Journeys, ad Infinitum
I was interviewed for a couple of pieces for eMarketer from Lauren T. Fisher, a standalone piece from the interview titled “To Make Multichannel Marketing Work, Audience Data Must Be ‘Rich’ and ‘Ready’" and as a part of a compilation study titled, “Four Tactics Required for Omnichannel Success.”
Lauren notes that for success marketers must:
Take an audience-centric approach
Overcome channel silos
Make messages relevant and meaningful
Use multichannel attribution to measure and improve
I wanted to highlight a few points that I was trying to make.
First, although I don’t like the term “customer journey”, I made the point that the “journey” is being time compressed. As I state, “A customer can go from intent to curiosity or curiosity to intent all the way to a purchase decision very quickly now.” That time compression necessitates marketing automation and decisions made in-the-moment. Latency in the decision cycle means you are many steps behind in trying to help a customer achieve his or her goals.
Although I used the term “customer journey” to talk about this time compression phenomenon, I do really hate the term. I understand why we use it. We have to describe a digital/physical pathway and it helps us visualize that concept. That visualization, however, is also the problem. We can visualize one journey at a time. We can fit maybe one or two on a slide. We can create, through rules, a very complex tree to symbolize 10-20 journeys. That isn’t sufficient! If you have five million customers, you have at least five million journeys. Millions of journeys require a level of computational complexity that necessitates a machine to assist.
If your approach to marketing automation relies upon a human to map our journeys you are not going to sufficiently address the pathways of all your customers, nor will you address the time compression of their journeys.
OK, so say you buy into what I’m saying and you outsource the computational complexity of managing billions of decisions along your customers’ journeys, what should you be doing? First, set priorities and incentivize your staff appropriately to align to your priorities. I’m still witnessing companies really stuggle with this. From the article…
“In a multichannel world, you’re going to run into challenges. For example, different channel managers are incentivized to show success, which often creates bias in the measurement. So, if the organization construct isn’t aligning to the outcomes they’re trying to achieve across the board in terms of the purchase decision and the consumer, then they won’t get optimal results.”
Second, say something interesting. Alright, humans, here’s where we really need you. How can you convey emotion, integrity, empathy, etc.? How can you let the customer know that you’re there to help them?
“We can find the right audiences, we can reach that audience, but you have to have something compelling to say that going to grab their attention.”