Deconstructing the “First Moment of Truth”: Understanding Unplanned Consideration and Purchase Conversion Using In-Store Video Tracking

Retailers and manufacturers are keenly interested in understanding unplanned consideration and purchase conversion, but data that capture in-store product consideration have been unavailable in the past. In the current research, the authors use in-store video tracking to collect a novel data set that records shopping behavior at the point of purchase, including product consideration. In conjunction with an entrance survey of purchase intentions, they conduct several descriptive analyses that focus on the incidence, category propensity, behavioral characteristics, and outcome of unplanned consideration. The results reveal several new empirical insights. First, the authors find significant category-level complementarities between planned items and unplanned considerations, which they capture using a latent category map. Second, planned consideration and unplanned consideration differ in key behavioral characteristics (e.g., likelihood of purchase, time of occurrence, number of product touches). Third, greater likelihood of purchase conversion is significantly associated with dynamic factors (e.g., remaining in-store slack, outcome of the previous consideration) and behavioral characteristics (e.g., number of displays viewed, distance to shelf, references to a shopping list). The authors conclude with a discussion of implications of these findings for research and shopper marketing.