Decision Time. When is the Moment of Truth now?
AI was supposed to get rid of the middleman.
Many years ago, the FMCG giant Procter & Gamble came up with a concept they named the ‘Moment of Truth’. Imagine a shopper, wheeling a shopping trolley down the aisle with a wobbly wheel. She stops by the washing detergent and looks up and down the shelves. She compares the prices, the specials, the new features - enzymes and spring woodland fabric softener scent. She reaches out for a box. It’s the moment of truth - until, a merchandiser hands her a sample packet. At that point, the brand still had ways of changing your mind.
The world moved on, and Google spent a lot of time on an updated concept - ZMOT, or, the Zero Moment of Truth. It was a similar theory, that a shopper with an internet connected device could reach out to friends and get advice, watch influencer videos, read reviews and the expertise of industry experts. All that research was done before the customer walked into the shop. They knew what they wanted. The RAM, the pixel quality of the camera, the colour… Everything that a brand marketing team could do had been done.
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And now, everyone is talking about agents. If we are to believe the agentic commerce experts, each one of us will have an AI personal shopper who will understand us perfectly and negotiate with the AI salesperson agent to get the best deal for the buyer, seller and producer of the product. Right?
The reality today, is that the agent will have to be trained. It will have to learn all your buying habits and preferences in context. It will need to know your location, the season, the time of day, perhaps even the weather. It will need to know if I am buying for me, for my employer, my family or a gift for someone else. It will need to know my size, my dietary requirements and allergies and my dislikes - the companies and brands that annoyed me in the past or I had a bad experience with and choose not to buy from anymore. That sounds like a lot of knowledge to impart. Wouldn’t it be easier to just specify what you want the agent to buy?
Or, isn’t it a more efficient customer journey to navigate to the cola category and choose 500ml Coke, rather than back and forth and back and forth with a chat-bot?
Maybe, if I was a loyal shopper, and the AI had all my shopping data, going back a decade, it could work out the difference between weekends and weekdays and patterns relating to public holidays and special family occasions that repeated every year. Maybe it would see how I react to price reductions - do I pantry stock? Do I respond to sampling campaigns, do I switch brands? Honestly, I can’t think of a retailer who has that much information on me. (I’m not a fan of loyalty programs).
But what does agentic shopping mean for the CMO? PMOT - the prompt moment of truth. If the customer has not already made the brand decision and specified it in the prompt, then the agent will make the brand decision for them, or at least present them with options that may not include your products and services.
I’m not sure there are many things that I truly don’t care about the brand. If I was replacing my electric kettle, I might not mind about the logo. Socks. Rice? Actually I do care about rice - if not the brand, the agent would need to know what I was using the rice for - so it make the right choice between Glutenous, Basmati or Arborio.
Which might mean, and this is a little bit controversial - marketing to the agents and their models is not the best thing to be spending your budget on. If your brand is on an outdoor ad as the buyer types the prompt into their phone, that might influence the request. The well placed ad in a podcast whose audience perfectly matches your target market might change the prompt.
The job of the CMO has always been to get a customer to ask for a product by name. That is still the job of the CMO. Awareness is not enough. Being top of mind at the prompt moment of truth is.
As always, if you got this far - thanks for reading. I am considering doing a podcast version of these newsletters, let me know if you would prefer the audio version.