I just bought a digital camera and here was my path to purchase.

1. On December 30^th, I realized I needed one for New Year’s Eve.
2. While in the car, I checked for deals on my foursquare and shopsavvy apps for electronics retailers near my location.
3. I chose a retailer to call and made sure they had cameras in the price range I was considering
4. I went to the store, chose a camera from an acceptable brand and got a memory card.
5. I then used Red Laser to image the UPC code of each and found lower prices at nearby stores
6. Rather than go to another store, I showed the results to the salesman who got manager approval to match both prices for a total savings of about $35.
7. I left the store feeling smart and successful and more likely to shop there again the next time as I know I will always get the best price there with the same shopping steps.

Marketers are training us to become system beaters. We all see a continuous flood of e-mails offering deep discounts and free shipping. Increasingly, marketers are making it easy for us by going paperless as we download the offers into our smart phones and loyalty cards.  Remember when we had to wait until Dec 26^th for big sales?  Now they start at midnight of Thanksgiving. And social media is a dream come true for system beaters; not only do we find the deals we want for ourselves but now we get to share them with all of our fans, friends, and followers.  We retweet the deals we find, and we like them via Facebook so all our friends see them too.  And by the way, looking for deals is a main motivator to like a brand page in Facebook in the first place.  Also, digital and mobile have compressed the timeline.  I now know I can wait until the last minute to start my research.

So, is this the end of branding? What should marketers and retailers do if shoppers are forever transformed into system beaters?  All is not lost as System beater behavior is itself habitual and selective in how a particular shopper goes about finding deals, just like we only use about 10% of the apps on our smart phones, and watch only 10% of the channels on our TV.  Study how consumers are seeking out deals…their system beating behavior…and then make sure you are ahead of competition at knowing how to use those promotional touchpoints to build habits.

Here are six marketing ideas to get loyalty lift from system beaters in return for hot deals:

1. Like-gate your promotion offers on Facebook
2. Use paid search to drive traffic to your owned media, where the landing page offers a relevant discount in exchange for some lasting marketing benefit;  people sign up for your e-mails, become members, download your app, or at the least, receive a cookie for subsequent promotional ad targeting
3. Make all of your offers shareable by including a sharing widget in the offer.  Reward the fan who shares the most.
4. For retailers, price matching should include matching Amazon online prices (as long as the item is new) so your store doesn’t become a showroom and you convert the trip into a sale.
5. Retailers should attach promotions to check-ins (like $5 off your purchase of $50 or more) to win the trip and build loyalty. (Check out Levelup which David Berkowitz from 360i made me aware of.)
6. Mastery of mobile is a must. Build apps that offer useful information as well as discounts so they turn your brand into a mobile portal. Also, please optimize your website for mobile.

Shopper behavior has forever changed and is forever changing and with it, the rules for branding.

Then it struck me: the tablet is the first device that can actually travel with the shopper through the complete path to purchase and if the prices come down enough, retailers might lease them for free to their frequent shoppers and club members to lock in their loyalty.  The lifetime value of a shopper would more than pay for this.  Imagine the incredible marketing value to a manufacturer who can deliver the exact right message to the right person, exactly at the right moment…the point of purchase.

Research I have amassed indicates that tablet owners already spend more time accessing the internet via their tablets than their computers. Tablets are becoming preferred devices among their owners for online shopping according to Forrester.  Today that is from the living room, but why should it be restricted so?  The tablet is inherently a mobile device.  Imagine a store completely wired for wifi so you can use your tablet as you shop. Imagine you have planned your trip at home, on your tablet by scanning what you are about to run out of and by searching on your tablet for coupons and interesting dinner ideas.  While you are doing this, smart marketers and retailers are advertising their products and offers using an interactive sight, sound, motion experience. Now, you have created a shopping list on your tablet, which also contains all of your frequent shopper information for the store you are about to visit.  When you enter the store with your tablet, it recognizes your presence and greets you with a video message from the store manager.  You place the tablet in your shopping cart so you can watch it as you go and your shopping list automatically gets reorganized so you can see which items that are on your list are in the aisle you are currently in.  This will encourage a shopper to completely navigate the store which any retailer would love. While you are walking down the aisle, windows awake on your tablet delivering messages that are relevant to you based on shopping history and interactively offering you deals.

Checkout is a breeze as you have all of the offers stored paperlessly, along with your frequent shopper data and mobile payment info.  As you leave, the tablet awakes to wish you a nice day and thank you for shopping at that retailer.  Of course, this shopping trip becomes part of the stored information so planning the next trip becomes easier.

