Conscious over digital

Insight #3 from our Breaking Inertia Report

This is part 3 in a 3 part report piece that covers our recently published research report, Breaking Inertia, which aimed to uncover the reasons and logic behind changes in our digital behaviour based on our research throughout the first pandemic lockdown. If you missed the previous articles, read part 1 and part 2!

Digitalisation is a different challenge for companies than for people

Explore your customers’ behaviour using our problem-solving loop

Last week we explained the factors that drive people’s decisions about solving problems in their life and that businesses should consider this as a loop where a given situation triggers a proven approach.

However, the problem-solving loop also implies that a change in the context, such as fewer restrictions and some aspects of life returning to normal, people might stop doing the things they picked over the past months. Indeed, we saw that despite people spending loads of time on digital activities for weeks, some of these digital experiences were not, or only partially incorporated into everyday life after the restrictions.

Amid the uncertainty of what the future brings after the pandemic, there are three important lessons we learned that will prove to be helpful for businesses in the long-term. in this article, we only highlight the most important one:

Insight 3: People become more conscious, not more digital.

While people have been forced to experiment with new solutions, they have realized what their expectations and preferences are regarding a service. More experimentation leads people to explore more shopping, customer service or entertainment situations which can be explored and evaluated. Think of it as a muscle that people can strengthen through various exercises. The more ways users try to solve a problem, the more they will learn about themselves, their preferences and how they depend on the context. Thus, people’s criteria and priorities are now more clarified and more specified — but not necessarily more digital.

“I do more planning before purchasing something. I’m not saying I’ve become more cost-conscious because I might buy things now that I’m going to need later. However, I may feel this because I feel a purchase twice: once when I buy it, and once when the courier comes with the order. This is deceptive but overall, I don’t think my expenses have increased.” — Barbara, 33

In particular, we identified three core phenomena that drove this increased awareness of preferences:

1. More (digital) interaction means more negative experiences. With many businesses being ill-prepared for the flood of online customers, customers had bad first experiences with purchased services. This is risky because the more people experiment with various channels and methods, the more they might realise they prefer their old way of doing things.
2. More friction in the processes means more conscious choices. We have seen that people develop a stronger connection with their online purchases because there are more frictions in the process: browse among the products, put them in the basket, check the price, add personal details at the check-out phase and confirm the order. These frictions can provide customers with the feeling that they have made more conscious purchase decisions because they spent a lot of time on it.
3. More new approaches mean more old things to lose. When certain experiences or services people got accustomed to suddenly disappear from their lives, the chosen replacement solution makes it clear what particular parts of the ‘original’ solution were the most liked. Businesses have to disassociate an online activity from its offline counterpart and create new core elements that provide an authentic experience. If they fail, replacement online solutions will always remain the second-best option.

“Only the Auchan was open. I didn’t buy anything I couldn’t have bought the day before. I had a look around at the children’s toy department, trying to find something I could buy for my nephew and sister. Only the experience of window shopping mattered not spending money there. That’s what I can’t do while online shopping. The impulse was so strong that I could not hold it back.” — Olga, 36

So what is the conclusion from our 9-month long research?

We set out in March 2020 to find out how people respond to the challenges of the coronavirus lockdown and to discover the changes in online and offline habits during the pandemic. We believe that through conducting more than 120 interviews, we managed to cover a lot more topics and unlock key insights.

The most important conclusion of our research is that it is more important to understand how people truly work in a given context than to wait for an external shock to push them into the direction desired by the business. Our inertia might break because of an event but then the question is: will whatever comes afterwards be good enough for new inertia to kick in?

If you enjoyed our 3-part series then we believe you will enjoy the full report, too: download it from the website.

If you want to learn more, shoot us any questions or organise a lunchtime presentation about the report with us through our website.