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Customer Experience

Zero Moment of Truth

Published February 23, 2016 9 min read Translated from the Arabic original

Introduction

I previously wrote about Moments of Truth in an earlier article. While writing that piece, something caught my attention: a concept Google calls the “Zero Moment of Truth.” I wanted to share what I learned about it because I believe it’s important. This article will be relevant to anyone working in marketing as well as customer experience.

Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)

It’s when you go online to compare prices for a particular product across several dealers without ever visiting their showrooms in person. It’s when you open Amazon to read reader reviews of a book before buying it, or when you check Goodreads to see how a book is rated. It’s when you browse travel sites looking for the best hotels or apartments before booking. It’s when you visit specialized review sites to read opinions about a new tech product or a car you’re thinking of buying. It’s when you decide to download a particular mobile app because you saw it had high ratings and many positive reviews. It’s when you reach out to friends on social media to ask their opinion about a product.

All of these moments — when you pick up your smartphone or sit at your laptop to learn more about products or services in order to decide whether to try or buy them — make up the Zero Moment of Truth.

Generation C

Let’s call them Generation C, named for a cluster of traits and behaviors that all start with the letter C:

Create, Collaborate, Computerized, Content, Connect, Click.

Members of this generation rely heavily on the Zero Moment of Truth to make their decisions — which is why some sociologists chose this label for them. If you’re between 18 and 34, you belong to this group, though if you happen to be tech-averse you may not really fit in. Conversely, falling outside that age bracket doesn’t disqualify you either: Generation C is a mindset and a lifestyle anyone can adopt.

This generation is obsessed with digital content — creating it, following it, sharing it — and reaching them requires marketing approaches very different from traditional ones, which I’d argue are heading for the grave within the next decade. This generation thinks, compares, and decides inside the Zero Moment of Truth. They might form a terrible impression of you because of a neglected website and decide not to do business with you for that reason alone.

So how would you describe yourself as a company owner offering products or services within this Zero Moment of Truth space? Have you ever stopped to think about this moment? Would you be happy with the results you’d find if you searched online for your own product and saw what people are saying about it?

New Directions

The idea that a consumer sees an ad and then heads to the nearest store to buy that product is no longer as effective as some traditional marketers believe. Between the ad and the purchase decision sits the Zero Moment of Truth. Advertising is no longer the primary driver of consumer decisions, and TV viewership keeps shrinking. Personally, I don’t turn on the TV at home except to watch a movie, and only because of the screen size.

Conversations between people and their discussions about specific experiences are arguably more trustworthy than descriptive market research, where participants are incentivized with gifts or money to talk and engage. That’s why there’s such a push to capture what’s happening online — those conversations are spontaneous and unbiased.

Have you ever wondered why companies invest in social listening platforms to monitor what’s being said about their brand by consumers? Because those conversations may reach members of Generation C, who use them to form impressions and make decisions. Have you thought about why many companies pay influencers large sums to place an ad or weave a marketing message into their content, or simply to share their opinion on a product or service? Because their influence is significant.

Market research firms have also been offering a service called Online Community Panels for over a decade. This service has recently become available in Saudi Arabia. The idea is to create a virtual online environment that brings together consumers or customers of a particular product or service to open up discussions, gather their suggestions, and get their input on new modifications. The principle is that the business engages with its customers at a time when they want to talk — not the other way around.

You’ll also notice that many websites now offer live chat with a representative, so they can engage with customers and capture them before their attention drifts to a competitor’s site.

There are also many sites dedicated to creating content around customer experiences and reviews of company products and services — destinations a person must visit before making a buying decision.

There is an unprecedented push toward e-commerce in the Middle East. I’d almost guarantee that within ten years, e-commerce will be a formal channel for most sales transactions, whether between individuals or businesses. Even the spread of virtual currencies (like Bitcoin), which don’t belong to any country, gives us something to reflect on regarding this generation’s direction.

On the personal-brand front, there are now entire books guiding employees on how to present themselves on social networks, how to market themselves, and what might damage their image in front of companies looking for talent. Some companies now search for candidates on social media to form an initial impression before the interview — and that moment is the Zero Moment of Truth for you as a job seeker.

The New Consumer Mental Model

The old consumer model had three stages: Stimulus → First Moment of Truth → Second Moment of Truth.

  • The stimulus related to advertising across all channels used for that purpose.
  • The First Moment of Truth was the moment the consumer saw the product on the shelf.
  • The Second Moment of Truth was the customer’s experience using the product.

The new marketing model — which I used as the cover image for this article and which comes from the Google book I’ll mention at the end — has four stages:

Stimulus → Zero Moment of Truth → First Moment of Truth → Second Moment of Truth.

In this new model, the Second Moment of Truth loops back as input into the Zero Moment of Truth when the consumer publishes their experience or opinion for another potential consumer to read before trying the product/service or deciding to buy it.

How to Win This Moment

After all this interesting information, what should marketers actually do? Well, whatever product you sell or service you offer, you need to give the Zero Moment of Truth equal weight to the other elements in the consumer mental model.

Some readers might object: “This doesn’t apply to all products.” When that happens, I’d ask you to do what members of the generation we discussed do the moment they hear about something they don’t know: “Google it.” What I mean is, they search for that thing on Google or YouTube. Try it yourself and the results will surprise you. You’ll quickly see that the competitors who invested in providing relevant content have succeeded in attracting members of this generation. Yet we still see some business owners with a traditional mindset who don’t believe any of this matters — time will be the one to convince them. Some forecasts suggest that by 2020 there will be more than 5 billion internet users, and currently more than a third of humanity uses the internet.

You also need to make sure your website appears among the top results in major search engines — what’s known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO isn’t my specialty so I won’t go into the details. What I do know is that it’s critical to winning the moment this article is about. Try searching for the most important keywords related to your products or services, then study the results carefully.

Understand how your customers search for your product and where they hear about you. Target new customers to answer this question and learn the places and circumstances in which the Zero Moment of Truth forms for your potential customers, so you can give it the attention it deserves. This impatient generation — and I include myself in it — wants everything as fast as possible. I once needed to buy a specific product as quickly as possible. What did I do? I opened Google Maps and found exactly what I needed in five minutes.

Answer the questions this generation is asking. There are tools that help you understand what’s being said about a particular topic, including a tool from Google called Google Trends. You can find more on Google’s Think with Google tools page. Using these tools will help you build digital content centered around what’s actually on your target audience’s mind. Of course, this doesn’t replace proactively asking your existing customers through market research to enrich content or develop the product.

Think about using new media if you haven’t already, including social media influencers.

Create attractive digital content that encourages sharing, so it can spread among Generation C. Remember that most of them use smartphones, so your website must be compatible with mobile browsers — and ideally have a dedicated mobile version.

Encourage your customers to leave reviews after their experience (the Second Moment of Truth), so those become input and a source of information (the Zero Moment of Truth) for potential customers. For example, a hotel should encourage its guests to leave a review on TripAdvisor.

You should also consider dedicating one of your staff members to owning this moment and everything related to it, and allocate a budget for improving it.

Closing

I drew on several YouTube videos and a Google book in preparing this article. For anyone wanting to go deeper, I recommend reading that book, since it contains many real-world examples and research statistics, especially in the appendices at the end. It’s a light read — about seventy-five pages — titled “Winning the Zero Moment of Truth — ZMOT.”

You can download it for free, and I also recommend following their dedicated website to keep up with the latest trends on this topic. Subscribe to their mailing list so you’ll be the first to know about anything new.

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