Moving People Along the Customer Journey

Part 1

From the line to loop

There’s a lot of buzz around customer journeys these days. Interestingly, it used to be shown as a simple straight line, from awareness to purchase, and ended there. Then we discovered that there really isn’t a simple beginning and end to the customer journey. As soon as a purchase is made and the customer begins using a product or service, the customer starts down the path to discovering the next brand offering - perhaps an up-sell, cross-sell, or add-on to what they already purchased.

The classic example of this is portrayed with fast food. French fries are the cross-sell to your burger. Up-sell is to “super-size” the meal and the add-on is dessert. We then began to understand that the customer journey is an endless loop instead of being a linear line.

Now, in a world of exploding channels, online influencers and the ability to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of consumer behavior itself, the customer journey has morphed into a complex spiral of stages, actions and commitments. Not only is the journey multi- faceted, layered, and complex, but it is also constantly changing.

From “Mad Men” to “Entitled” digital natives

The other principle difference between the ways we used to map customer journeys and the way we need to today, lies in understanding who controls the journey. In the traditional linear approach, it was the brand that defined the journey and pushed people through it based on mass advertising. The theory was that if you saw the same ad with enough frequency the message would stick and influence your buying behavior.

Success was defined simply in terms of frequency and reach – the number of times (frequency) multiplied by the number of people (reach) who saw the ad. For decades, Frequency X Reach = Influence was the norm. The means by which you moved people along the journey was dependent on the creative to elicit an emotional connection, and produce a favorable opinion. Then it was simply a matter of getting it in front of the audience.

The brand was squarely in charge. All it had to do was produce the right creative and distribute it to the largest possible audience as often as possible. This model was created and reined supreme throughout what we now call the “Mad Men” era of mass market, broadcast TV and print media.

It wasn’t all left to chain-smoking account executives coming up with brilliant ideas after a three-martini lunch though. This was also the era when market research came of age as well. People with degrees in psychology, anthropology and ethnography were hired to figure out how people would react to different messages and which ones would elicit the desired behavior.

Ultimately the role of market research, or insights, was to inform the creative to be able to create that emotional connection. Audiences were divided up into broad segments based on gender and societal roles. In those days, most women were homemakers and therefore decision makers for most classes of domestic purchases whereas men were the targets for considered purchases like automobiles and the things in life that contributed to their “manliness.”

This approach suited the expanding TV medium extremely well. Programming was developed and aimed specifically at homemakers during the day to sell consumer product goods like soap, hence the rise of the soap opera. Saturday mornings were given over to kids TV, selling toys and cereal. Over the decades, research became more sophisticated and segments expanded to include household income and age in addition to gender.

The success of that model depended on being able to easily address and distribute to very large audiences and a very high percentage of households. This reached its zenith in 1983, when 125 million Americans, representing 60% of households, 77% of TV viewing audience and 54% of the entire population of the United States, watched the final episode of M*A*S*H. Compare that to 2018's top TV show, The Big Bang Theory, with an average viewing audience of 23 million and the much-heralded finale to the cable series Breaking Bad, which was watched by only 10 million viewers. The market has been diversified and the ability to reach vast audiences at a single time has disappeared.

Combined with the changes in consumer behavior (whether representing an evolution in consumer sophistication, or simply a numbness caused by over stimulation and cultural attention deficient disorder), there has been the steady decline in the effectiveness of traditional marketing methods, regardless of channel. Given current click through rates (CTR) for online ads, email and paid search, all being in the single digits at best, there is a need for fundamental change in the way we engage with people all along the customer journey, which they now clearly control.

The change means the creation and delivery of contextually relevant content that is the cornerstone of effective and engaging customer experiences. What is different today is that the content may take different forms and may be ordered or presented in a different sequence depending on the channel, the device or form factor and the platform on which the content is consumed. In this case, channel is being used very broadly to not only include traditional channels like broadcast, print, radio and out of home, and mature digital channels like display, email and search, but emerging channels like in-store digital displays, POS, and interactive out-of-home. Devices include smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops as well as wearables, in-car, Google glass and any new format that is bound to come along in the next few years. And by platforms, it can be as simple as mobile web versus app or as specific as Apple iOS versus Android or Amazon.

What is also a sea change in customer experience is that most experiences now take place across multiple channels. Not only does this include the roughly 80+ percent of people who research a purchase online regardless of if they purchase online or in store. But it includes all the people who engage multiple channels simultaneously. People are regularly bringing their smartphones into a store, comparing pricing online in real time or changing the temperatures of their homes while they’re waiting for their meal in a restaurant.

Turning data into insights

With all at stake, where should you begin? The one thing that hasn’t changed in fifty years, or perhaps a hundred is that the first step in creating great customer experiences is to understand who your audiences are. We purposely used the plural, audiences, because unlike the Mad-Men era of mass marketing, now it is up to the marketer to identify and understand multiple different audiences, each with their own characteristics, values, attitudes and behavior. In fact, once the individual has engaged directly with a brand and given a set of personally identifiable data, they expect to be treated as an audience of one. It also means that brands have to be able to deliver individualized experiences to everyone. The good news is that there’s finally a selection of technologies that enable a company to do just that and to be able to scale efficiently and effectively without breaking the marketing organization’s budget or its ability to support the effort.

Who your audiences are is just the first question. What are they really interested in (as opposed to what they say they’re interested in when they respond to surveys) is the second question. It gets to the heart of attitudes, behavior and action. It requires looking at the world through their eyes, not the brands. It necessitates becoming truly customer centric and not just producing a campaign that tells people how much you care about them, especially when your actions speak differently.

The answers to these basic who, what and how questions comes from looking at insights in a whole new way. While traditional market research techniques can yield important directional results, they are no substitute for digitally driven approaches that replace focus groups of 10-20 people with online panels numbering in the millions. Instead of surveys which ask people what they would do or like, online data shows what they are actually doing and liking. And instead of fielding research once or twice a year, socially sourced data streams in real-time. There is no latency and no fear of keeping up with a fickle market.

In the modern incarnation of insights and market research, ethnographers have become virtual ethnographers, psychologists have become data scientists and membership in the online panels that expand on focus groups can number in the millions. Audience data does not come from just social or online sources though. While online data may be the best means to understand the anonymous audiences, implicit, aggregated data should be paired with data derived from understanding your existing customers, all of whom are individuals. They can provide explicit data on their behavior, attitudes and the ways they want to shape their experiences at every step of their customer journey.

If insight and research helps companies understand intent and predict what happens next, customer analytics measures what has actually happened. It is the compilation of data, usually collected and stored in a CRM or similar customer database technology. Data can be collected, stored and analyzed on both a 1 to 1 basis and can be aggregated up to produce sophisticated customer models and segmentation. The key is to be able to associate history and behavior at each stage of the customer journey including being able to look back to an individual’s behavior prior to becoming a customer.

Luckily the ability to match customer data and prospect data exists. It is at the core of re-marketing, using software like Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop. However, using these technologies by themselves won’t work across the entire customer journey and will not produce the desired results unless they are linked both technically and strategically with anonymous audience data collected online. To do so requires breaking down the complete non-linear customer journey into bite sized pieces that the marketer can digest and impact directly. This is done through customer journey mapping.

Once you’ve figured out who your audiences are and what they’re interested in, you have to find the answer to how do they want to engage the brand. The trick here is that the answer changes constantly, influenced and affected by a thousand variables, the marketing equivalent of the butterfly effect.

Make sure to come back next week where we dive into mapping the customer journey.