84% Is Only 16% Less Than 100%

84% of purchase decisions are made before shopping even begins, according to new research tracking 1.2 million consumer journeys across 200+ categories, meaning that by the time your prospect actively shops, the decision is already made.

Over months and years, your favorite and not-so-favorite brands build neural pathways beneath your conscious awareness so that when the buying moment arrives, what feels like a rational choice is actually the echo of impressions accumulated long ago.

During actual purchase phases, owned, shared, and earned media look to be three times as effective as paid advertising. So the website someone seeks out, the review a friend shares, and the article that mentions your brand are the touchpoints that shape decisions with disproportionate force. Yet we optimize conversion funnels, capturing only 16% of the decision process.

This does not mean that all consumers are equally reachable, as receptivity varies dramatically. The low-receptivity consumers resist influence but demonstrate fierce loyalty once won. And high-receptivity consumers convert easily but defect just as easily. Most marketing planning ignores this entirely, treating audiences as undifferentiated masses. They are different and should be treated as such.

Ergo, it would be better to stop chasing every consumer with equal intensity and instead invest in long-term brand building that operates beneath conscious awareness. How do you do this?

• Map which touchpoints actually shape decisions in your category.
• Build assets, content ecosystems, authentic relationships, and product quality that generate organic conversations that compound over time.

Context matters profoundly because different categories, brand positions, and competitive dynamics require different approaches to building priming effects. Your homogenized strategies treating all brands as interchangeable will fail because they ignore the specific conditions under which individual brands compete for space in consumers' unconscious preferences.

The pressure for immediate returns pushes strategy and tactics in exactly the wrong direction.

Great marketing is wine, but good marketing is water, and everybody drinks water. Apologies to Mark Twain.