Why You Should Revisit Your Shopper Journey (And How To Do It Right)

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Understanding the shopper journey has always been (and still is) a crucial piece to closing the gap between interest and purchase. But while fundamental needs haven’t changed, the customer journey is much more layered and multi-directional.
Today’s consumer doesn’t just follow one of a handful of discrete routes in their journey to purchasing a good or service. With the Internet at their fingertips, shoppers now bounce around the traditionally linear path to purchase – easily jumping from an in-store touchpoint to a digital platform, gathering information from multiple sources throughout the process.
Keep these two major shifts in mind when deciding on a research strategy for your next shopper journey project:

 

 

Shoppers are Wildly More Empowered in Their Relationship with Brands.

We don’t just live in the age of information. We live in the age of informational guidance, with unprecedented access to (and considerable depths of) knowledge about almost anything there is to know. This is especially true when it comes to products and brands. Consumers can now leverage the wisdom of the crowd to educate themselves before ever setting foot in a store.
This presents a huge opportunity for brands to garner awareness among consumers shopping for their products. But it also gives brands exponentially more touchpoints to maintain, track and provide consistent brand experiences across.
Shoppers are able to consume information via the Internet, as well as publish their own thoughts, reviews and experiences. An opinion that was once voiced to a handful of peers can now be amplified 1,000-fold by way of direct input and feedback platforms. As a result, rapid customer service response has never been more important.
While companies have lost a degree of control over their digital narrative thanks to bloggers and product/service review sites, the new landscape is not without its advantages. Adding a digital footprint to brand perceptions offers a valuable opportunity to monitor and better understand perceptions of your brand and what sites consumers are visiting online.

 

 

The Market Landscape Has Become Significantly More Fragmented and Competitive.

Today’s world is defined by options.
Consumers now have a tremendous amount of choice in what products to buy and brands to engage with. The rapid increase in options for shoppers to explore, coupled with more ways to access and consume products, means that consumers expect a brand experience that fits seamlessly into their lives (not vice versa). What’s more, people browsing online now have easier access to information about your competitors – even comparing their products and yours side by side.
Given this landscape, it’s important to find ways to visually represent customer journeys clearly and concisely, so you can understand and activate within consumers’ actual paths. That said, it can be difficult to capture and map the complexities of today’s typical path to purchase, because there’s nothing “typical” about it. Keeping to the traditional model of path to purchase is no longer an option, because it doesn’t adequately represent the varied journeys a consumer may realistically take.
But abandoning the model entirely isn’t the solution, either. We believe in a differentiated customer journey mapping philosophy based on key shifts in the landscape, integrating existing knowledge with newer techniques (like social listening) to give our clients a complete and accurate picture of the shopper journey.

 

Want to learn how Material can help you build a customer journey map that boosts your chances of being chosen over your competitors? Reach out.