The Consumer Electronics Journey Has Shifted. Has Your Investment Strategy?
- uzmakrauf
- Feb 22
- 7 min read
Updated: Feb 25
How consumers discover, evaluate, and buy consumer electronics has shifted – permanently.
Since the pandemic, it’s not only what consumers buy that has changed, but also how decisions are formed, where research happens, which voices carry credibility, and how value is judged under sustained economic pressure.
Yet many CE organizations still plan investments around legacy metrics and historical spend – misaligned with what drives consumers' decisions today. The result is systematic misallocation: resources concentrated in familiar places, while critical decision moments go underfunded.
I’ve seen this gap firsthand. As former VP of Insights at Samsung across Mobile, TVs, and Home Appliances, I led journey intelligence work that informed go-to-market strategies and supported competitive share gains. The difference was investment precision – aligning resources to how consumers and shoppers actually decide.
Where Investments Break Down:
Brands over-invest in winning the sale – then go quiet once revenue comes in. That's backwards, as 74% of loyalty is built post-purchase (Edelman).
Most CE brands waste money marketing to an "average consumer" who doesn't exist. Gen Z and a 50-year-old premium buyer follow significantly different journeys, requiring different reasons to choose you.
Brands think they control their narrative. They don't. Retailers, influencers, and peer reviews shape your brands' perception before most consumers visit your website – and only 10% will (McKinsey).
Most CE leaders know something isn't working. They diagnose it as a loyalty problem. It's more fundamental than that – it's a failure to fully understand their consumers and invest in how they actually decide.
In an environment of tighter budgets and margin pressure, precision is no longer optional. Brands need clarity on which touchpoints actually drive decisions – and the confidence to deprioritize those that don't.
And timing matters: The pandemic-era surge in Consumer Electronics and Home Appliance purchases (2020–2021) is now entering replacement cycles. Millions of devices are aging out.
The brands that align their investment with how consumers navigate their journeys today will capture that demand. The rest will feel the impact gradually – in share erosion, declining loyalty, and missed lifetime value.
The Journey Framework: A Quick Primer
The Consumer & Shopper Experience Journey (CEJ) maps the complete arc of how consumers discover, evaluate, buy, use, and recommend products.
Not every touchpoint matters equally. CEJ's strategic value lies in identifying – for each target consumer – the specific moments that disproportionately shape choice, confidence, and loyalty – and aligning investment accordingly.
While journeys are rarely linear and consumers enter and exit in different ways, a structured view allows leaders to see what really influences and where assumptions may break down.
We structure our CEJ work against 7+1 phases:
Shopper Path-to-Purchase:
Purchase Trigger – something prompts entry into the market
Awareness & Perception – early impressions form
Consideration & Evaluation – active research kicks in
Decision & Purchase – the moment of truth
Consumer Ownership & Use:
Onboarding – unboxing, setup, first use
Use & Satisfaction – ongoing experience
Advocacy & Cross-Purchase – recommend, review, return – or defect
+1: The Loyalty Loop – when it’s time to buy again, consumers bypass evaluation and repurchase automatically. Apple has mastered this; most brands have not.
Brand loyalty gets built – or lost – at each critical touchpoint.
Which ones truly matter for your brand?
Six Forces Reshaping Every Phase
Several forces are impacting the CE journey simultaneously.
What matters isn’t just recognizing their individual impact, but also how they interact – and where they most distort decision-making and investment priorities if left unmanaged.
Economic Pressures – Value is paramount and redefined. Every purchase must pass the "worth-it" test: quality + experience + price. Many are pulling back, 47% wait for sale, 40% buying fewer. [Numerator]
Consumer Bifurcation – The U.S. consumer is not a monolith. K-shaped economic divergence and generational differences create fundamentally different journey behaviors. One strategy won't serve all.
Channel Evolution – Physical retail dominates sales; digital dominates research. Omni-commerce is table stakes, and ever evolving. Strategies that optimize them separately will underperform.
Media & Influence – Social platforms and creators shape decisions across the full journey – not just awareness. 69% of consumers trust influencer recommendations over brand messaging [Empower]. Partnering well is now essential.
Brand Dynamics – Only 25% of consumers stay loyal to a single CE brand [Numerator]. In categories with long purchase cycles, people are often clueless on latest brands. Being readily visible and in the first consideration set is critical to winning the sale.
Technology – Consumers want AI-enabled convenience but expect human support when it matters. AR/VR and in-store digital tools empower decision confidence when integrated at the right touchpoints.
How Each Journey Phase Is Changing – And What It Demands
Purchase Trigger
What's changing: Economic pressure means consumers delay upgrades and require stronger justification to re-enter categories. Social ecosystems increasingly create upgrade desire and purchase intent. And different generations enter through distinct pathways.
What it demands: Drive the trigger, don't just respond to it, especially as pandemic-era devices now enter replacement cycles. Understand what motivates re-entry in your category – is it "need" (product broke – common in appliances) or "want" (new technology for TVs)? Each requires a different approach.
Awareness & Discovery
What's changing: High impact of creator content, peer reviews, and social research. Retailer ecosystems shape early brand perception as consumers are often clueless on the latest brands in long purchase cycle CE categories. Under 10% visit manufacturer websites [McKinsey]. Instead, they turn to retailers like Best Buy and Amazon to learn.
