Strategy chunking (2)
For reasons of clarity in describing further how strategies work in NLP it's useful to consider a common example and break that down into it's component parts so that we can understand it more fully.
The example that we'll consider here is a person's Buying Strategy purely because the buying process is likely to be one that most people are familiar with.
At the top level the Buying Strategy is broken down into four chunks:-
- Motivation
- Decision making
- Convincer
- Reassurance
At step 1. a person becomes motivated to make a purchase.
Step 2. involves investigation of and selection from the available options.
The Convincer (step 3) let's the person know that this purchase meets their criteria at the point of sale.
Finally, step 4 is the means by which the person is subsequently reassured that they made a good purchase (or from another viewpoint, avoids 'buyer's remorse').
At this level of abstraction these four chunks provide labels for the steps typically included in the buying process, but reveal very little detail about the underlying processes involved.
More detailed information is available by 'chunking down' one level to reveal that the four chunks which constitute the 'Buying Strategy' are themselves composed of a number of chunks in the form of distinct, sequential steps. At this lower level the original four chunks, Motivation, Decision Making, Convincer and Reassurance, can be treated as individual strategies in their own right. These four lower level strategies are nested inside the higher level Buying Strategy.
The results obtained from the elicitation of a person's Buying Strategy are therefore likely to be more useful if chunked at the lower level of their strategies for motivation, decision making, convincer and reassurance.