When I discussed this topic with my friend Doug Stephens (@retailprophet), he advised me to think about the trend that consumers are using the best screen for the purpose at hand. While a number of apps are being developed for smart phones, I think the tablet might be the best screen for shopping.  A number of initiatives reflect this thinking as well, most recently in the US, mediacart.  Now there is a significant initiative in China that is similar.  While such efforts have yet to succeed, the big difference I am proposing is that rather than using a foreign device attached to a shopper cart, use the same tablet you use in your living room, on the train, in the bathroom, etc. that you then bring to the store and mount on the cart.

There is still much work to build the needed in-store and cloud-based technology infrastructure to support this vision.  However, as the Institute for the Future preaches, develop foresight about possible futures to provoke strategies that need to start in the here and now.

Have you studied this yet? Have you measured how people have formed their strategies to find you by their recurring experiences as they seek brands, advice and offers out on the web? From conversations I have with marketers, it does not seem like this is adequately researched.

For example, research shows that a main motivator for liking a brand on Facebook is to be made aware of deals.  Also, people will seek recommendations from friends. However, you can imagine that one would NOT turn first to Facebook for store hours and locations.

Consider a list of consumer tasks.  Isn’t it likely that consumers might have these tasks in mind and would first turn to different digital places depending on purpose?

• Deals and offers
• Store locations and hours
• Planning meals or parties
• Ratings
• Customer service questions
• Community connection
• Finding a mobile app to download
• Making purchases

When you start thinking about your digital strategy from a consumer perspective, you also realize that people turn to third party sites, not just your owned media site or Facebook page. This needs to be part of your strategy.

Let’s focus on one of these tasks; finding deals and offers. There are a variety of entry points that consumers use.  The obvious one is search and the trend in Google search shows an increase in searching for “coupons”.  But, many more people just go to coupons.com (about 10MM per month, according to Compete).  Furthermore, a number of women have created a presence across Twitter, Facebook, and their own website to become information and distribution centers regarding deals and coupons.

Moneysavingmom (Crystal Paine) has a big presence on Twitter, Facebook, and her own website.  On Twitter, she has over 80,000 followers, is on over 1,000 lists, and tweets deals about 15 times per day.  On Facebook, there are 143,000 who have liked her page.  According to Quantcast, she has about half a million visitors and over one million visits each month.  The deals that she lists on her website also serve as the content for her tweets and Facebook updates.  She juxtaposes the best deals from different retailers via a page with all of the logos for different retailers that are clickable, taking you to deals she finds from their websites.

By comparison, Couponmom (Stephanie Nelson) has an even bigger monthly traffic profile (over 1MM visitors) and has been featured on Oprah and CNN.  She has 147,000 people who have liked her on Facebook and 95,000 followers on Twitter.

Bottom line for retailers: these coupon-aggregating moms sites drive trips to stores!

With newspaper circulation declining, the future of promotional advertising will be shifting away from the printed page.  Sites like these might very well be a big part of the digital future of how people “circular shop”.

How people seek out a community connection is also an interesting question.  People seek out their friends on Facebook and “like” brands, but do they seek a community connection with brands there?  Mystarbucksidea, dellideastorm, and Harley-Davidson show the power of building community in owned media.

The most important point to remember about creating a digital brand strategy is that you are not in control of how people will seek out your brand, consumers are.  Consumers have been conditioned by all of the options that digital marketing provides and you can either make it easy for people to find your brand or hard.  Consumers will reward the access and simplicity offered by a brand with a properly aligned digital presence.

The first step in developing an effectively integrated digital strategy is to measure patterns of how consumers digitally seek out you and your competitors for each purpose.

Smartphones, tablets, iPod touch will create the mobile, app-enabled lifestyle and that means apps.  Why?  Because mobile is not like a computer with a small screen; it is transformational. Apps provide needed simplicity for mobile web access by extracting the essence of a service and put it right in front of the user, in a way that fits perfectly within the screen limitations and adds a localized dimension. For example, search for Walmart on your computer now do that on your Smartphone. Locations near your current location will be mapped and, if you click the link, you will get to a very app-like landing page rather than the one you see on your computer.  Search for eBay and the app itself shows up in the results.  They have optimized nicely for mobile search and perhaps that has something to do with their pronouncement that nearly $2 billion in gross sales were generated via mobile in 2010.  On the other hand, many grocery retailers are not yet optimized for mobile and you have to do the pinch and stretch thing to be able to read the website you get to, and then, only to find that the coupons need to be printed!

