Consumer loyalty and the consumer journey
It can be challenging to take a step back and truly view your product or service through your users’ eyes. You might have invested in a brilliant ad campaign that’s increased awareness of your product but have yet to see this convert into new customers, or you might be really great at enticing new users to your service but struggle to make them want to come back for more.
Consumer journey mapping is the process of creating a structured, visual story of your customers’ or users’ interactions with your brand or service. It helps put you in the shoes of your consumers and understand how they experience your brand at every stage, from awareness through to becoming a loyal user or customer. It helps you identify pain points – that might turn customers away – and gives you insight into how these can be improved.
In today’s world, consumers interreact with brands and services across an increasing array of channels. And so, by nature, understanding your consumers’ journeys can feel overwhelming as they are so diverse and numerous. This is where mapping comes in!
The five stages of the consumer journey
Regardless of the product or service you’re focusing on, consumer journeys can be organised into stages. They may be labelled differently, or broken down even further, but ultimately any consumer journey map will cover the following five stages:
If all stages are met successfully and positively, consumers should start the process all over again – entering the loyalty loop!
How do you research the consumer journey?
There are many ways to research consumer journeys, both qualitatively and quantitatively. While mixing methods gives you the most holistic picture (and gives us the opportunity to team up with our lovely qual partner Little Wing!), it’s also possible to gain a wealth of insight using one or the other.
For quantitative research, consumer journey mapping can be used as an approach to structure a survey, walking consumers through their experiences and forcing them to consider their behaviour at each step. This is a useful exercise as many decisions made along the journey are quick, even sub-conscious.
Quantitative research captures the frequency and magnitude of behaviours and attitudes along the journey and provides a benchmark that can be monitored going forwards. Repeating the research then delivers robust evidence of how optimising one stage of the journey can affect all of the others. Consumer journey mapping can also provide foundational insight for strategic gap analysis – once you know what your consumers currently experience, you can identify where improving the experience can have the biggest business impact and devise your strategy accordingly.
