What About The Customer Journey?
One of the challenges in creating impactful customer connections is the use of tools and frameworks that are convenient but may misrepresent actual customer realities.
Exhibit A: the customer journey.
As marketers, we have all seen one. It could be a funnel, a flow chart, or a Gantt chart—but the journey and message is the same: what is the ideal pathway to move a consumer from prospect to advocate?
And while the customer journey can be helpful in planning marketing tactics, it is also misleading, as it conditions us as marketers and business leaders to think passively. The customer journey trains us to think how can we get customers to move closer to our business. Rather than: what can we do to move closer to our customers?
Three things to consider:
The average customer, in all likelihood, doesn’t care about their brand or business relationships. They just want whatever product, service, or good is being provided at a decent price. We need to give them reasons to care.
No relationship is linear, and no customer-to-brand engagement is linear. Customers move dynamically through brand interactions as and when it meets their needs. As we try to move closer to them, we need to be opportunistic and strategic about building connection around those needs.
The endpoint of every customer journey doesn’t benefit the customer. Oddly, it’s their journey, but the end benefits the brand or business. Customer journeys aren’t in any real way customer-centric, and they don’t promote business accountability either. It is a business-centric framework that defers accountability to the customer.
So why do we focus on the customer journey? Why do we believe customers are—or should be—working their way towards us? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Shouldn’t we be working our way towards them?
Words matter.