Simonson and Rosen's Influence Mix
The Influence Mix maps where a buyer's confidence in a purchase actually comes from - their own prior beliefs and experience, what other people say, and what marketers say - and argues the balance has shifted hard away from the marketer and towards the other two.
Three spokes fan out from the buying decision at the centre, one for prior belief, one for peers, one for marketing.
Reach for this when…
- Your ad spend is up but conversion isn't moving and you don't know why.
- Customers arrive already knowing more about your product than your sales team assumes.
- Reviews and forums are shaping opinion of your product and you're not part of that conversation.
How to run it
- Map the three sources shaping a buyer's decision: their own prior beliefs, what other people say, and what your marketing says.
- Audit how much weight each source actually carries for your specific buyers, not in general.
- Check whether your actual product quality can survive contact with what other people are already saying about it.
- Invest attention where the real influence sits, not just where your budget has always gone.
- Fix the product first if other people's opinions would expose a gap; no campaign covers that for long.
A worked example
Situation. Sofie Peeters ran Leie Home, a furniture e-commerce business in Ghent, Belgium, and kept increasing her ad spend as sales growth flattened.
Applied. She traced actual purchase paths and found most buyers were reading independent reviews and comparison sites before they ever clicked an ad, and her products scored badly on delivery time in exactly those reviews.
Result. She shifted budget from paid ads to fixing delivery speed and got honest reviews out ahead of purchase. Conversion moved more from that than any campaign had in a year.
The catch
The framework can tip into fatalism - marketing still shapes first impressions and category entry, it hasn't become powerless. Other people's opinions aren't neutral either; review platforms have their own incentives. And a buyer's own prior beliefs can outweigh both, which is easy to forget when you're staring at review scores. Use it to check where your effort goes, not to abandon marketing altogether.
If your product wouldn't survive an honest review from someone else, better marketing just gets more people to find that out faster.
Origin: Itamar Simonson; Emanuel Rosen