If there is any life activity that is crying out to become appified, simplified, localized and mobilized on your smart phone, it is shopping.  Furthermore, marketers want it too.  Imagine; you will be able to deliver messages and offers to a shopper as they stand right in front of your brand and its competitors that are customized from prior purchase activity.  This is behavioral targeting and recency, two principles of media placement, on steroids.

Look at this distribution of time spent on apps by category from Flurry; it appears that aiding shopping has not yet taken off.

1. Games: 47%
2. Social: 32%
3. News: 9%
4. Entertainment: 7%
5. Other: 5%

However, app developers are starting to work on this.  Modiv has been testing a mobile shopping solution called Scan It with Stop and Shop that is now about to be tested on iPhones.  It links offers to your frequent shopper history and knows where you are in the store.

Ad Age reports Finish Line unveiled a new app that is focused on shopper experience; it gives shoppers access to real-time inventory at the store nearest them. Users can check to see if an item is available in the style, size and color they’re looking for before coming to the store.

Amazon offers a price checking app so you can be in a Best Buy or Walmart, check the price of the same item at Amazon and decide if you want to order it from within the app.  Making a purchase at Amazon while standing in the Walmart “showroom”!

Truly it is the “rise of the planet of the apps”!  As an increasing majority obtains smart mobility, as smart phones replace PCs as the number one way of accessing the internet, as life becomes app-enabled, people will insist, “yeah, we want an app for that”…and they’ll get it.

In app-enabled lifestyles, marketers will see transformational opportunities to connect consumers and shoppers with their brand.  They will optimize their owned media for mobile. They will see new mobile ad units that are very impactful, and vertically integrate their relationship with consumers from the living room to the store, becoming relevant at the right time, right place, with the right message.

I’ll share more of my thoughts on the app-enabled lifestyle on Nov 30-Dec 1 at the SF Appnation III conference.

Now, since 2010, Google has started a campaign around  ZMOT, the zero moment of truth.  This recognizes that many shoppers actually start their shopping online via a search.  Again, true.

However, let me introduce “minus one” in path to purchase, because there is something that comes before search.

Most of search that refers traffic to a given site is based on typing in a trademark name, not a generic phrase like, “get the smell out of my carpet”.  So, how did someone get to know about that trademark that they thought to search for?  I think there are 3 main sources:

1. Push advertising on TV and digital display that creates desire and curiosity
2. Word of mouth and conspicuous consumption (those white earbuds on the iPhone had tremendous impact on creating societal acceptance)
3. Visibility at retail.    Yes, the first moment of truth can come BEFORE the zero moment of truth. In a way, packaging was the zero moment as it was the searchable content before mobile devices brought the internet into the store. Well, you knew linear marketing was dead, right?

So, I’d say that the moment of curiosity and desire that creates interest in learning more is the minus one moment of truth.  Minus one can be triggered anywhere; in the living room while watching TV, on the train, in the store, or in Facebook and Twitter (and now Google plus) conversation.

The mating dance between minus one and zero has always existed.  What I think happens is that unless you can quickly act on your desire, it dissipates.  Before internet search, when minus one occurred you needed to go to the store, or call a friend, or buy a magazine.  I have to believe that 90% or more of desire was squandered in the pre-digital age.  Now, consumers can instantly search for something they are curious about…from their computers at home or work, or mobile devices right in the store, or from 35,000 feet.  So what search does is it lets us act on our curiosity before it dissipates which is powerful for marketers.   Some marketers are ahead of the curve at turning minus one into zero anywhere and anytime but this is a big part of digital strategy…turning curiosity at minus one into a zero moment activity before it dissipates.  This should be a priority for a marketer.  How would you do this at shelf, online, in a TV commercial, outdoors?

So for moments of truth marketing, we need to keep a few pieces of advice in mind:

1. There is something before the zero moment of truth; minus one is the point at which desire and curiosity lead to the desire for search and seeking activity.  What is your minus one strategy?  Is it TV-based, social-based, store-based or something else?
2. A progressive marketer will find ways to enable people to instantly pass into the zero moment by fully leveraging digital, social, mobile wherever that person might be when minus one hits.
3. The second moment of truth is not just based on product use; it is based on experience with the brand which includes continuing to search and talk about it in social media.  The McKinsey consumer decision journey work proves this.  Hence, second moment and zero moment loop around and reconnect.

There are powerful concepts in moments of truth marketing, but don’t get too literal. The moments are not in a fixed sequence mapped to time and place even though they are numbered.  Mobile in particular, will bust up any thoughts of sequence.