Brands are planning for 2020 and with that, comes evaluating the customer journey. Customer journeys can be a useful tool, but it only tells part of the story and done year to year, they can all start to look the same. To make the customer journey work you have to zero in on the “human” versus the “shopper” and get a broader view of their life. Committing to the customer first and focusing on solving actual, human problems will require tweaks to how the customer journey is approached, and will lead you down paths you may not have explored in the past.
“Don’t be afraid and let it go. Follow it. Follow the journey and see where it leads you. Because as you seek richer insights, new jumping off points to inspire different thinking, to produce better results than what you’ve had in the past, sometimes you got to shake things up.”
–Jan-Eric Anderson, Chief Strategy Officer at Callahan
In this episode, we discuss what customer journeys are today and the challenges that come with it. Then, we will give three recommendations on how to improve customer journeys to make them more useful and help your brand truly cut through the clutter.
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Welcome to Callahan’s Uncovering Aha! podcast. We talk about a range of topics for marketing decision-makers, with a special focus on how to uncover insights in data to drive brand strategy and inspire creativity. Featuring Joe Cox and Jan-Eric Anderson.
Jan-Eric:
Hi, I’m Jan-Eric: Anderson, Head of Strategy at Callahan.
Joe:
And I’m Joe Cox, a activation strategist here at Callahan.
Jan-Eric:
So, Joe, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Pumped to have you. We’re going to be talking about a topic that is … It’s very timely for us right now because we’re starting to head into 2020 planning, all the activities that kick up as you head into that. And we’ve got some grievances, actually, with one of the key artifacts or key steps along the process of 2020 planning, and that is customer journeys.
Joe:
Oh, good old customer journeys.
Jan-Eric:
Right?
Joe:
My favorite time of the year.
Joe:
When they all come out.
Jan-Eric:
It’s like a rite of passage every year with getting through annual planning. We’ve got to pull the customer journey back out, and let’s dust it off and see how it’s changed or how we can make it better.
Joe:
And really to the point, I don’t have anything against the customer journeys.
Jan-Eric:
No.
Joe:
It’s a great tool to use. It’s just there’s parts of it. It doesn’t tell the whole story. And if you’re looking to solve human problems and you want to be creative, you need a little bit more. And that’s what we’re going to talk about.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah, totally. And I guess for from my perspective on customer journeys, I love the idea of them. The more of them you do, though, the trap you end up seeing is that sometimes they all start to look kind of the same. And then you look year to year, even on a single client or a single customer, it doesn’t really ever change.
Jan-Eric:
And if it’s not changing and evolving, then how useful does it really become? And that’s really what we’re looking for is you’re heading into annual planning. You want to make sure that the inputs that you have and the things you’re using are going to be beneficial for making something good or different or effective or impactful, something that’s inspiring in the process, for planning.
Joe:
Right.
Jan-Eric:
So what we’re really going to try to dissect today is, let’s just make some observations about customer journeys as they are today and what are the major trappings of that. And then we’ll wrap up maybe with some ideas on how to improve customer journeys to make them more useful. Sound right?
Joe:
I love that. I love that.
Jan-Eric:
So, let’s just start with the idea of the customer journey. Is that really what it is? When we say “customer journey,” is that the best maybe articulation for what it really is?
Joe:
When we look at it … Here, let me bring it up. I think found, like everybody knows, there are different parts to it.
Jan-Eric:
Sure.
Joe:
Awareness.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah.
Joe:
Awareness comes in there. Evaluation.
Jan-Eric:
Consideration.
Joe:
Consideration.
Jan-Eric:
Research.
Joe:
Wait a minute. But this is a very customer-centered approach, of course. And wait a minute. It’s starting to look and feel kind of like the sales funnel.
Jan-Eric:
Right. Right.
Joe:
And we already have one of those.
Jan-Eric:
And find me a consumer that thinks in terms of “I need to wake up today. My goal today is to create some awareness for myself and some consideration of how I can go spend some money on product X.”
Joe:
Exactly. And with the clients that we work with a lot too, it’s one thing to say if there’s a six-month buying process and you have a sales team that’s going out and there’s many touchpoints and it’s a $300,000-a-year piece of software, that is a different thing than “I need a cheeseburger for lunch.”
Jan-Eric:
Right, right.
Joe:
And it’s tough because you may be going through those processes quickly.
Jan-Eric:
And so this is probably the biggest trapping of a customer journey and the way that many marketers are using them is that the customer journey is confused with a purchase funnel.
