The purchase decision process can be thought of as a funnel, where customers are potentially lost at each stage, either because of lack of awareness, misperceptions, or because the messages they receive about a product or service do not match with their wants or needs. Your customers and prospects are constantly bombarded with information. All of the messages they receive about your product or service, from whatever sources, ultimately impact purchase behavior. From analyzing attributes for thousands of products and services over many years, Burke has discovered that some attributes act as filters. A product or service has to meet certain minimum perceptual requirements to first get considered. Once in the consideration set, the product has to meet different perceptual requirements to get purchased on a trial or test basis. Once tried, there may be yet different requirements to be adopted or purchased repeatedly.

STAGES^® provides clients with a better understanding of how customers are acquired or lost, by tracing them through the "funnel" from awareness to consideration to trial to repeat purchase to heavy usage (behavioral loyalty). Image attributes are used as predictors at the various "stages" of the purchase process to identify which perceptions of the product or service are most critical in the minds of buyers when moving from one level of the product adoption process to the next.

For example, when buying personal computers, some buyers may primarily use "speed" to decide which PC's will be considered for purchase, then use "reliability" perceptions to make their final decision. STAGES analysis can show you how to maximize the number of customers retained at each stage of the product adoption process.

STAGES was developed by Burke to realistically estimate the impact of attributes on each stage of the purchase decision process.

The ultimate goal of STAGES is to help our clients put more customers on the bottom line, or put another way, to diagnose how to reduce the number of potential customers lost at each decision point.

With STAGES, Burke produces custom behavioral models to identify the product or service attributes that drive each stage of the purchase process to an optimum level. STAGES allows you to simulate attribute changes and predict the impact on consideration, trial, adoption, and ultimately, customer loyalty.

The Division President of a multinational health care company wanted answers to the following questions:

• What aspects of our product or service really "enhance our value" to customers?
• What aspects are "nice to have" but not really necessary?
• Which aspects are "minimum requirements" that we absolutely must deliver?

The answers to these questions were needed in order to allocate resources and clearly set divisional operating priorities. Burke applied its STAGES protocol to identify the elements of product and service that were most leverageable and which truly differentiated the client's "value for the money" image among current and potential customers.

Consequently, the client established a human and capital resource budget best targeted to maximize return on investment.