The CPG Attitude/Behaviour Gap: What Consumers Really Want vs What They Say They Want
Dec 9, 2024
12 min read
Your market research is wrong. Consumers are both unaware of their own actions, and are lying about their conscious preferences, rendering much analysis and attribution wildly inaccurate.
In a sea of meaningless data, how can marketing teams better understand CPG customer intent?
In this report:
WARC, Nielsen and industry experts debunk buyer psychology myths with their latest findings
Google, PepsiCo, Unilever and Diageo marketing leaders share their learnings of the attitude/behaviour gap
CPG CMOs lift the lid on consumer behaviour truths.
Discover The Truths Behind the Customer Behaviour Gap
There is a clear and predictive relationship between the number of products consumers claim they will purchase, and how much they actually buy in-market. However, consumers mis-represent or mis-report their actions by as much as 50% (Nielsen IQ).
The attitude/behaviour gap prevails. And for CPG marketing teams increasingly overwhelmed with vast volumes of customer data - whilst under growing pressure to deliver short-term ROI and long-term growth - it matters.
5 Consumer Behaviour Myths & Truths - The Latest from Industry Experts
Loyalty
UK consumers report that the most important consideration in purchase choice is price - 60% stated good deals and incentives as the deciding factor - with reward for loyalty coming in second at 52%. Three quarters of customers report shopping around on price rather than committing to their favourite brand, favouring the chance of a discount over quality. (WARC)
In reality, customer experience has a much greater impact on loyalty behaviours than price and promotions. ‘Customer loyalty depends on how easy you make it for your customers to do business with you’, reveals Nick Toman, Group Vice President at Gartner. An overwhelming 96% of customers with high-effort brand experiences were disloyal, compared to only 9% of customers with low-effort experiences.
Gartner also finds that customer satisfaction surveys are not reliable predictors for customer loyalty. More than 1 in 5 - over 20% - of self-reporting satisfied customers also simultaneously reported actually intending to leave the brand in favour of purchasing from a competitor.
Personalisation
71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalized customer experiences, and 76% become frustrated when they don’t receive them. (McKinsey) Investment in personalised marketing can also reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50%, lift revenue by up to 15%, and increase marketing ROI overall by up to 30%.
Shopify reports that 57% of consumers say they will spend more on a brand that offers personalised experiences, which makes them more likely to return. However, when surveyed, customers are not telling the whole story. Preferences for personalisation are limited to specific products and experiences, and in reality can backfire - because customers don’t actually like personalisation as much as they believe.
The vast majority - 75% - of consumers find most forms of personalisation ‘somewhat creepy’, with more than 1 in 5 - 22% - saying they would leave for another brand because of ‘creepy experiences’. (InMotion)
NTT’s Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report finds that organisations and consumers have differing views of what actually constitutes personalisation Consumers say that personalization is ‘not about how well the organisation knows them, but how well the organisation is listening to them, and how efficiently and effectively they respond to needs.’
Consumers also don’t want personalisation at the expense of their own beliefs on security and data protection:
50% of consumers usually decline to have their personal data tracked by brands (HubSpot)
40% of individuals don’t trust companies to use their data ethically (KPMG)
30% of consumers say they ‘flat-out refuse’ to share data (KPMG)
67% of consumers feel they don’t understand how their data is used (Shopify)
65% of consumers would stop using a brand that is dishonest about how it uses customer data. (Shopify)
Sustainability
Every leading CPG brand is investing heavily in sustainable R&D and promoting their CSR credentials - but consumers don’t value sustainability anywhere near as much as they claim.
HubSpot finds that 90% of all consumers believe that companies should prioritise socially responsible practices. 91% of Gen Z say they want to buy from sustainable companies and 77% of this demographic report willingness to pay more for sustainable products and services, compared to 72% of Millennials, 67% of Gen X, and 62% of Baby Boomers. (PDI Business of Sustainability Index and EY)
As the main drivers of the online DTC ultra-fast fashion industry, Gen Z are the biggest culprits in the ESG attitude/behaviour gap. Retailer Shein generated a 43% increase in revenue on 2022 figures. More than half of all consumers who say eco-products are more expensive agree that they prioritize price over sustainability (YouGov).