What it demands: Treat retailer and social platforms as primary brand-building environments. Invest in creator ecosystems, education-driven content, and trust-building signals. Brand.com plays a role later in the journey, not here.
Consideration & Evaluation
What's changing: Consumers start with a narrow set of brands they've heard of, then significantly expand their options as they research (in laptops, shoppers evaluate ~22 products [Criteo]). Retailer and expert platforms most support these phases, but brand.com is now used for details. AR/VR and visualization tools reduce uncertainty.
What it demands: Get into the consideration set early – then ensure you show up with the right content (comparison tools, specs, reviews) in the right places (CNet, retailer sites, brand.com) to make the final shortlist.
Decision & Purchase
What's changing: Consumers expect seamless digital-to-physical continuity. Depth and credibility of reviews drive confidence. Assisted selling, financing, fulfillment, and at-home setup options strongly influence brand choice. Up to 40% of consumers change their minds at this stage based on in-store factors alone.
What it demands: Ensure the factors that close decisions are clear, visible, and funded in proportion to their influence at the moment of choice. Sales associates must support your brand. Reviews must be reliable. CE brands have trained shoppers to wait for a sale – so they do. Promotions don't need deep discounts, but high visibility at the right moment speeds up the purchase.
Onboarding
What's changing: Value is judged by ease of setup, usability, and integration into daily life. Product complexity increases early ownership risk. 70% of consumers would return a product because it's hard to operate; 54% because it's hard to install [copilot.cx]. Consumers are excited when they buy, then grow frustrated searching for setup help that often doesn't exist.
What it demands: Design onboarding as a branded experience, not a support function. Premium brands are getting this right – Samsung's higher-end TVs guide setup automatically. But most brands still leave customers to figure it out alone – losing loyalty, generating returns and bad reviews. This phase is typically underfunded vs its influence.
Use & Satisfaction
What's changing: Product use is where consumers spend the most time with your product – and where 74% of brand loyalty gets built [Edelman]. Long-term value is evaluated through satisfaction, longevity, and ecosystem compatibility. Multi-device ownership dramatically increases retention.
What it demands: Manage ownership as an ongoing relationship with continuous engagement, quality service, and innovation for ecosystem integration. The biggest re-investment opportunity for CE lies in this phase.
Advocacy & Loyalty Loop
What's changing: Satisfied customers not only repurchase (building the loyalty loop) but also fuel discovery and confidence for other shoppers through social sharing, reviews, and peer recommendations. Premium ecosystems create switching barriers that are now psychological, not just functional.
What it demands: A dissatisfied consumer tells others. Quick responses to issues and bad reviews are critical. Advocacy programs must span social, service, and ecosystem channels.
What Must Be Managed Across Every Phase
Two failures cut across every phase of the journey – and getting them wrong undermines everything else.
Different consumers navigate differently.
Many brands don't know who their consumers really are – so they default to the "average." But each phase must be designed to deliver on real differences: discovery channels, trust sources, decision factors, and loyalty drivers. One strategy cannot serve all.
Internal silos break the consumer experience.
Go-to-market teams – marketing, sales, retail, service – optimize for their own KPIs. The consumer sees inconsistent messages on TV, social, and in-store. Confusion leads to delay and abandonment. I've seen silos not only across functions, but within them. Winning requires cross-functional alignment around the end-to-end journey.
Five Priorities for CE Leaders
Get clarity on which touchpoints truly drive consumer decisions.
Not all moments are equal. Investing without this clarity means lower ROI by funding the familiar – not the influential.
Design for distinct consumers – not the statistical "average."
Different segments follow materially different journeys. A strategy built for everyone delivers for no one.
Rebalance investment toward ownership phases.
Onboarding, satisfaction, and service are where long-term value compounds – and where most CE brands are systematically underfunded.
Invest where decisions actually happen.
Retailer platforms and creator ecosystems often shape preference earlier and more powerfully than brand-owned channels.
Align teams around the journey.
When marketing, sales, retail, and service optimize separately, consumers feel the friction – and brands pay for it in lost loyalty and missed lifetime value.
Is Your Investment Model Aligned to the Modern CE Journey?
The CE journey has structurally shifted. The question is whether your investment model is shifting with it.
The brands that outperform won't simply do more – they'll invest with greater precision in the moments that truly drive choice, loyalty, and lifetime value. As CE replacement cycles arrive and margins stay tight, that precision becomes a competitive advantage.
If any of this reflects gaps in your current strategy, a Journey Diagnostic conversation is a focused way to pressure-test assumptions and identify where reallocation could have the greatest impact.
For CE leaders wanting to go deeper, I share a detailed executive presentation – with supporting data and diagnostic frameworks – as part of that conversation.
Uzma Khatana Rauf is the founder of Khatanalytics, a marketing intelligence and strategy consultancy specializing in Consumer & Shopper Experience Journey (CEJ) intelligence for Consumer Electronics and CPG companies.
A former VP of Insights at Samsung across Mobile, TVs, and Home Appliances, she helps mid-to-large CE brands develop higher ROI strategies by knowing precisely where to invest across the full consumer journey.
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