data sources that we foresee to base
our analysis upon are: Google Analytics, and OpenTracker. The data that would be instrumental if I
have access to are those related to the competitors of Bosch and Grainger where while these data
can be available, it will help close any existing gaps in performance in regards to other competitors.
As an example of analysis, By looking at the Excel file provided by Grainger that belongs to
structured data, we can imply the following outcome represented in this diagram:

Figure 08: Comparison between Revenue and CPA in terms of ROAS

By taking a closer look at the above diagram it seems there is more spending on visitors visiting
Grainger & Bosch but making no purchase which should be the focus of the future marketing
strategy in order to see how to mitigate that cost and turn into a benefice knowing that the ROAS
percentage for visitors going to Grainger & Bosch and making no purchase is 0.24% 15. Added to
that, by looking at the daily clickstream habits of audience on the website we can get many insights
on what, where, and when customers are doing what they are doing. The following diagram
demonstrates this:
 Figure 08: proportion

The previous diagram reveals that the surfing patterns of customers tend to be at its peak on Friday and Tuesday as
well in terms of CPA which may give insights about the correct timing of applying marketing strategies and campaigns
such as display ads, etc. Having said that, we notice the following trend during the days of the week in terms of CPA
as it is shown in this diagram:

Figure 09: Trend of CPA

We also need to launch some research tools that give us more power over the data we’re collecting
especially the ones that fulfill the inferential analysis such as guest surveys that we would be launching
for returning and new visitors who visit Bosch power tools. This will give us more insights about the
persona of this segment which will eventually help us tailor more user-based ads and more personalized
email campaigns. In addition to that , we need to run a strong multivariate and A-B testing in order to find
correlation that may lead us to causalities which is the core feature of causal analysis. We need before
hand to define the control and independent variable in these experiments so can compare against the
experiment and control groups. This is necessary in order to avoid interpretation bias and also in order to
reach more reliable and valid data here so we can apply especially to reach our business objective,
namely here influencing consideration. Due to the shortage of data, it seems to me a bit challenging to
engage in a predictive analysis that requires more data to be processed and tidied up into a manageable
data sets let alone the tedious process of conceptualizing an attribution modelling.

3.1. Benchmarks
The benchmarks we plan use here is to increase the average session by 20%, page depth by 15%,
amplification & applause rate by 30%, and also decrease shopping cart abandonment rate by 15%.
This is not an exhaustive list but rather an overview at the most important benchmarks that we
wanted to highlight here.
The Channel and Content Strategy

Emails and Display Campaigns for Audience Category 1 and Category 2

In order to have a sound a reliable email and ad display campaigns for the users in each category,
we will divide that in the following elements:

Email will consist of regular follow-up emails and promotional emails that are targeted to primary
customers who are mainly procurement department officers. As for the first category of the
users email should be a natural completion of what these users have been already doing since
this will likely to bridge the possible gap present in them.

Display ads should be programmatically triggered at different stages of CDJ once a need is
spotted and this could be at the different platforms especially Facebook 16 where most of the
users are active there. This can be done in a multivariate tests in order to offer a constant
feedback and any necessary update for the test and control phase. Display ads should not be
only designed to trigger a call to action to check more products but should be also designed to
hook on more users to join, for instance, the newsletter so as to get more demographic data
about them and to be able to personalize and gage their needs more accurately. Actually,
display ads, as stated before, should be used in three different scenarios with different
marketing objectives: whether to catch the users’ attention, or to retain them or to stand among
the crowd while they are in their active evaluation. Accordingly, it should be an ongoing
processwith an ongoing adaptation and change. For example ads like these can have a good
impact on new customers17:

For the sake of offering them incentives to apply the call to action, the ad should explicitly and
simply entice users by promising them special offers that are not available to outside circle of the
ad. Since the ads are designed to hesitant users whether new or returning one, it is really
necessary that they lead to landing pages that are reliable of what is stated in the ad else we risk
to lose the users due the advertising fatigue s/he may go through. Also, the landing page should
promote and make use of:
For the sake of offering them incentives to apply the call to action, the ad should explicitly and
simply entice users by promising them special offers that are not available to outside circle of the
ad. Since the ads are designed to hesitant users whether new or returning one, it is really
necessary that they lead to landing pages that are reliable of what is stated in the ad else we risk
to lose the users due the advertising fatigue s/he may go through. Also, the landing page should
promote and make use of:

- Mention in one sentence what Bosch Tools is

- Collapse filters by default but offering an option to show them according to the need of
the user so he can’t be intimidated by the plethora of filters.
 Bosh… for leaders and

Information about the

product

Filter
Filters should not appear above

Figure 11

The channel of email is very crucial for primary users, namely procurement department officers,
since it allows them to have an up-to-date information about what is new. Primary users should
receive more personalized follow-up emails based on their experience on the website and what
they have conducted so far, and also promotional emails to let them know what is trending, and
to keep them up with the new advances power tools industry even if it doesn’t belong to Bosch
in terms of research and development since this will create credibility. But we should be aware
not to overwhelm this category with information since they are busy officers who may not read
from A to Z what is in the newsletter for instance.

- Scenario 1: here, promotional emails emails and retargeting should be applied.

- Scenario 2: Here more personalized follow-up email campaigns should be conducted in
order to assist and guide them in this scenario.
- Scenario 3: banners that call to subscribe to the newsletter and benefit from seasonal or
promotional orders, and after they subscribe only with their emails, they receive confirmation
email that would lead them to another page that asks more demographic information.
Recommendations

In order to sustain the relationship with customers the content of the visuals and the emails
should be well crafted and well studied before delivering it to the customers. It is important to
keep in mind the busy schedule of the audience that we are to address and by that we are
meant to point right away to the point and be direct by using simple and short sentences as well
as reiterating and capitalizing on the original idea of Bosch power tools are the right one
because they do the right job which would be compatible with Bosch philosophy and value as
well.
Added to that, the tone of ads should interpret the credo of “man in the action” so users will
retain the practical side of what Bosch power tools can do. This will inspire and encourage users
to have the tool since they will be seeing the same need they’re looking for being reached by a
model man in action and humans like to model by nature. For instance, the tone of the banner
should reflect something similar to the following picture18:

Figure 12

4.2.1. Content and Tone of the message and visuals

The language of the emails whether promotional of follow-up should not be too lengthy so as
not to scare away the users from reading some of it at all since according to studies humans
can only focus for 20 minutes19 and beyond that it is hard to put a full focus on the subject under
question, namely here reading an email or a newsletter. Also, the language of the follow-up
email should reflect an understanding of the user and should never feel that it is only a mass
email else the user won’t feel that he’s being treated as an individual but rather a cell in a
database. The distribution of the information should take the letter “F” since according to studies
that were conducted on customers by tracking their eye movements, they have concluded that
generally they move their eyes in a pattern that is similar to the shape of “F” 20.
For instance, a follow-up email to a customer whom we think he’s at the phase of “moment of
purchase” should go like this::

To: <email>
From: Grainger Support staff
Subject: Need Help? We Are here.

Dear <Customer name>,

I’m <name of the support staff> and I thought that you may need my help in regard to your
research about the product you want to buy and guide you on what suits your needs. If you
need a live assistance on what to buy kindly click on the following link <link to online chat with
the customer> and I will be directly chatting with you while you’re surfing on the website to look
for what you need.

As Grainger, we always believe that time for our customers is precious and that is why we
encourage you to connect with us when you need assistance.

Thank you.

The tone and the language should not be too intrusive so as the client doesn’t feel he’s being
watched and that we’re trying to hard sell our products, but rather we just need to remind him
that we are here and we can help if he wants.

4.2.2. Keeping Content aligned with Bosch

In order to make sure that the message being delivered through the marketing channels is
compatible and aligned with Bosch branded, it is necessary to establish a roadmap and
guidelines on how Grainger and Bosch collaborate together in order to increase the positive
effects and to avoid any inconsistencies between the channels and the values of Bosch.
Having said that, the core value of Bosch should resonate in every ad especially quality that
Bosch prides about. This does not mean that the rules or standards imposed by Bosch should
coerce Grainger to stay within them but rather they should serve as a foundational element for
more creative display ads and emails that are delivered based on what Bosch believes to be
its core feature.