Joe:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jan-Eric:
It too closely mirrors a purchase funnel. And so marketers are limited in their thinking around trying to generate consumer insights and actionable insights and key moments of truth along that, along that journey.
Jan-Eric:
It’s really not a journey at all. And from the consumer’s standpoint, it’s really a path to buying my product.
Joe:
Yeah.
Jan-Eric:
And that’s such a myopic view of the actual consumer experience and what the consumers needs are that it’s really kind of turning a blind eye on 99.9% of of the context of a consumer’s life that the brand is seeking to establish relevancy within. Right?
Joe:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). If you’re only looking at the fractions of a moment that your brand or your product is important to a customer, you’re going to be looking at such a closeup view, at such small moments, that we need to find the entire human. We need to find the whole person to understand what problems we can solve for them. And with this tool the way it is, you are only looking at me, me, and me as the brand. And where we really wanting to go customer-focused, which kind of means human-focused.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah. And I guess that’s an artifact of the past. That approach is really one of the past where it’s an advertising-first mindset. “I am here to establish awareness of my product. I will talk about points of differentiation for my product, the benefit that it deliver when my product delivers.” And it’s really a push model of “I’m going to to push my messaging on people.”
Jan-Eric:
Yet you’ve got clients saying, “I need to break through the clutter. I need to capture someone’s attention or intrigue or interest.” Advertisers are trying to avoid advertising, yet these tropes, these mechanisms, these tools within the toolkit for planning, are not really up to the challenge of breaking through the clutter or really piquing someone’s interest if they’re so myopically focused on a purchase model.
Joe:
Right on.
Jan-Eric:
So I think that if we, the way we think about consumer journeys, if we were to more accurately talk about how they currently are used, it’s more of a not a customer journey or consumer journey. It’s more of a path to purchasing my product. Our point of view … And that’s a big aha. So our point of view would be you’ve got to take a giant step back from just these key moments of truth along the way of purchasing a product and really taking it a level up and trying to understand broader the human context, the human experience, what else is happening in the world of this consumer to understand what’s the opportunity for a brand to establish relevancy. And that becomes a big thing.
Jan-Eric:
So, I was at a Gartner Symposium, Marketing Symposium, a few months ago, had the great fortune of hearing a keynote from Afdhel Aziz, who is an author of of a great book, Good Is the New Cool. And in that, he talks about shifts in how marketers should be thinking about how to approach consumers and even approach the world to establish relevancy.
Jan-Eric:
One of his key kind of points in the book is to think of … Don’t think about your target as a consumer, but think about your target as a human, a person. I think the word he uses is “citizen.”
Joe:
Right on.
Jan-Eric:
But it’s really relevant to kind of what we’re talking about here, about thinking about these people as human beings, not just as purchasers of your product.
Jan-Eric:
So, as we think about humans and instead of just as shoppers, where that starts to lead to is why is that important? It opens up a whole nother set of doors.
Joe:
Yeah, this to me is one that we run into a lot is because whenever you try to cram everybody into your journey, whenever you’re trying to look at your entire customer base, all the different shades of who that person is, what we ended up doing is making that person and the journey the most … It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t open any doors. It doesn’t have any insights. We don’t get inspired by anything because what we’ve done is we’ve crushed that human into … It doesn’t tell us anything. It is too many people.
Joe:
So for us, it’s like, “You got a zero in.” If you want to tell a human story, and you’re telling a story of them going through a journey, you have to talk about a human.
Jan-Eric:
You got to pick one. You got to pick one. You can’t generalize. You can’t say it’s-
Joe:
And it can’t be anybody. And it’s okay that it’s not everybody.
Jan-Eric:
You can’t say, “Hey, it’s segment three,” that it came out of my segmentation study. You’ve got to give this person a name and you got to pick a side. Is it a boy or is that a girl?
Joe:
Yeah.
Jan-Eric:
And you got to give them a name. You got to give them an age. “Well, I want him to be 35 to 44.” Nope, give them an age.
Joe:
And for goodness sakes-
Jan-Eric:
Are they married or not?
Joe:
… please use as much actual data as you can.
Jan-Eric:
Yes.
Joe:
This is the time. In the journey is when we dump all of that great research that has been done, data that we know about our customers, and we pour that in, but we have to bring that down to one person and bring them through the journey.
