Why Do Marketers Focus More on Who Bought Than on Who Didn’t?

Recently, I met with a team of young marketers from an organization with a digital marketing program. While discussing different dimensions of marketing, the conversation drifted towards marketing return on investment (ROI).

They shared three questions that were troubling them: 

• Why do people engage better online when content is promoted, but barely respond when it is organic?
• Why does an organic campaign deliver excellent results one month, but the next campaign with similar messaging and focus struggle?
• And why does a client who appears genuinely happy and gives glowing reviews choose not to buy again?

What struck me was that these questions are not unique to this young team alone; even seasoned marketers grapple with them. On the surface, these may look like different challenges - engagement, conversion, retention. But the larger puzzle underneath them is “non-choice” and the hidden mechanics behind every moment a person chooses not to buy.

We marketers spend enormous energy on understanding people who choose our organization’s products or services, but we fail to realize that there is equally valuable insight in non-choice, among those who said “No” or “Almost Yes”. A lead that disappeared, a customer who postponed a subscription renewal or an abandoned cart holds part of the puzzle that marketing rarely studies with the seriousness it deserves. 

Technology today allows us to market with extraordinary precision – tracking behaviors, preferences, journeys, clicks, purchases. Target audiences and ideal customer profiles are built with a level of detail that marketers from a few decades ago could scarcely imagine. Yet the information that makes one targetable does not explain why that person ultimately said yes or no. 

Have marketers ignored the nature of consumer choice?

Quite the contrary. Marketing leaders, researchers and experts have spent decades trying to understand what shapes consumer decisions - their motivations, attitudes, preferences, trade-offs and purchase behavior. There are well-defined models that help marketers understand how consumers weigh one factor against another, behavioral research that shows how context, framing and presentation of choices can influence decisions, and studies that map how consumers move through consideration and evaluation towards purchase.

Technology has added another layer to this. Marketers can now observe and identify who their buyer is, whether their customer’s behavior has changed because of marketing, and track additional response that the campaign has created. Interpreting signals from customers, predicting optimal offers and measuring subconscious emotional responses is now possible.
Yet much of the marketing measurement still centers on understanding the customer who said yes. Comparatively, less attention is given to understanding the one who almost said yes, or said no.

As a result, it can still be remarkably difficult to answer why one person chose a brand at a particular moment, while another with a similar profile didn’t. 

This difficulty also arises because human choices happen within specific circumstances. A customer may genuinely want to buy a product or a service, but may decide to wait until payday. A recommendation from a friend may overturn weeks of consideration. A purchase decision may change because another circumstance has taken precedence. 

Some of these determinants can be studied, inferred or discovered by asking, while others may never make their way into the marketer’s database. Two customers with similar profiles can encounter very different decision circumstances, and understanding this distinction changes how marketing ROI is viewed. Put simply, conversion is not always a communication problem.

So, what can marketers do? To begin with they should begin widening their evidence base. The idea is to understand what customers say, study how behavior changes with circumstance and test what they actually do when something changes.

Approaching research through the lens of non-choice changes what we learn from it. While testing campaign effectiveness, marketers can also try to understand the determinants surrounding choice or non-choice. It will help them to gain insights beyond the conventional measures of awareness, engagement or message effectiveness. And it will provide them with a comprehensive picture of what is influencing, preventing or blocking the business outcomes. It also moves ROI measurement beyond conversions towards understanding how much incremental business value marketing creates.

Human choice will always hold an unknown element that cannot be captured within a model. Therefore, it would help to take steps to reduce uncertainty by observing, asking, measuring, learning and adapting. With technology, marketers can narrow the gap between reach and choice through a precise learning and measurement.
This may not make the three questions those young marketers asked me disappear. But it will help us understand better why people respond, why they do not, why they stay and why they leave, and that may ultimately take us closer to the ROI that marketing is expected to deliver.