Goals: the hidden drivers of consumer behaviour

A purchase serves several goals at once, and you only hear about some of them

Someone buying accounting software will tell you they need to send invoices. That is true and it is not the whole reason.

They may also want to stop feeling disorganised, to look competent to an accountant they find slightly intimidating, and to get an evening back. None of those will appear in the brief, and 2 of them would be uncomfortable to say out loud.

That is the practical content of this topic. A goal is what the buyer is trying to achieve, the purchase is a means to it, and the stated goal is a filtered version of the real set.

My position is that the standard advice here, to align your brand with your customers' implicit goals, is close to useless as written. It gives you no way to find out which goals are operating, and no way to be wrong. The useful work is a research technique, not a positioning workshop.

The 4 kinds of goal in one decision

Goals differ on 2 axes. How long they last, and whether the buyer can state them.

Fundamental goals persist across many decisions. Situational goals come from the circumstances of this one. Explicit goals can be reported when asked. Implicit goals operate without the buyer articulating them, and often without the buyer being willing to articulate them, which is a different thing.

Crossing those gives 4 cells. All 4 can be present in a single purchase, so this is a checklist rather than a set of buyer types.

	Explicit, the buyer can state it	Implicit, the buyer does not state it
Fundamental, persists across decisions	'I want the business to run properly without me checking everything.' Appears in briefs and sales calls, and is usually where your marketing already points.	Wanting to feel like a competent business owner rather than someone improvising. Rarely said, often decisive between 2 similar options.
Situational, specific to this decision	'I need this working before the quarter ends.' Drives urgency, timescale questions and the shape of the enquiry.	Avoiding a difficult conversation with a partner, an accountant or a board about a decision already made. Explains stalls that have no stated objection.

Most marketing addresses the top-left cell, because that is the language customers use. Most stalled deals sit in the bottom row.

The bottom-right cell is where I would spend attention if you only have time for one. It is also the cell where it is easiest to invent a flattering answer and impossible to check it, which is why the method below matters more than the model.

Laddering: how to find the goals nobody states

There is a proper technique for this and it is nearly 40 years old.

Jonathan Gutman set out the means-end chain in the Journal of Marketing in 1982: buyers connect product attributes to consequences, and consequences to personal values. Thomas Reynolds and Gutman then published the interview method for eliciting those chains, laddering, in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1988.

The mechanic is one repeated question. Start with something concrete the buyer said they wanted, then ask why that matters to them, and keep asking.

A ladder from a real enquiry pattern looks like this.

• I want the reports to be automatic. Why does that matter.
• Because I currently build them by hand on a Sunday. Why does that matter.
• Because I am behind by Monday and I start the week already losing. Why does that matter.
• Because I do not want to be the sort of business owner who is always reacting.

The attribute was automated reports. The consequence was getting a Sunday back. The value at the top is a self-concept about how they want to run a business, which connects this to identity and self-concept.

Three practical notes from using it. Four or 5 'why' questions is usually the ceiling before it becomes irritating, so vary the wording. Stop when the answer becomes a value rather than another consequence. And write the answers verbatim, because the phrase they use at the top of the ladder is often the sentence that should be on your services page.

This is the same discipline as separating a request from a need, which I cover in user needs versus what users ask for.

What 'implicit' does not license you to claim

Implicit goal research has a measurement industry attached to it, mostly built on reaction-time methods such as the Implicit Association Test.

Be careful with how much those tools are said to deliver. The largest challenge to the IAT's predictive power is a 2013 meta-analysis by Frederick Oswald and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which concluded that IAT scores were not good predictors of the behaviour they were meant to predict, explaining at most small fractions of the variance even in controlled settings.

The scope of that finding matters and I do not want to overstate it. It examined racial and ethnic discrimination, not brand preference, so it is not direct evidence that brand IATs fail. What it does show is that the method's predictive validity is weak in the domain where it has been studied most, which is a reason to treat confident implicit-measurement claims about your customers with suspicion, particularly when they arrive from an agency selling the measurement.

For a small business the practical position is simpler. You are not going to run implicit measurement. You are going to interview people properly, which the research above supports and which nobody can sell you a licence for.

Where the standard advice goes wrong

'Align with your customers' implicit goals' fails as guidance because it cannot be checked.

Any campaign can be described after the fact as tapping a deep human motivation. Belonging, status, security and self-improvement are broad enough to accommodate almost anything, so the claim survives whatever happened to sales. That is the same problem as explaining a campaign's success with a single named bias, which I set out in the science of consumer behaviour.

Two rules keep it honest.

Name the goal in the customer's words, taken from an actual ladder, not in the abstract vocabulary of motivation. 'I do not want to be always reacting' is checkable. 'A desire for control' is not.

Then say what your offer does about it. An implicit goal you have identified but cannot serve is a piece of trivia. If the buyer wants to stop working on Sundays, the question is whether your service demonstrably does that, not whether your homepage mentions freedom.

There is also a line worth holding. Identifying an unstated goal so you can serve it is research. Identifying an unstated insecurity so you can press on it is something else, and it produces the manufactured-anxiety marketing I argue against in the role of emotions in purchase decisions.

What to do next

Take your last 5 customers and run one ladder each, retrospectively, from your notes: what they asked for, why that mattered, and what it would have meant if it had not been solved.

If you cannot get past the second why from your existing records, that is the finding. It means every conversation stopped at the explicit, situational cell, and everything you know about your buyers is the part they were comfortable saying.