Joe:
If you want this tool to work and do what it is, the second thing is 100% got to get in and zero in on a person.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah. And once you’ve established in your mind’s eye this person, this actual person, that’s when you can really start to unpack “What is this person’s experience? What’s going on in this person’s life? What are the emotions that this person is experiencing? Where are they in their life stage? What are other things that are influencing key decisions? Or what are milestones that are happening in this person’s life at this particular time?”
Jan-Eric:
It leads into motivations. “What motivates this person? What’s the driving force in this person’s life right now?” All those types of things you can really start to get in that when you get out of the generalization, and you can really hone in on a very specific person.
Joe:
That’s right. And what you’re leading to is what it does is it leads us to the juicy parts, the emotional parts, the places we know that it’s a little bit messy and chaotic, and a customer or a consumer is going to make choices that aren’t always logical. We do know they’re going to lead with an emotional decision. We do know that we need to, if we can lock into emotions and we can lock into that emotional point of like, “This is me and this is my identity,” that we are going to get that attention and we are going to at least have a chance, then, to have that hooked attention to be able to talk with them more.
Jan-Eric:
And identifying those emotions, it kind of reiterates the earlier point about getting beyond the purchase path because the key moments of truth that may be important to a marketer in terms of “Well, they saw my product on shelf, now they’re going to grab it. I have to have packaging that just separates or differentiates. I have to have a competitive price point,” that’s a nanosecond in the broader human experience that has nothing to do with the emotions that were happening outside of that, out of that particular aisle in that example of a CPG product.
Jan-Eric:
But really being able to take that step back, it allows you to get into those emotions that live really richly outside that purchase decision funnel.
Joe:
And we’re not saying that those parts of that journey or that part of that “Buy my stuff” journey is … It’s important.
Jan-Eric:
Oh, 100%.
Joe:
But those things, they’ve been paved. We have gone down those roads and we’re very good at those places. But if you want to stand out and you want to make something that’s novel, that gets people’s attention in this world, we’re going to have to be exploring. Our point is like, “You got to be exploring the richness of the things going around in context.” And that is where the traditional journey, where it stands, has a tough part finding those places.
Joe:
So we kind of got to build something around it in order to build something new that helps us think about the those moments around our product, not just at our product.
Jan-Eric:
So, we’ve got some ideas about some things that marketers can do to make sure that they’re not falling into some of these trappings with customer journeys.
Jan-Eric:
And so we’ve got three suggestions. The first one is kind of this idea of playing one level up. And the idea of that is to don’t get … Protect against the myopic view, the narrow-focus view, of just the key moments of truth on the purchase funnel. Get a step away from a level up into more of the human experience and the broader view of what’s going on in their life.
Jan-Eric:
So, an example of that, right?
Joe:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jan-Eric:
If you’re selling a dog food and you’re wanting to target puppies, the parents of new puppies, it’s easy to think about what’s the decision process to picking out food for puppies? And there are key moments of truth along the way of that and researching and all of that stuff that we’ve talked about.
Jan-Eric:
But what would one level up be of if I’m a manufacturer of dog food and I’m wanting to target puppy parents, what would be an example of going one level up?
Joe:
Well, if I’m in the market for puppy food, I just brought a new family member into my life, and that is just filled. I’ve just brought chaos and a baby into my life, and that is just filled with richness of many highs and lows emotionally.
Jan-Eric:
And you’re a dog owner.
Jan-Eric:
You know what it’s like to have a puppy in the house.
Joe:
Yeah.
Jan-Eric:
There’s a lot going on, a lot happening, outside of the idea of what am I going to feed this dog? Of course that’s an important decision to make.
Joe:
It’s part of it.
Jan-Eric:
But it’s one of many, one of many things happening. That’s a great example then of …
Jan-Eric:
So, instead of focusing in on the purchase funnel of buying dog food and selecting dog food, it’s really understanding the new parent of a puppy journey and experience and how that may start with pre-adoption into adoption day into getting acquainted, the hell week, that first week of-
Joe:
Or two.
Jan-Eric:
… the dog peeing all over the house and not sleeping through the night and “Oh, my gosh. What have I got myself into?”
Joe:
Yep. And being scared and these moments of “Whoa, I am over my head.”
Jan-Eric:
And to start getting acquainted, right?
Joe:
Yes.
Jan-Eric:
And then it’s comfortable and it’s like this roller coaster of emotions and how rich that is to start to understand all of that.
