Sowing the Seeds

The fundamental principal of marketing says that organic growth occurs only with a thorough understanding of the customer buying process. In this paper, the depiction between the traditional and the new buying process will be analyzed.

In the article, the authors discuss the new customer buying process while revealing the downfalls of the traditional process. As a result of an increase in “product choices, information sources, distribution channels, and marketing platforms,” the traditional buying process has become more intricate (Pocharski). The traditional buying process, as described by the authors, states that success in the first step results in success throughout the entire process. The steps include: “awareness, trial, consideration, purchase, and repeat” (Pocharski). The new buying process defines a key difference from the traditional view, where success in the first step does not necessarily confirm success throughout the process. With additional competition in the customer awareness step (or customer point of contact), the renewed buying process was required. However, the new buying process proves to be more difficult for tracking customers and results in a multitude of outcomes, where customers may remove themselves from the process at any given step. Complexity has arrived, with the addition of the internet, causing information gathering to become more prevalent and a protagonist for product awareness. Furthermore, the internet has increased the importance for marketers to define the way in which a customer frames their problem of engagement towards the product or service.

In the traditional viewpoint, marketing analysis models have two significant limitations for analyzing the buying process:

1. The buying process is nonlinear: With the development of technology, customers do not follow a direct process of beginning with the first step of awareness, leading to the following steps. They have various ways to make purchase decisions, including...