Mobile is playing a key role in the path to purchase for consumers - not just when they are ready to make a purchase but during the important passive stage when brand impressions are being formed.

However, many marketers today do not understand the full potential that mobile can have, believing that having a mobile social strategy covers them in terms of connecting with customers. As a result, they are missing an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of their customers as mobile has become an important extension of consumers.

?I think mobile is incredibly relevant to marketers not only for fulfilling the potential of their brand or product but bringing them closer to understanding a different part of the purchase cycle that we haven?t paid as much attention to as we probably should have,? said Pele Cortizo-Burgess, global director of integrated planning at media agency MEC.

?It is just a different approach,? he said. ?It is not about having mobile reach its potential, it is about us allowing mobile to help our brands, product, messaging, communications, ideas we sweat, it is about embracing mobile that it plays a critical role and an exciting role in meeting that potential.?

MEC recently introduced a new proprietary approach to understanding and quantifying how consumers make purchase decisions called Momentum that describes the purchase decision as a continuous cycle with four stages: passive stage, trigger, active stage and purchase.

One of the key findings from the research that went into developing Momentum is that the passive stage is more important than some marketers give it credit for.

Here, Mr. Cortizo-Burgess discusses growing understanding of the consumer path to purchase and the role that mobile plays in both the passive and active stages.

What should marketers be doing to better incorporate mobile into the path to purchase?
They need to take a more holistic look at all of the days leading up to a purchase. Don?t just wait until the person is in that traditional purchase funnel stage. I am asking you to consider this person for all of the years that lead up to building his or her perception of your brand.

Why is that important? Because when something triggers a new life stage, such as an addition of a new family member or the need a mortgage, when those triggers happen, what a lot of marketers have missed is all of the pieces that would give them a perception of your brand that were built 20 years prior to the eight-day purchase cycle that we often feel and believe exists when someone goes into make a purchase.

When you look at the passive stage, when he or she is not in the active phase of the purchase, but living their everyday lives, mobile is one of the most important extensions of who they are.

We used to say cars were an extension of whoever the user is. Sometimes we overlook that mobile is an extension of the way that they live their lives in helping to understand customers.

How is the growth in mobile impacting the path to purchase?
Deloitte talks about how one of the most important initiatives for the CMO is rethinking the purchase pathway.

I think it is easy for marketers and people within the industry to think, yes, that is very important, but the challenges that it presents in terms of rethinking that pathway is actually getting us to be more familiar and embracing of technology and behavior that a lot of us probably overlook or have not had exposure to because of the country, market or region they are in.

If you look at Momentum and it is split into two phases, which is active and passive, in the both stages, mobile presents huge opportunities. The trap is to think that the way that you would use mobile in the active stage is exactly the same way you would use it in passive.

Why is it important for marketers to take a closer look at the passive stage?
If you look at what goes on in credit cards in the active stage, all the behavior that people go through is very rational, there is very little emotion bonding in that phase.

More likely than not, more than half of people will enter the active phase knowing what kind of brand they are going to buy when it comes to a product. All of that is built within the passive stage.

You have CMOs or heads of companies saying, I want to build trust and let?s build trust in the active stage. When you look at the category of credit cards, trust is in [the consideration set when picking one], but it is number four or five in terms of what is important. What is important are things like comparisons. The emotions are in there, but it is a different kind of role.

What are marketers not getting right when it comes to leveraging mobile?
What most marketers aren?t getting right is that they are not experimenting more in mobile. And that?s the biggest thing because if you think that mobile isn?t relevant to connecting with people, then we?re missing huge opportunities to be a part of their daily lives.

Because that?s the whole premise of Momentum - the audience we are trying to connect with, they are always on and they are quite happy in that state of mind. It is how we connect with them and the channels that we leverage to connect with them, where they differ and they vary.

When people think about ways to connect with them, many automatically think social. There is a social aspect to mobile, a very intimate piece. Sometimes when clients think social is the only way to go what happens is they miss another way of gaining a more intimate connection with their audience.

I still think it is early days and people are still sort of pioneering when it comes to mobile. I do see more often than not, people not necessarily getting mobile and, therefore, not practicing it or trying to push that discipline forward more.

What role does mobile play in the active stage?
When it comes to the active phase, whether it is comparative, whether you are trying to find out additional information, and those might be the critical data to get you to choose between one credit card or another, a lot of the times, people will think we have some coverage since we have them online.

But what happens is that you miss the point that a lot of people when they live their lives, they might be online a majority of the time, but that does not mean they are in front of a computer screen. It means they might be accessing it from a different portal.

If you look at mobile as a point of access or as a way of receiving intel, that?s another way that marketers can leave nothing to chance at such a critical stage such as in the active stage.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York