The way that prospective students make decisions when selecting courses and education providers is messy - and it has recently become even messier. There are things that student experience designers know about how these purchase decisions are made. We know that what happens between trigger and purchase decision-making is not linear. We know that there is a complicated web of touchpoints that is unique to each person. What is less clear, is how prospective students process all of the information and choices they discover along the way. And what is even more critical, is how this process influences what students ultimately decide to buy or sign-up for.
As the internet has grown, it has transformed from a tool for comparing prices across comparable courses and qualifications, to comparing everything in the student experience. Specialists from Google have been tracking this data across a recent research project across consumers from other industries by evaluating consumer behaviour changes over years on Google Search. An interesting finding from this research was the evaluation of search terms such as "cheap" or best. Their study indicates that worldwide, search interest for "best" has far outpaced search interest for "cheap". The same dynamics hold true in countries around the world like Germany, India and Italy, when the same data is anlaysed through searches for local translations for "cheap" and "best" in search data.
The precise value of "cheap" may vary between individuals, but still carries a singular meaning according to Alistair Rennie and Jonny Potheroe, members of Google's consumer insights team. "Best" on the other hand, according to this study can have a wide range of meanings, including quality, value, popularity and performance.
The focus of their study was what happens in what is referred to as the "messy middle" between the trigger and the purchase, in the context of education, the conversion, application or sign-up. As Covid-19 has accelerated online shopping, online learning and remote work, it is now more important than ever for education providers to make sense of their equivalent of the messy middle.
Using Behavioural Sciences Principles to Purchase Decision Processes
The team at Google's Consumer Behaviour teams along with behavioural science experts, The Behavioural Architects, started on a journey into decoding how consumers decide to buy.
There are valuable lessons from this process that education providers can internalise and adopt to pivot their student recruitment and enrolment efforts in the short, medium and long-term.
This study comprised of literary reviews, shopping observation studies, search trend analysis, and a large scale experiment. Their aim was to understand how consumers make decisions in an online environment of abundant choices and limitless information. What the researchers found was that people deal with scale and complexity using cognitive biases encoded deep in their psychology. As these biases existed long before the internet, they were curious to understand how they affect people's purchase decisions today.
Decoding the "Messy Middle"
Through research, updated decision-making models began to surface. At the heart of this model lies the messy middle - a complex space between triggers and purchase, where customers are won and lost.
Consumers, looking for information to aid purchase decisions, look for information about a category's products and brands and then weigh all the options. This equates, in the study, to two different mental modes in the messy middle: exploration, an expensive activity, and evaluation, a reductive activity. Whatever the consumer is doing across this huge array of resources comprised of search engines, aggregators and review websites, can be classified into one of the two mental modes referenced above.
Consumers loop through these twin modes of exploration and evaluation, repeating the cycle as many times as they need to make the desired purchase decision.
Cognitive biases that influence purchasing behaviour and decision-making
As consumers explore and evaluate in the messy middle, cognitive biases shape their shopping behaviour and influence why they choose one product over another. While many hundreds of biases exist, the following six were prioritised in the research:
- Category heuristics
- The power of now
- Social proof
- Scarcity bias
- Authority bias and
- The power of free
The researchers defined the above biases in the following descriptions:
Category Heuristics: Short descriptions of key product features, benefits and attributes to simplify purchase decisions.
Power of Now: The longer the consumer has to wait for a product, the weaker the proposition becomes.
Social proof: Recommendations and reviews from others to persuade a purchase decision.
Scarcity bias: As stock or availability of a product decreases the more desireable it becomes.
Authority bias: Being swayed by an expert or trusted source.
Power of free: A free gift with purchase, even if unrelated, can be a powerful motivator for action.
These biases formed the basis of a large-scale shopping experiment with real in-market shoppers, simulating 310,00 purchase scenarios across financial services, consumer packaged goods, retail, travel and utilities.
In the experiment, "shoppers" were asked to pick their first and second favourite brands within a category, and then a range of biases were applied to see if people would switch their preference from one brand to the other. To test an extreme scenario, the experiments also included a fictional brand to each category, to which shoppers had zero prior exposure.
The results showed that even the least effective challenger, a fictional cereal brand, still managed to win 28% of shopper preference from a well-known brand, when it has been supercharged, so to speak, with benefits, which in this study, included five-star reviews and an offer for a % extra for free. And in the most extreme case, a fictional car insurer won 87% share of consumer preference when supercharged with advantages across all six biases.
The experiment showed that, when applied intelligently (and responsibly), these behavioural science principles and the behavioural and informational needs they aligned with, are powerful tools for winning and defending consumer preference in the so called "messy middle".
What does this mean for education providers?
This messy middle might seem like a complicated place for those selling insurance and cereal, but even more so when recruiting students and chasing enrolments for qualifications and courses. It is important to remember that to the consumer, or student it "feels" like a normal shopping or browsing experience. The goal is not to force their hand and exit this loop, but to provide them with the information and reassurance they need to make a decision, in this case select a qualification- or programme that aligns to their career goals, aspirations, interests and budget.
Lets's consider the "Messy Middle" in the context of your current enrollment process:
The good news, is that whether you are a category giant or a challenger, such as an emerging private higher education provider, the recommended approach stays the same:
Ensure omni-channel presence of your institution and programmes so that your programmes, student services and experiences are top of mind when prospective students are exploring.
Employ behavioural science principles intelligently and responsibly to make your institution and offerings compelling as prospective students evaluate their options.
Close the gap between trigger and purchase so your existing and prospective students (and alumni) spend less time exposed to competitor brands.
Build flexible, empowered teams who can work across functions to avoid traditional branding and performance silos that are likely to leave gaps in this so-called "messy middle".