Joe:
And the journey to finally that being a family member. It’s a beautiful journey.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah.
Joe:
It’s a beautiful story to tell, and there’s so many people going through that. Anybody buying puppy food, probably going through that, somewhere in that place. And we have to find the places of tension. We have to find the places of emotional highs and lows. And you’re not going to get … It’s going to be harder to get there when we are just looking at when this person is in the market and looking for food.
Jan-Eric:
So, the first suggestion is to identify one level up from your-
Joe:
That’s right.
Jan-Eric:
… purchase path and get to a broader context.
Jan-Eric:
The second idea, we talked a little bit about this earlier, is personify that target. Give that target a name. Give your target, your person, a name, a face, an outfit, an age. Put them in a house. Give them a car. What other brands do they like? You got to blow this thing out and really personify the person. Beyond just a persona from a segmentation study, you really got to go deep and really get in your mind’s eye who it is that we’re talking about.
Joe:
And it might need to be multiple journeys. If you have two people you’re really trying to zero in on, that’s totally fine. But what we can’t do is smush everybody together because you’re not going to tell a story. These journeys are going to be way more beneficial to you and more beneficial to the work you make whenever we’re talking and thinking about a specific person and we’re telling a story with one person.
Joe:
So, absolutely it’s going to be tough. It really is. It’s the tough thing to do, but get what you need, get the data you need, to zero in and build that person.
Jan-Eric:
And with doing that, that’s what really enables our third suggestion, which is to hone in on what are the emotions and motivations of that person in the context of this broader view of the journey. So, exploring those emotions, both the negative and the positive, because within those, within those emotions, is where you start to find tension. And tension is where the action is. Where we can find friction is where we can find opportunity to bring a product message forward. When you start to hone in on what are problems that really need to be solved, what’s on their mind, and this starts to eliminate that path to breaking through the clutter.
Joe:
Yep. Right on.
Jan-Eric:
So, the three ideas to hone in on, just to recap real quick, figure out what’s your version of a level up. Go one step higher in understanding kind of the customer’s experience beyond a level up higher than your purchase path.
Jan-Eric:
The second is personifying that target. Give them a face. Give them a name. Give them an age. Really understand who this person is that you’re talking about.
Jan-Eric:
And then really unpack the emotions, both the negative and positive emotions, and also the motivations for that person to try to hone in on those tensions.
Jan-Eric:
Those three things, following those three suggestions, can help you take leaps forward in terms of avoiding some of the traps of these myopic views of what we call a customer journey, but is really a path to purchasing my product.
Jan-Eric:
Any other thoughts you’d want to throw out before before we wrap up?
Joe:
I love the idea of the journey. I would say take a long look at what you’re doing. And is it just a mask of saying, “Me, me, me”? Or are we still talking about brand first? If you’re really committed to customer first and to human first, are we really solving human problems? And then ask yourself, and these are tough questions, but take a look at what you’re doing because we get so close and we get so close to it, “Am I solving human problems? Or am I solving only problems and only thinking about it from my view?”
Joe:
Sometimes it’s a tough conclusion, but if you know that you need to get more human, there’s a ton of things you can do. And I think we did a pretty good job of showing you where you can start.
Jan-Eric:
Yep. And I would just add onto that that these suggestions and nuances and tweaks to how you approach this may require some courage because it may start to lead you down a path that takes you into different areas to explore than where you’ve been in the past and that will require some courage.
Jan-Eric:
Don’t be afraid and let it go. Follow it. Follow the journey and see where it leads you. Because as you seek richer insights, new jumping off points to inspire different thinking, to produce better results than what you’ve had in the past, sometimes you got to shake things up.
Joe:
Right on.
Jan-Eric:
So don’t be afraid of a new path.
Joe:
Yeah. Let’s bring some bravery back to marketing, for sure.
Jan-Eric:
Joe, this was great. I hope to get you back in the podcast booth again. This was great. Thanks for joining me.
Joe:
It took too long.
Jan-Eric:
I know.
Joe:
I heard a ton of these. You have some big brains in here.
Jan-Eric:
Yeah.
Joe:
So, well, it was super fun. I had a good time.
Jan-Eric:
Awesome.
Joe:
And I’ll be back.
Jan-Eric:
All right, great. Thanks for joining me.
You’ve been listening to the Uncovering Aha Podcast. Callahan provides data savvy strategy and inspired creativity for national consumer brands. Visit us at callahan.agency to learn more.
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