The Customer Journey Model

The customer journey model is generally credited to Frank Dukesmith, who in 1904 introduced the basic idea of a multistep sales process. This helped salespeople, and eventually marketers, think of the purchase process as a path and not a single action. Marketers used this concept throughout the 20th century with tweaks and variations to help plan tactics for distinct purchase phases and to move consumers “through the funnel.” The model was generally brought to life as AIDA: the phases of awareness, interest, desire, and action.

In 2009, consulting firm McKinsey & Company evolved the concept, bringing several key ideas to the mainstream business consciousness.⁴ McKinsey described the previously linear journey as a loop in which the customer was always evaluating. It popularized the idea that customers diverge into different paths postpurchase, with some going back into the consideration phase while others shortcut the path through loyalty. And importantly, McKinsey added the idea of a trigger, or inflection point, when some type of catalyst begins the active purchase process.

Today, we use journeys to help identify and prioritize touchpoints. As the complexity of the digital experience has grown, user experience experts have created elaborate journeys to help define user stories. These maps identify critical paths and potential friction points at which customers experience difficulties. This process allows user experience designers to match the right features and functionality of their product or service to specific stages of a digital experience journey.

From Company-centric to Consumer-centric: A New Take on an Old Framework

At the core of the modern model is a change from a company-centric to a consumer-centric approach. Historically, funnel models focused on company goals first: that is, moving consumers from awareness to interest to purchase to loyalty and so on. But in the modern age, marketers must flip the model to focus on consumers. What do they want? What needs do they have? What are their habits? In doing so, a company can obtain a more accurate and helpful view that better allows it to serve the customer’s needs—and achieve the company’s goals in the process.

While the bones of this approach have been around in some form for 100 years, it’s important to note that the application of its principles in new ways is more valuable than ever before. Understanding the 21st century customer journey can help us manage tactical complexity. Furthermore, as the promise of big data becomes a reality, increased visibility about customer behaviors through data makes establishing an organizing framework all the more critical.

Pre-need

Interestingly, the pre-need phase is not part of the actual buying process, but is the stage where 99 percent of customers exist in any category (see Figure 8.2). A customer may have purchased shoes, but 99 percent of customers are not thinking about their next shoe purchase until a trigger event occurs. Most relevant for businesses, the pre-need phase is usually where companies direct the most advertising dollars in trying to reach this 99 percent—their potential customers. One of the benefits of isolating this time frame is understanding how to best interact with customers who are not specifically looking to interact with your brand.

For B2B companies, this pre-need stage usually identifies key stakeholders who have a simple need to stay current about trends and products in their industry. This leads to behaviors such as reading industry publications and newsletters and attending conferences. B2B marketers at this stage are generally seeking to build awareness of their solutions and establish credibility. For example, on its digital site 99U, software provider Adobe provides its target customers with useful content that drives interaction (and data collection) but holds off on the hard sell.

For B2C, we frequently find companies advertising broadly to consumers at the pre-need stage, who are likely not actively interested in their product category. Advertising to the uninterested is not necessarily wrong, as it has been shown that building high levels of brand awareness has an oversized impact in low-involvement categories. However, reaching this group of consumers does require advertising communications teams to work harder to break through the clutter.

An example is Starwood, the parent company of numerous hotel brands. The company is a frequent poster on photograph-heavy Instagram. Its social posts typically focus on beautiful imagery of enticing vacation locales. The images are intentionally not heavily branded advertisements or promotions for last-second deals. In using the journey construct, Starwood likely found that many of its target customers at the pre-need stage were on Instagram and were interacting with travel imagery.

This type of content is exactly in line with Starwood’s target customers’ needs and their behavior on this platform at this stage. We can also assume that these posts are driving some awareness of Starwood’s properties and are thus working toward its business goal to help consumers find Starwood hotels when they are ready to book their vacations.

Trigger

At some point in the customer journey there is a trigger, or inflection point, that shifts the model and consumer behavior from passive to active. Your lease on a car is coming due, a machine is starting to break down at your factory, your hair gets too long, you expand your family with a new child, or you simply run out of gum.

