Penny Andrews
“Just browsing” isn't as brand-agnostic as it looks
Last updated: September 4, 2026
Retailers and brands already know the consideration phase for customers starts long before anyone's in a showroom or browsing a website - it's a big part of why so much budget goes into social media further and further upstream.
You might have a presence on Pinterest, but I think we may still be underestimating how early the real decisions are being made.
Browsing isn't as vague as it looks
“Just browsing” and “gathering inspiration” during the planning process tend to get treated as vague, brand-agnostic behaviours - feeling forming, not decision making. I'm not sure that's true.
What we see in Reno's decor tools
We see a version of this in Reno's decor tools. We didn't add real paint brands to push anyone toward a decision, or to influence what they'd eventually buy. We added them because a lot of customers asked us to; a generic colour wheel didn't feel realistic enough for their planning. They were wanting to get as accurate and specific as they could, still long before they were anywhere near ready to shop.
“Am I really brave enough to go with orange?” - high level, exploratory, nowhere near a fixed decision in their own mind.
But rather than a generic colour wheel, that exploration now happens using real colours from real paint brands - Farrow & Ball, Little Greene, Lick, COAT and many others we work with. So instead of landing on a vague idea of “a warm green,” they land on an actual, specific product.
And because a plan naturally remembers whatever you picked, that specific selection is now what's sitting in their plan by default, unless they go and change it.
Nobody needs to be misled for this to work
None of that requires anyone to be misled or rushed into anything. The customer picked that colour because it looked right to them, on its own merits, same as they would from any swatch book. The only difference is that the option in front of them was already real and specific, rather than generic.
But it does mean the brand didn't need the customer to find them in an online search or browse the many paint aisles in store, or even think of themselves as “shopping”, to end up as the answer already sitting in the plan.
Earning that kind of place - being the specific, real option someone can plan with early in their journey - is worth more than it might feel like from a distance. It's easy to assume that's too far removed from an actual sale to matter, but by the time someone's ready to buy, the plan has often already decided for them.
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