Most brands have a theory about how their shoppers decide.
They see an ad. They remember the brand. They get to the store. They buy it. Simple.
Except that’s not how it works. The real customer purchase journey is messier, more interesting, and full of moments where your brand can win or lose the sale, moments that never show up in your sales data because they happen well before anyone touches a shelf.
Understanding the shopper’s path to purchase is one of the most commercially valuable things an FMCG brand can do. And most organisations are only seeing a fraction of it.
The path to purchase isn’t a straight line; it’s a series of decisions, influences and competing priorities that play out across different touchpoints, different mindsets and different contexts.
Our path to purchase research maps all of it, from the moment a need is recognised to the moment a product is chosen.
That includes:
When you can see the full picture, the places to intervene become obvious. That’s where the commercial value sits.
Here’s something we see often in large FMCG organisations: significant investment in retail execution, packaging, pricing and promotion – with relatively little investment in understanding whether any of it is reaching shoppers at the right moment in the right way.
The result is a lot of activity that feels productive but doesn’t move the needle, like campaigns that don’t convert, or in-store materials that get ignored. Price promotions that attract the wrong shoppers and erode margin without building loyalty.
Most of these problems trace back to the same root cause: decisions made without a clear map of the consumer purchase journey.
Our path to purchase consulting work is built to fix that. We give commercial teams a grounded, evidence-based picture of how their shoppers actually decide, and then we help them identify exactly where to focus effort for the greatest impact.
There’s a version of path to purchase research that produces a beautiful journey map, gets presented once, and then lives in a shared drive forever.
At Story Insights, our path to purchase consulting is built around a commercial question from the start. What are you trying to change? Where do you think the decision is being lost? What would you do differently if you knew exactly where shoppers were switching to a competitor?
That means the frameworks we use, the questions we ask, and the way we interpret findings are all shaped by deep category and retail knowledge – not imported from a generic research methodology.
Not observations. Not hypotheses, only actionable directions.
The modern shopper path to purchase spans more touchpoints than it did even five years ago. Online research, social influence, loyalty app behaviour, in-store triggers, and post-purchase sentiment all feed into the picture.
Our customer behaviour analytics capabilities let us track and interpret behaviour across these touchpoints, understanding not just where shoppers go, but what they’re looking for, what they find, and what ultimately tips the decision.
That depth of analysis is what separates a useful path to purchase research from a surface-level journey map. We’re not just plotting the steps. We’re understanding the logic and emotion behind each one.
For category management consultants working on range strategy, this level of shopper understanding changes the quality of the decisions being made. For brand managers working on communication, it tells you where your message needs to be and what it needs to say.
For anyone preparing for a retailer conversation, it gives you a shopper-backed story that buyers find hard to argue with.
We are not a generalist market insights agency that occasionally dips into shopper behaviour. This is our world.
Every senior consultant at Story Insights brings 30+ years of hands-on experience in retail and FMCG, and every client works exclusively with those senior people. No handoffs. No account managers passing briefs down the chain. The person who understands your commercial context is the person running your path to purchase research.
We’re also ex-management consultants. Which means we think in structures, prioritise ruthlessly, and always work backwards from the decision you need to make.
Our retail data analytics capabilities sit behind the qualitative picture, so when we map the consumer purchase journey, we can cross-reference what shoppers say with what the data shows they actually do.
That combination of senior experience, commercial rigour and shopper specialisation is what global brands like Coca-Cola, Nestlé and Lactalis rely on when the decisions are high-stakes and the margins for error are small.
Running path to purchase research across a single brand is straightforward enough. Running it across a portfolio, multiple brands, multiple categories, multiple retail channels and markets requires a different kind of thinking.
We design path to purchase programs that scale. Consistent enough to compare across brands and markets. Specific enough to reflect the real competitive dynamics each brand faces. And efficient enough to fit inside the way large commercial teams actually operate.
If your team is making ranging, communication or investment decisions without a clear map of the shopper path to purchase, there’s a better way to work.
Talk to Story Insights today. Our path to purchase consulting helps you understand exactly how your shoppers decide, where your brand is winning, and where the real opportunity sits.