Intent-based mar­ket­ing, or under­stand­ing the con­sumer intent that prompts search, is the con­cept behind Avinash Kaushik’s See, Think, Do, Care mar­ket­ing mod­el.

Kaushik is a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing evan­ge­list at Google and, in an inter­view with Acronym CMO Mike Gre­han in 2015, he said he hates stan­dard offline mar­ket­ing mod­els like aware­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion, pur­chase and loy­al­ty, so he cre­at­ed a new one. (And, per Gre­han in a recent inter­view, Care has since been append­ed as a fourth stage.)

“Rather than think­ing self­ish­ly as a com­pa­ny, you have to think from a con­sumer per­spec­tive,” he told Gre­han.

Instead, Gre­han said brands some­times still use AIDA – Aware­ness, Inter­est, Desire and Action – even though it is a mod­el he said was devel­oped by a door-to-door cash reg­is­ter sales­man a cen­tu­ry ago and doesn’t apply to mod­ern mar­ket­ing.

So what is See, Think, Do, Care?

The See stage includes what Kaushik said is a brand’s largest qual­i­fied address­able audi­ence.

The Think stage is the seg­ment of con­sumers think­ing about a par­tic­u­lar thing.

And the Do stage includes con­sumers ready to buy.

And, per Gre­han, Care is the ongo­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion there­after that inspires repeat pur­chas­es.

Kaushik used the exam­ple of a car com­pa­ny to fur­ther explain See includes all the con­sumers who go from place to place and have mon­ey, Think includes those who are con­sid­er­ing a new car and Do is the con­sumers ready to buy now.

For his part, Gre­han likened See, Think, Do, Care to Andrei Broder’s Tax­on­o­my of Web Search, or what Gre­han called sem­i­nal research that deter­mined search engine queries are infor­ma­tion­al, nav­i­ga­tion­al and trans­ac­tion­al.

Why is this a better marketing model?

Fur­ther, the prob­lem, Kaushik said, is many sites still only cov­er Do, so they don’t address con­sumers in oth­er stages. That, in turn, means there’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate con­tent ear­li­er in the con­sumer jour­ney to nur­ture these con­sumers at what­ev­er pace they want.

That includes dis­play ads, too.

“When tar­get­ing the largest address­able qual­i­fied audi­ence with a dis­play cam­paign based on demo­graph­ics [and] psy­cho­graph­ics, dis­play ads are ‘buy now, buy now, buy now,’ [and] it’s not going to work,” Kaushik said.

Instead, brands should have dis­tinct dis­play strate­gies for See and Think as well.

Gre­han said he finds he still has to evan­ge­lize about these oth­er stages – and, he not­ed, many brands under­stand the con­cept, but want it for free. In oth­er words, the paid search bud­gets at most com­pa­nies are trans­ac­tion­al.

“When it comes down to media spend, nobody spends mon­ey in the See/Think stages, only on the Do stage and that’s the hard­est place to come in…[but] the ear­li­er you can con­nect with a poten­tial cus­tomer, the soon­er the brand affin­i­ty begins,” Gre­han said. “Nobody is spend­ing mon­ey to reach [con­sumers] at the See stage, which is prob­a­bly cheap­er to cre­ate and present content…from a key­word point of view than it is to chal­lenge some­one at the Do stage.”

In fact, in a Q&A with Think with Google, Gre­han also said brands should not wait until the so-called I‑want-to-buy moment to make a pitch. Instead, they should come in ear­li­er when con­sumers are research­ing because in part it gets awful­ly crowd­ed in lat­er phas­es.

“My advice to brands is: Don’t slug it out with every­one else sole­ly at the I‑want-to-buy part of the low­er fun­nel. Reach these cus­tomers long before your com­peti­tor does, such as dur­ing the I‑want-to-know moments, and build brand affin­i­ty,” Gre­han told Think with Google. “When you start at the top of the fun­nel, you have the largest address­able audi­ence and you can posi­tion your­self as the author­i­ty in the field so cus­tomers will have you in mind as they progress on their pur­chase path.”

That means think­ing more about con­sumer needs and how your prod­ucts solve their prob­lems. It may not gen­er­ate a sale in the imme­di­ate future, but it gen­er­ates good will and makes your brand front-of-mind when they are ready to pur­chase prod­ucts in your ver­ti­cal.

What’s more, Gre­han told Think with Google brands don’t have to be there for every moment – just those that are most impor­tant for their brands, such as where deci­sions and pref­er­ences are being made, which means invest­ing in ear­li­er stages to start a dia­logue.

Indeed, Kaushik agreed using behav­ior to dis­cern intent and sub­se­quent­ly tar­get­ing adver­tis­ing is a great way to exe­cute a See, Think, Do, Care strat­e­gy.

‘Stop selling, start helping’

But Gre­han also not­ed just because con­tent is rel­e­vant doesn’t mean it is use­ful – and length of engage­ment isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the best barom­e­ter. That’s the case with, say, the weath­er, in which con­tent that pro­vides the tem­per­a­ture may quick­ly solve a need.

“It’s not just about how long peo­ple engage with your con­tent – it’s about how use­ful it is in the moment,” Gre­han said. “That’s why I’m so much of a sup­port­er of micro-moments because they exist – they help on the path to pur­chase to get to that next point.”

Intent-dri­ven con­tent is also not nec­es­sar­i­ly tied to key­words.

“If you were stuck with key­words and were search­ing for ‘fish tank,’ you would nev­er see ‘trop­i­cal fish aquar­i­um,’ which might be bet­ter,” Gre­han said. “It’s under­stand­ing the need of the end user in that par­tic­u­lar moment… ‘Stop sell­ing, start help­ing,’ is my new slo­gan now in that See/Think stage.”

But Kaushik also told Gre­han dig­i­tal mar­keters have not nec­es­sar­i­ly made the case that they can dis­cern intent through behav­ior, which is a much bet­ter way to tar­get and/or serve ads than psy­cho­graph­ics and demo­graph­ics – like a 98-year-old woman who wants an iPad.

Gre­han said that’s in part because some brands still cling to a more con­ven­tion­al per­spec­tive in which they try to push a broad­cast media mod­el onto dig­i­tal.

“But nobody watch­es the Inter­net,” Gre­han said.

And that’s why search behav­ior is a bet­ter indi­ca­tor of what con­sumers want than demo­graph­ics. In oth­er words, if mar­keters try­ing to reach the afore­men­tioned 98-year-old woman used the con­ven­tion­al mod­el and sim­ply her age, she might only see ads for wheel­chairs. But mar­keters tap­ping into her search behav­ior around con­sumer elec­tron­ics would be bet­ter posi­tioned to deter­mine what she real­ly wants – and make the sale.