Google calls this “ZMOT,” for zero moment of truth. It’s the moment when you grab your laptop, mobile phone, or some other wired device and start learning about a product or service you’re thinking about trying or buying.⁵ In other words, a customer has identified a need and begins the process of looking for a solution. These trigger points are incredibly valuable to marketers because brand relevance peaks as the buying process begins. Money spent reaching someone at the trigger point will motivate action at much higher levels than someone in pre-need.

Across both B2B and B2C companies, increasing spending at the trigger point of the journey is becoming a common tactic to prioritize messaging, as this money is spent at the exact time when a customer’s purchase process begins. For instance, searching “vacations in Mexico” on Google is a beacon to advertisers that a customer has moved from pre-need into active category participation. The most obvious touchpoint for advertisers is the paid search results. Beyond search results, that search for vacations is now data that becomes part of the user’s digital profile. This means that advertisers can then buy across the digital landscape from banners to videos to sponsored social posts. While competition can drive up pricing for the precious touchpoints associated with these triggers, it is essential that firms learn the most relevant triggers for their offerings.

Consideration and Evaluation

The consideration and evaluation phase has become dominated by the idea of content marketing, or inbound marketing. The basic premise is that as consumers research a choice, a firm should provide the answers their customers seek and even establish itself as the authority on a given topic in order to help positively influence the purchase.

This strategy has been driven by a dramatic shift to self-guided research in the Internet age. A 2017 Forrester report found that “68 percent of B2B buyers prefer to research online on their own, up from 53 percent in 2015 . . . and they considered gathering information online on their own superior to interacting with a sales representative by a margin of 53 percent to 17 percent.”⁶ B2B firms are spending significant resources on aligning both the content (white papers, product videos) and the functionality (comparison tools, ROI calculators) that their disparate customers seek.

For B2C, the level of evaluation can be almost negligible, but in many categories it is still important, particularly for first-time purchasers. Consumers researching running shoes may start by asking friends, reading a running blog for recommendations, and even checking out reviews on Amazon. In some categories, companies are tracking consumers’ digital behaviors along this path to better understand how they are making decisions. For example, automakers are beginning to use sophisticated digital journeys based on real-time consumer behavioral data to understand what behaviors are occurring at what points of the car-buying phase. Using a mixture of first-party data (from their own data gathering) combined with third-party data from other sources, marketers are stitching together the most common paths and the most important components of the path that lead to purchase. For instance, a potential customer goes to tesla.com to look at the models and signs up for a newsletter, in the process agreeing to the web site’s cookie policy. Then the customer goes to autotrader.com, edmunds.com, and audiusa.com. Later he or she responds to a Tesla newsletter by clicking through to a financing offer, making an appointment online, and coming in for a test drive. All of the actions taken on this day can be collected and then aggregated to build out a model of what comprises the key parts of the consideration and research phase.

Buying

Omni-channel commerce is a current marketing buzzword. Simply put, it consists of matching a company’s purchase options with a customer’s preferences to purchase. Like other phases, the buying phase is rapidly changing territory, as digital buying options have proliferated in recent years to challenge on-site purchases at physical locations.

The tendency is to think of multichannel buying as simply enabling e-commerce or mobile commerce alongside sales from physical locations, but it is more complicated. E-commerce darling Warby Parker, an eyewear company, attributes more than half its sales to physical stores, but founder Dave Gilboa notes that “about 75 percent of our customers who shop in our stores have been to our web site first.”⁷ The future of commerce will not likely be a binary choice between offline and online, but an integration of the two.

In recent years, U.S. grocery stores have been scrambling to fight Amazon, learning from their European counterparts that have been leaders in enabling digitally driven options, such as Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. Companies are intensely studying consumers’ buying behaviors and their underlying needs, and matching those to their particular store’s unique capabilities. This process is driving success in the online/offline pairing of click-and-collect shopping, whereby customers purchase online but pick up their products at a physical location. Understanding the buying needs that drive customers enables firms to create the purchase path that best meets the needs of their shoppers—and the best pairing of off- and online.