Earning lower wages, with less job security, the biggest demographic to pull back on spending due to economic stress are 18–26-year-olds, who are voting with their wallets rather than their beliefs. Ultimately the cost-of-living crisis and personal gain are greater driving factors in the purchase behaviour of this consumer demographic than their self-reported sustainable values.
Price
Whilst consumers self-report waning interest in Black Friday, stating a lack of interest and trust in Black Friday sales, retailers and advertisers needn’t panic.
In November 2024 only 36% said they were likely to buy anything in this year’s Black Friday sales compared to 45% in 2023. (The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC). Ipsos finds consumer scepticism is rife amongst core audiences, with just 30% of consumers reporting trust that discounts displayed by businesses are real.
However, other reports from the same sources predict that purchasing will remain significant, with spending per shopper likely to reach €431 compared to €343 last year. The Buy Now, Pay Later trend is also a likely accelerator of Black Friday buying, with 20% of online shoppers using services like Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay to spread out their Black Friday purchases.
Cross-Channel Purchase Behaviour
For years many consumers, advertisers and brands have perpetuated the belief that UK audiences no longer watch TV and that digital channels are far more influential in terms of behaviours and sales activation. However, TV as an influential channel is ever-growing. Overall, UK audiences watched more TV and video content at home in 2023, averaging 4 hours and 31 minutes a day (an increase of 2% since 2022). Ofcom finds that this is primarily driven by an increase in daily viewing to video-sharing platforms (up 12%) and to broadcasters’ video-on-demand services, such as iPlayer and ITVX (up 29%).
‘Gen Z and Alpha are used to swiping and streaming, not flipping through broadcast TV channels. The traditional TV is fast becoming a device of choice to watch YouTube. But whilst live TV may not have the universal pull it once did, its role in capturing those big moments that bring the nation together remains vital,’ Ian Macrae, Ofcom’s Director of Market Intelligence
Television’s reach is increasingly effective as consumers become more savvy about their online exposure to advertising and more adept at both consciously tuning out to paid ads, and self-controlling their exposure settings, reducing responsiveness and effectiveness. Two thirds - 68% - of users do not consider digital ads influential in their purchasing decisions. (Embryo)
Despite the popularity of social channels in advertising budget investment, TV has been consistently found to directly influence buyer decisions more than digital channels. ThinkBox finds:
TV is responsible for 71% of total advertising-generated profit at an average three-year ROI of £4.20 per £1 spent: the highest ROI of any media
Television also delivers the highest short-term ROI of any media at 62% of all advertising-generated profit at £1.73 per £1 spent
TV presents the lowest-risk advertising investment option with the highest likelihood of profit return: 70% likelihood over three to six months and 86% over three years.
How can CMOs access genuine customer behaviour insights and harness to deliver advertising that drives both conversion and long-term brand value?
Cutting Through the Noise: CPG Marketing Leaders Deriving Real Customer Understanding to Drive Campaign Performance & Brand Investment
PepsiCo - Democratise the Right Data & Harness it the Right Way
PepsiCo bridges the gap between consumer self-reports and actual purchase behaviour trends by developing their own tools to democratise consumer insights across the global organisation.
‘Whilst previously we had access to a wealth of consumer insights, it felt like we were absolutely not leveraging our scale, and as a result of that, we were not driving any competitive advantage for our company,’ reveals Stephan Gans, Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo. ‘Consumers have become more value-conscious with their spending patterns and preferences across brands, packages, and channels. We will remain focused on providing good value to consumers by offering great-tasting products that offer variety, convenience, and affordability.’
PepsiCo’s emphasis on zero-sugar variants and sports nutrition aligns with consumer trends towards healthier options, potentially leading to increased market share and improved profitability. The global food and beverages brand implemented a new insights and ad testing platform to deliver the real consumer behaviour insights that inform product development and market penetration.
PepsiCo harnesses genuine intent and activity information to expand its product offerings in the zero-sugar category and enhance its presence in the sports nutrition and hydration segments with brands like Gatorade and Propel.
Cisco - Map Out & Really Understand True Personalisation
Cisco believes the attitude/behaviour gap stems from one core problem: many brands don't have the right infrastructure, processes or people in place to deliver real, valuable and targeted personalised experiences.
