The push and the pull: Touchpoints that inspire vs. touchpoints that convert

Marketers are well aware that not all touchpoints are created equal. But the reasons why a touchpoint is effective or not is much more complicated than many people realise. 

WPP Media’s How Humans Decide research reveals the reality: the ability of a touchpoint to shape brand perception and purchase decisions varies dramatically depending on the context, the category and each consumer's receptivity - not just the touchpoint format itself.  

To learn more about how likely consumers are to be influenced by marketing communications, read our recent blog post on receptivity. 

Accounting for this fluctuating touchpoint impact dramatically increases your chance of influencing your audience’s decisions. Our research showed that picking four touchpoints without understanding their influence gives you a 20% chance of swaying consumer behaviour. However, analysing and choosing the ‘best’ four touchpoints boosts your chances of influence to 47%. 

So, how might tactical touchpoints inform your wider marketing and conversion strategy?  

A touchpoint can be anything that enables communication between a brand and consumer. For instance, ‘TV’ contains touchpoints like ad spots and product placement. Even recommendations from friends count as touchpoints, via the ‘word-of-mouth’ channel.  

What happens next, of course, depends on whether a consumer was primed. As we explored in a previous blog, 84% of purchases involve people picking brands they’re already biased towards. That friendly word-of-mouth recommendation? It may not count for anything unless a consumer has seen and positively experienced a brand several times in advance. As a result, most brands initially need to prioritise brand-building communications over pay-for-performance marketing.  

Once someone is triggered by a need or want, they enter a period where they are actively considering, and moving towards, a purchase; the active stage. Here, the role of brand communication shifts to conversion, either to confirm the bias of the 84% or attempt to divert the 16% who may be considering another brand.  

At this point, brands must carefully consider their touchpoints - with the influence of owned, shared and earned touchpoints (OSE) being especially important. 

Our How Humans Decide study finds that OSE touchpoints are, on average, nearly three times more influential than paid when converting primed consumers to purchase.  

Research into the probability of influencing lower-funnel customers highlights some particularly stark differences. Word-of-mouth recommendations have a 48% chance of influencing a sale and customer reviews 36%. Meanwhile, paid touchpoints like online ads rank at just 17%, and radio/podcasts at 6%. 

Touchpoint influence will also vary by category, with the type of product a consumer is shopping for (such as haircare) often dictating which touchpoints impact them most. As a result, brands must analyse touchpoints’ context, category and consumer before finalising their media plans.  

Ultimately, our research reveals that while paid media builds brands, owned, shared, and earned channels are frequently more effective at converting consumer bias into sales. This means marketers need to replace any lingering one-size-fits-all conversion tactics with strategies shaped by precision and context. Particularly, they must integrate influence as a core planning metric, recognising the power of OSE channels to convert the bias created by paid media. 

WPP Media data provides detailed, category-specific insights to improve planning and investment across owned, shared, earned, and paid channels (OSEP). Drawn from over a million consumer journeys, this intelligence offers clear guidance for more effective integrated OSEP planning and is embedded into our Open Media Studio, ensuring the insights can be applied directly and consistently at scale for our clients. 

Ready to learn more about the How Humans Decide study and explore how WPP Media can transform understanding of your consumers’ purchase journey? Download the whitepaper here.