Previously on this blog, I have highlighted the importance of the journey to understand people’s behaviors and inform the development of a shopper marketing program. But what journey?
The fact is that the marketing landscape has grown increasingly complex, and paths to purchase are no longer sequential nor linear. The good old sales funnel model in use in marketing for decades is not working anymore (Awareness, Preference, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty: do you remember?). The cascading funnel “fails to capture all the touchpoints and key buying factors resulting from the explosion of product choices and digital channels, coupled with the emergence of an increasingly discerning, well-informed consumer” said McKinsey & Co in their now-famous article from 2009.
Today, the journey term is well established in the marketing community and even beyond. Nowadays, when you join a meeting, everyone talks about journeys: consultants, creative agencies, media shops, digital giants, and… shopper marketers. But do they really talk about the same thing? Consultants tend to talk about ‘consumer decision journey’, creative agencies about ‘consumer journey’, digital shops about… ‘digital journey’ whereas shopper marketers often use the term ‘purchase journey’.
Embracing the journey as a marketing framework is great but do we really need so many journeys? Probably not. I’d like to offer my point of view on how to bring everyone on the same page – or more literally, on the same map. But let me share a couple of considerations before.
Firstly, marketers realized lately that talking about consumers or shoppers was reductive and somehow flawed. There were no such things as shoppers on one side and consumers on the other: there were people. And often the same people but in different modes – shopping or consuming. Focusing on one or the other was preventing marketers from holistically understanding people’s mindsets and behaviors and communicating with them effectively. They were not connecting insights and actions taken at different stages of the journey.
Secondly, the concept of the ‘consumer decision journey’ has been massively adopted by the industry but in most journey sequels, the word ‘decision’ has disappeared. This simplification is not benign. Journeys do not just distill into an exhaustive list of the touchpoints and messages people may have seen or engaged with. What really matters is to capture the moments during which decisions are made by people, and how they can eventually be influenced. Because it’s only when you understand the role, the relevance and the impact of those moments that you can precisely select the touchpoints and craft the messages. Context and content, not one or the other.
The People Decision Journey
To bring it all together, I’d like to suggest an evolution of the seminal ‘Consumer Decision Journey’ into the ‘People Decision Journey’. The ‘People Decision Journey’ would be a framework mapping all the interactions that happen when people shop to fulfill a want or a need in a category of products or services during their everyday life. A framework capturing the different mindsets and behaviors across the different modes people go through – planning, buying, consuming, using, or reflecting on their purchases. A framework simultaneously providing the macro-view of the key phases of the journey as well as the detailed view of the steps – or micro-moments as proposed by Google – where interactions are happening and decisions are made – online or in real life.
Think Shopper 