Anurag Dhingra, SVP of Engineering and CTO at Cisco, illustrates an example of real consumer behaviour-driven personalisation in practice. ‘I'm a frequent flyer with one of the airlines here in the US. When I call them, I expect them to know who I am, to know that I typically fly out of San Francisco airport, to know what meal I typically order and that I typically don't check a bag. When I'm interacting with an agent, whether a virtual agent or a human agent, I expect them to know all of these things and then anticipate what I might be calling about.’
McKinsey - Appeal to Genuine Customer Values, Not Their Vanity
‘When you look at the reality of what consumers are doing, value for money is still far more important than the values of sustainability and being environmentally friendly,’ advises McKinsey Senior Partner Sajal Kohli. ‘In the past, the younger generations would always vote with their feet, which is, “I really care about the environment. I care about sustainability.” When you look at the data now, they are the first group to walk away from that claim when it comes to paying a premium for sustainability and environment-friendly products or services.’
Google - Focus on the Messy Middle
Google understands that the way customers make decisions is becoming ever ‘messier’ but that there are many known truths about purchase behaviour that can be built upon. The path between trigger and purchase decision-making is not linear: Google’s consumer insights team set out to discover not only how shoppers process all of the information and choice they discover along the way, but how that process influences what people ultimately decide to buy.
‘As the internet has grown, it has transformed from a tool for comparing prices to a tool for comparing everything,’ explains Alistair Rennie, Global Head of Innovation & Insights at Google. ‘That’s clear in how we’ve seen purchase behaviour change over the years on Google Search. Our large-scale shopping experiment with real in-market shoppers simulated 310,000 purchase scenarios. The precise value of “cheap” may vary between individuals, but it still carries a singular meaning. “Best,” on the other hand, can have a wide range of meanings, including value, quality, performance, or popularity. This is the kind of research behaviour that happens in the “messy middle” between trigger and purchase.
‘People look for information about a category’s products and brands, and then weigh all the options. This equates to two different mental modes in the messy middle: exploration, an expansive activity, and evaluation, a reductive activity. Whatever a person is doing, across a huge array of online sources, such as search engines, social media, aggregators, and review websites, can be classified into one of these two mental modes. People loop through these twin modes of exploration and evaluation, repeating the cycle as many times as they need to make a purchase decision.’
5. Ogilvy - Think Like Behavioural Scientists, Not Promoters
Advertising & PR giants Ogilvy advise marketing teams to think like behavioural scientists, no matter their official roles. Ogilvy UK’s Senior Partner, Head of Behavioural Science Dan Bennett believes that one of the key thinking traps to befall advertisers is the assumption that customers want what they are asking for.
‘One charity that had a five-year decline in donations had thrown the kitchen sink at saving the organisation. If you ask customers what would make them donate more you hear a lot about needing motivating causes, for proceeds to go directly to those in need, and even to add Gift Aid so you can give even more for free.
‘But behaviour change is not as simple as doing what customers ask. The intervention that drove a whopping 17% increase in donations was to simply reorientate the donation envelopes given out to households. People stop giving when they get that ‘full envelope feeling’ as it’s a cue that they’ve done enough. A landscape envelope feels fuller quicker than a portrait one – and so people keep filling it up.
‘We cannot rely on what people think will change their behaviour; adding the option to give more via Gift Aid actually reduced donations. To be successful, we need to read between the lines when analysing customer research. With customers, why they think something is often more insightful than what they think.’
6. Nike - Underestimating Both Consumer Behaviour & Marketplace Logic Cannibalises Brand Equity
Nike’s 2020 shift in strategy was acknowledged in 2024 to have resulted in a dip in customer acquisition and missed short- and medium-term revenue growth targets. Underutilising consumer behaviour analysis, the fashion giant pivoted from creating demand to serving and retaining demand, meaning that most marketing investment was directed to existing Nike consumers. ‘If you drive a car just by looking in the rear-view mirror, that’s not a good thing,’ Nike’s Chief Design Officer Martin Lotti observes. ‘The bigger opportunity is the windshield.’
Nike poured double the resource and spend usually allocated to brand activities into programmatic advertising and performance. Unlike competitors, the company refocused around DTC channels, ignored declining consumer response to chosen tactics and invested $billions into activities that were easier to be measured short-term, but that consumer behaviour analysis would have shown as less effective.
