Creating a Customer Journey Map to Reveal Branding Moments
Customer journey mapping is an incredible technique to align all stakeholders in a brand with the same vision. It also helps brands to understand the ‘customer journey’, reveals pain points, competitive strengths and weaknesses. Customer journey mapping can be a major asset whilst establishing a product and service strategy. Furthermore, how you create the map should not be restricted in concrete frameworks, but be shaped by both the clients’ needs and customer insights.
The Problem
Just a year ago, one of our clients came to us requesting a usability test for their one-year-old mobile application. It was very exciting to see how even a seemingly more traditional industry, flooring and wood products, could digitize and leverage the benefits of contemporary principles. Moreover, solely building an application without understanding your customers, won’t be effective to increase sales or acquire leads.
After we assessed our client’s position, we have advised them that a usability test will add little to no value to their organizational needs, as the application has been built without solid insights over where it would fit in the customer journey. Without having a solid unique selling proposition and a perfectly fitting hook in a customer’s lifecycle, a brand will always have to push marketing efforts and spend big money, instead of pulling consumers with data-grounded needs and acquiring them organically.
At that point, we have introduced ‘customer journey mapping’ as a framework that could glue their digital initiatives with the traditional business processes.
Research Scope
- 56 customer interviews, who recently changed their flooring, or who are currently researching for a good fit
- 10 stakeholder interviews to perceive the brand in the eyes of different departments
- 5 distributor visits for ethnographic research
- 3 competitor deep dives
All of this boils down to more than 200 hours of research and analysis.
Plot Twist
When we were visualizing the journey map, we realized that the traditional framework, visualizing customer emotions is not always the most useful way to create this journey. In this case, the emotions of customers are often very stable. There is no added value to exaggerate findings in order to fit in a framework. During the journey customer emotions naturally change (for example when the house is flooded, the customer gets very unhappy), but oftentimes, brands have no influence on these particular factors.
What did we do differently?
In our case, our brand’s aim was to understand customer touchpoints and increase brand awareness. Just like a regular journey map, we visualized which steps a customer partakes during their journey and through which channels they go through. What we did differently was that we didn’t simply map customer emotions. We visualized areas in which customers are more receptive to various kinds of brand communication and depicted the intensity of effect. The brand could leverage these moments, considering their positioning in the market.
For example, if someone is promoted, or acquires a sum of money, he/she is more inclined to conduct more diligent research before buying a product, ergo creating more opportunities for branding. On the other hand, if the customer’s house is flooded, then you have to position yourself differently as a brand and have fewer opportunities to convey your brand.
After mapping all the customer insights according to branding points and different channels, the customer journey map ultimately looked something like this:
Outputs
- We have realized that not just the customers, but also the stakeholders don’t have a unified vision of what the brand stands for. We analyzed both stakeholders and customer interviews. Thereafter, we synthesized all this data to create a unified vision, which helped us to create a concrete outlook. A customer journey map is a physical tool for the brand to share and explain this vision and roadmap with concrete customer stories.
- The brand has created a very functional core message for their B2B audience, yet this message is not just dysfunctional but also damaging to the brand in a B2C setting.
- We recommended a better positioning for the B2C audience
- Customers pass through very different and intricate channels. They come back and forth at different steps, as this is a long term investment. By visualizing these channels, we created a concrete view of how different channels interact with each other and at which stage we should release which information.
- Utilizing our newly created behavioral personas, the brand is now able to differentiate customers according to how they enter the sales cycle and guide them through different flows. These different flows among different channels help them to understand their customers better and personalize marketing efforts according to the customer’s needs.
- Through the ‘customer journey map’, the brand was able to gain a concrete understanding of where the mobile application and other digital channels fit in a customer’s journey, and how they can use these channels to create brand awareness and retention.
Conclusive Remarks
If we had followed the traditional method and tried to fit our data and stories to a traditional map, it would be impossible for the brand to utilize the map instantly but should translate the data in a way that is actionable for them.
By utilizing our insights over UX writing, positioning, packaging, digital marketing strategy and traditional marketing recommendations, the brand was able to quickly reform their business.
