Seven years managing shopper marketing at Coca-Cola Oceania teaches you one thing above everything else: the decision to buy happens much later than most marketers think.
We spend enormous energy on brand awareness. Top-of-mind recall. Category association. All of it matters. But the moment a customer actually chooses your product — the moment they reach for one thing and not another — that decision is made in a completely different cognitive state than the one your above-the-line advertising reached.
The 7-second window
Research consistently shows that most in-store purchase decisions are made in under seven seconds. In that window, a shopper is dealing with competing visual stimuli, physical fatigue, distraction, and the unconscious anchoring of dozens of past decisions. They are not evaluating your brand rationally. They are pattern-matching.
Which means your brand needs to be the right pattern.
Not just recognisable. Not just prominent. But specifically designed for the context in which the decision is actually made — the shelf, the aisle, the moment of reach.
What I saw inside one of the world’s best marketing organisations
At Coca-Cola, the resources dedicated to understanding shopper behaviour were extraordinary. Eye-tracking studies. Purchase path analysis. Fixture design testing. The level of rigour applied to the physical retail environment was the same level of rigour applied to television advertising — because the outcomes were just as important.
What I learned from that environment is that the brands winning at shelf aren’t winning because they have better products. They’re winning because they understand the cognitive context of the purchase moment better than their competitors.
Cleaner on-pack hierarchy. More intuitive colour-blocking. Adjacencies that make the choice feel easier. These details compound. Across a range, across a fixture, across a retail network, small advantages in the moment of decision translate into significant share shifts.
What this means for brands outside FMCG
The principle isn’t limited to supermarket shelves.
Every brand has a “moment of decision” — the specific context in which a potential customer moves from consideration to action. For a service business, it might be the website. For a B2B brand, it might be a presentation or a proposal. For a retail brand, it might be the point of sale or the social ad at the moment of intent.
Understanding that context — truly understanding it, not just inferring it — changes what you build and how you build it.
Most brands design their marketing for a hypothetical customer in an ideal state of attention. The best brands design for the real customer, in the messy, distracted, emotionally loaded context where they actually decide.
That’s the difference between marketing that looks good and marketing that works.
And it’s the question we always start with.