Usage

The usage phase is traditionally defined as the experience that a customer has with a product or service once it has been purchased. Overall satisfaction with the offering is paramount, but a deeper understanding of usage can unlock insights for future communications and even innovation.

It’s also important to understand how the other phases work together to create an overall user experience. For example, by deep-diving into the usage stage, a large floral-delivery company was able to prioritize the critical pain points in its postpurchase usage stage. The product was the delivery of flowers to the receiver. But the driving need for the giver was not simply making sure that the flowers arrived at their destination. Instead, the consumer was most driven by being able to create a moment of surprise and joy for the intended recipient. The flowers were simply a vehicle for the expression of care. This led to differentiating usage improvements in the delivery process, as well as additional offerings and services that addressed this core need.

Post-usage Evaluation

In the post-usage evaluation phase (see Figure 8.3), customer behavior will diverge. In past customer journey models, marketers would hope for users to progress to a loyalty phase or an advocate phase, where they would turn to social media with abounding praise for their product or service. These are the desired business goals from this phase, but they are not a customer-centric approach to understanding this phase. As McKinsey suggested with its loyalty loop, everyone does not “restart” the journey in the same way.⁸ In the model (Figure 8.3), there are multiple paths in the post-usage evaluation phase: rejecters, price-driven switchers, loyalists (who return with a predilection for repurchase), and even the coveted evangelists, who would never think of purchasing any other brand.

Critically, understanding which customers diverge where and why will inform a marketer’s future actions. Marketers must look for the types of people and the types of experiences that drive loyalty, and use that knowledge to focus their future actions. For example, a large CPG company recently explored a segmentation process that examined past buyers’ data in order to understand the telltale traits of those who are predisposed to becoming loyalists versus those who buy primarily on price, as well as those who become brand rejecters. This knowledge enables the company to deliver different messages and promotions to the two former groups and eliminate the likely brand rejecters from the media buy.

At a simpler level, the post-usage evaluation phase allows marketers to understand the likelihood of advocacy behavior and manage that proactively. All brands would love social media influencers to widely praise their offerings, and as such, they frequently try to promote this behavior. While expecting all customers to become evangelists may be impossible, all brands must actively manage their online reputation in some fashion, as the growing power of ratings and reviews becomes a key influencer for consumers.

Who Are Our Most Important Targets?

A fundamental premise of modern marketing is prioritizing the allocation of marketing resources to a distinct target segment rather than a broad population. Traditionally, market segments have been defined as distinct populations of customers who share a set of driving needs within a category. Marketers choose to focus their resources on a target segment for whom they can create more value than the competition. And in turn, that target segment will respond by purchasing from the company and driving value for the firm. This process of segmentation and targeting is a means to focus limited budget and time on the activities that will drive the most value.

In practice, it is difficult to narrow to a single target segment. A company with multiple brands will have multiple target segments, and a large brand will frequently choose to target several segments. For example, McDonald’s targets multiple segments for different product lines and times of the day. This complexity is compounded in B2B situations in which a single product line can have multiple distinct buyers and also multiple key decision makers who influence purchase.

As a result, identifying the right target segments for whom to create a customer journey can be complex, but the complexity should not hinder companies from taking on the challenge. Mapping a customer journey for distinct segments will provide significant guidance to firms looking to focus their marketing dollars for the greatest return.

The tool is most useful when focused on a distinct segment. If not, the needs, attitudes, and activities become watered down and less useful. As such, it’s important to force prioritization: For which segment would this understanding create the most value? As their acumen grows, marketers can add more segments as the firm’s needs and resources dictate. Start with the segments that are likely to create the most value and then scale.

What Is the Primary Path for This Segment?