‘The brand team shifted from brand marketing to digital marketing and from brand enhancing to sales activation’, reveals Massimo Giunco, Former CMO at Nike and current Brand Strategist. ‘We underestimated consumer behaviour and the logic behind the marketplace mechanisms of the sport sneakers and apparel distribution. We created a cannibal ecosystem that ate brand equity, product equity, gross margin, market share, demand creation budget and consumer connectivity.
‘Consumers are not so elastic as some business leaders think or hope. And consumers are not so loyal as some business leaders think or hope. Many consumers - mainly occasional buyers - did not follow Nike but continued shopping where they were shopping before the decision to change strategy. So, once they could not find Nike sneakers in “their” stores – because Nike wasn’t serving those stores any longer - they simply opted for other brands.’
7. Diageo - Look at Content Engagement, Not Conversations
Diageo works with an AI-powered consultancy partner to identify consumers’ actual behaviour, leading to the development of an immersive experience for its Tequila Don Julio brand through an Apple Vision Pro app. Diageo strives for a different way of building their brands with deep-grounded consumer insights by looking at “real behaviour, not unintended”. Rather than looking at conversations, the global beverages leader instead looks at what content people are engaging with and analyses this through the AI technology.
Diaego places emphasis on the importance of uncovering communities that “exist today” to harness the “halo power” from tapping into them. The marketing team discovered that its tequila enthusiast segment are continuously “seeking new ways” to deepen their understanding of the spirit, and closely aligned content, comms and approach around consumer behaviours and intent.
‘Brands that innovate and are culturally relevant for consumers grow six times faster than brands that don’t,’ says Ana de la Guardia, Global Head of Planning - Breakthrough Innovation at Diageo. ‘We get closer to real consumers with a sneak peek into their lives that enables us to make data-driven decisions.’
8. Unilever - Experiment to Uncover Consumer Behavioural Change as a Result of Engagement
Unilever strove for real customer understanding by running an in-depth consumer experiment of the role of influencer content in impacting sustainable choices. Partnering the Behavioural Insights Team, the world’s first government institution dedicated to applying behaviour science, the CPG leaders analysed not only the engagement levels of audiences interacting with their sustainability content but also which content would directly cause sustainable behavioural change in consumer audiences - and why.
75% of consumers in the experiment reported that Unilever’s content made them more likely to adopt sustainable behaviours, including saving and reusing plastic, buying refillable products, and freezing and reusing leftovers. Going further, Unilever identified which content drove which behavioural change. After watching Unilever’s programmatic content, 69% of consumers took unprecedented actions to reduce their plastic or food waste, compared with 61% of consumers who watched ‘optimistic’ content taking subsequent actions.
Professor David Halpern, Chief Executive of the Behavioural Insights Team, comments, ‘This study is a world-first of its kind and the largest online controlled trial to test the effect of different styles of social media content. The behaviour change potential of social media is clear and the results show that there’s a huge opportunity, providing fertile ground for further exploration in this space.’
Accurately Measure Your Attitude-Behaviour Gap to Drive True Customer Understanding
Consumers misrepresent and misreport their behaviour for many reasons, making the right measurement vital to developing - and continually building on - real customer understanding.
The average MarTech stack contains 90 different tools, and most attribution models are failing to take into account the full buying journey. Marketing teams urgently need quality data on both consumer intent AND measured purchase action to deliver advertising ROI and customer acquisition growth.
ViewersLogic measures the entire journey from ad exposure to purchase. Our single-source data directly connects media exposure with online and offline purchases on the same buyers. A full funnel customer view can reveal unprecedented visibility on campaign effectiveness and real consumer response to advertising.
Uncover hidden consumer behaviours – here’s how CMOs are empowering customer understanding through the power of single-source data.
The best CMOs know that brand drives sales, but performance doesn’t build brand. Here’s how world-leading CPG marketing teams are simultaneously delivering short-term activation and long-term revenue growth.
References
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-behavior-statistics
https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/analysis/2024/connecting-mind-matter/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nike-epic-saga-value-destruction-massimo-giunco-llplf/
https://www.marketingweek.com/diageo-ai-real-customers/
https://www.marketingweek.com/three-steps-to-thinking-more-like-a-behavioural-scientist/
https://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2023/11/yet-another-survey-shows-we-hate-over-personalised-ads/
https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/blog/personalization-trends#10
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/effortless-experience-explained