Death of the Customer Journey – at the hands of Customer Centricity

Few things in marketing sound better than “Customer Journey”. It combines elements of adventure and freedom – and embodies a desire to capture the choices enabled by such freedom. It implies linearity, narrative… and a focus on the customer. 

The very opposite could be true.

The Customer Journey is the Customer’s problem

POSSIBLE’s Jason Carmel wrote brilliantly about this at the time, on The path to purchase is really a random walk: 

Instead of spending time streamlining a path-to-purchase construct that is mostly fictional, perhaps we should be looking for ways to shift variables that we can control positively in an inherently chaotic system.

In essence, people have a life beyond your digital properties. No matter how big or old, your brand means little in the context of a customer’s life.

In other words, customers, not brands, will define THEIR journeys. Every attempt to map them, measure them, tag them… will be constrained by many factors:

• The digital ecosystem is still dominated by the web, originally built for documents rather than services or transactions. We had to seriously overstretch it in order to accommodate “sessions”, “unique users”, or data persistence of many sorts. And we are still paying for that overstretch. Particularly in terms of tracking and measurement. Whatever resembles a “people-based” environment had to be faked.
• We wouldn't necessarily have ended up in a better place with an identity-based environment. The closer we get to real people, the more unpredictable and emotional “touch points” become.
• Journeys are not brand-centric, or supplier-centric (even when apparently constrained to a physical store in the offline world). Brands happen to be there when people need goods or services. 
• People want to be in control of their choices and their future. Just look at the proliferation of ad blockers, privacy browser plugins or alternative browsers. Recent regulatory initiatives are only a reflection of this.

Regardless of our technical approach, a "deduplication" of customer records (identity, cookies, patterns, etc.) will only work as long as individuals decide to dance along. And the non-written contract we have so far relied upon may just not be there anymore, if it ever was.

The Brand Journey IS your problem

As businesses, we do have an obligation to make the most of OUR resources, and this calls for a good understanding of the “Brand Journey” you want to make available to potential and current customers. In essence, we want to be present at every possible stage of the customer’s decision-making process. This is very different from attempting to monopolize those stages.

As we enter a demand-led world, customers are more empowered every day. This does not mean that we get to see more of them, but the exact opposite: THEY get to dictate and control the data they expose to brands and the decisions they make.

Whatever comes next (think of “The Upside Down” from today’s CRM) has to take that assumption as a starting point. Hard as it is for traditional marketers used to dealing with voiceless audiences. Tough as it will be for digital marketers held on a short lease by their CFOs, conditioned by short-term returns and unrealistic expectations.

Redundant, unidirectional “Customer 360” endeavors are about to get replaced by trusted C2B connections. In a world of increasing transparency, portability, and interoperability, it is only natural that modularity and customer-driven activation become the new differentiators. 

In short: Choose your own adventure.

(I wrote and published most of this back in 2017, as part of an introduction to the “Journey Distribution Flow”, in the context of the paper “The ROI of Accepting Attribution is Impossible”.)