Once a target segment (or segment) has been identified, the marketer must then identify that segment’s primary path to purchase. Even one target segment could include millions of individuals with millions of different paths. Consider the visual metaphor of a large, grassy city park, such as Hyde Park in London. Millions pass through the park every day, often choosing a different path. But when we look down from above, we see the well-worn trails of the most frequent paths. The key here is to prioritize and choose the most well-worn path. Typically it follows the basic flow shown in Figure 8.4.

To identify the most frequently used paths, companies rely upon a variety of sources, such as internal customer data, external data, and larger-scale research. (See the “Finding the Data to Craft the Journey” section below for more details.)

Once the primary path has been identified, marketers must ask three questions at each stage of the journey (see Figure 8.5):

1. What are your target customers’ most important needs at each stage? What is the goal they are striving for?
2. What are your customers thinking? What are their key attitudes, drivers, friction points, and challenges? What do they think about your brand? What delights them?
3. What do your customers do (and where do they do it)? What are your customers’ most relevant behaviors by stage, and what are their most frequented touchpoints?

Using this model paints a picture of the consumer’s journey from his or her perspective. This is important because we have described consumers not as we wish they were, but how they actually are. That perspective allows marketers to plan their interactions with them in ways that are most relevant to them and thus most efficient for the company.

Figure 8.6 presents an illustrative model constructed for a vacation company.

What Business Goals Do We Need to Achieve?

At this stage, the lens shifts from the consumer to the business (see Figure 8.7). Marketers must ask, “What is the ideal outcome for our firm at each part of the customer journey?” In the pre-need phase, that outcome might be a certain level of awareness. For example, a luxury automaker with high awareness might have the express goal of changing long-set attitudes about its brand in the pre-need phase.

In the consider/evaluate phase, marketers evaluate where the segment is learning the most about their product: from third-party consultants, from in-depth online research, or simply from the front of the package? In the buying phase, how are they buying now? Are they purchasing differently from competitors? The usage phase examines whether the customer is having a frictionless experience and identifies potential opportunities for improvement. In the post-usage evaluation, marketers must determine whether customers are sharing feedback online or through other methods.

After establishing the goals, marketers must consider how they will measure success against these goals. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help benchmark your progress? Is there a brand-attitude tracking study in place? Is there a Net Promoter Score (NPS) mechanism to understand usage satisfaction? Or, if social sharing of user-generated content is the goal, then you will need social listening tools to measure efforts. The vacation company example showcases the kinds of goals and associated KPIs that might be considered (see Figure 8.8).

Finding the Data to Craft the Journey

In almost every scenario, companies will likely lack all the information they need to create a perfected journey map. However, it’s important not to postpone the exercise due to lack of complete data. At worst, marketers will have a more instructive framework than they had before, and at best they will have a fairly accurate depiction of the company’s most important customer journeys. Frequently, the initial journey helps identify the specific research that would be most valuable to pursue.

To gather the data you need, you may want to turn to variety of sources, including:

• Your internal team. A small team of experienced internal resources can craft a fairly usable journey in just a few hours.
• Existing research. Many companies are awash in studies done by various groups over the years. The journey model can create meaningful value by simply having the disparate research studies aggregated into a single framework.
• Secondary research. While secondary sources may not provide an exact match to your target, data on “CPG shopper” or “B2B buyer” behavior can help to fill in the blanks.
• Primary research. Qualitative research can be used to uncover new information. Do your B2B customers engage with Twitter? How are they using it? Are they following industry leaders? More in-depth quantitative studies also help you understand the scope and scale. What percentage of the customer base is using this channel? Is it more common with certain segments? This data gathering can be as low fidelity as a phone call with a customer or a quick survey. In addition, digitally based diaries in which customers use a mobile app to note their feelings and activities during a purchase path can be used to help identify touchpoints. These are particularly helpful for capturing offline touchpoints.
• Online data. The most recent progression of journey mapping is tracking the online behaviors of the customer base throughout the journey. By matching customer data to third-party data providers, marketers can stitch together an aggregate view of the most important touchpoints that critically tie back to sales. As data capabilities grow, marketers can increase their understanding of the evolving customer journey.