This is a summary from the Journal of Business &
Industrial Marketing “Constructing thick descriptions of marketers' and buyers'
decision processes in business-to-business relationships” by Arch G. Woodside
Elizabeth J. Wilson since 2000. The Consumer or Buyer Decision Making Process
is the method used by marketers to identify and track the decision making
process of a customer journey from start to finish. It is broken down into 5
individual stages which we have decided to demonstrate with our latest decision
making journey surrounding some rather sorry looking trainers.
A central finding
in the relationship marketing/buying literature is that the thought and
decision processes by both marketers and buyers include a series of branching,
if‐then, questions and answers.. Consequently, from designing and evaluating
bid‐purchase proposals to evaluating the current state of the overall
seller‐buyer relationship, the perceived value of the level of any given
attribute depends in part of the value perceived in the levels of several other
attributes. Possibly, business‐to‐business decisions and outcomes may be
understood best by constructing thick descriptions of the multiple contingency
paths that marketers and buyers think about and sometimes enact when deciding.
We report the use of two “think aloud” methods to learn the contingency
thoughts and decisions of marketers and buyers of industrial solvents. The main
conclusions of the study: designing generalized “gate keeping”, contingency,
models of if‐then decision paths can be achieved; these models are useful for
constructing accurate behavioral theories of marketer‐buyer relationships. The sales process is an area of marketing ripe for
anthropological approaches to research. Unlike many aspects of the marketing
mix, selling involves the direct contact between the seller and the buyer. The
outcome of a selling encounter is as much determined by the ``chemistry''
between sales person and buyer as it is by the objective consideration of
``facts''. Wood side and Wilson point out that, since most writers acknowledge
the importance of adaptive selling, we need to have a greater understanding of `` the triggering thoughts, decision frames and events resulting in alternative
paths and outcomes occurring in such (buyer/seller) relationships.'' If the
sales person (or indeed the buyer) appreciates the processes whereby an
individual arrives at a particular course of action then they are more able to
adapt their behavior so as to increase the prospects for a successful outcome. Wood side
and Wilson discuss ways in which the results from their study and results from
other potential studies applying similar methods might be put to use. The main
advantage lies in the development of sales people through training and in
informing the general communications strategy.
