Traditional customer journeys and paths to purchases used to be fairly easy to follow, track, understand, improve upon and make everything seamless for your customer. But, how does one navigate the information, brand, content and path architecture of today?
What was once believed to be linear almost like an undeniable funnel can have few or many twists and turns along the way.
However, for certain categories like FMCG and Groceries, Medicines and more – their paths will always be mostly linear. But, what happens when you’re suddenly stuck with the challenge of an altogether new category. It’s simple, you have to track it, science it completely and try to understand it with real-world data. Online and offline.
To find your brand, product or service’s nearly accurate path to purchase don’t operate out of a silo, a vacuum or just target everything and everyone out there. By doing that you’ll easily hemorrhage your marketing budget moreover it will be a true waste of time and effort.
To understand this path, you need to live this world, track a package, meet stakeholders and people who will pass the baton along the way.
Navigating an upsurge of touchpoints
Conversations, thoughts, affinities, preferences, motivations, likes, dislikes they all converge in this journey. Many other factors also affect these touchpoints like brand visibility, recall, acceptance, functionality, product fit, durability, likeability and even repeat availability.
The problem of unavailability and sudden disappearance of product continuity
Repeat availability is a major factor in buying things because manufacturers often believe that things are seasonal when on the contrary a handful of people do return from time to time to shop for the same product after being satisfied with their first purchase.
Nostalgia in the mix
Nostalgia has made a huge appearance or should I say reappearance with its tangible and intangible charm across categories. It can send a product or brand straight into the abyss or bring them back all of a sudden from a void of years or decades. Action figures, games, movies, online or tv shows also fall in this category.
What do people really want?
People don’t tell you directly what they want. Is it fun, comfortable or functional? Can you spot it on their social timeline? Sometimes people just want to fill their wardrobe. At times their tastes in fashion reflects their taste in movies and can be very niche. Maybe they’re looking for something similar to what characters are wearing in their favourite story, sport or game. As humans, we do like to emulate the things, patterns, motifs or designs that we love or have grown to love. Maybe someone spotted a great, comfortable pair of joggers(pants) and sneakers in a conversation. Maybe the sneakers appeared in an article or a meme discussing popular culture. Maybe the design of the sneaker was just like the one the person grew up with and now they’re looking for a throwback item in their wardrobe. Maybe it’s a recommendation from friends or artists. Spotted at an event perhaps? Gifting? Regifting also plays a huge role in repeat purchases. Once you try the best, you do wish to pay it forward to your network. This is especially true in the case of action figures or games of popular titles. These twists and turns drive the journey from linearity to unfamiliarity.
Reviews in full view
Sometimes, a negative review or conversation or a vision of a future regret regarding a particular product can stop the customer and their journey in their tracks. Like a bad dream.
Cause and effect
A turn of unforeseen events can also make people shut down all purchases or a core belief system like minimalism, less is more or a new sustainable lifestyle approach may also make people question their future purchases.
What about churn?
Numbers, tools, models, calculations, modules, programs may give you all the metrics you think you need but how do you find out about a user or buyer’s immediate thoughts and feelings? The truth is you can’t and churn a term often used in data science also lends itself to behaviour and for example – if someone uninstalls a brand, product or service from their life, chance are, the network will follow. Or if someone refused to refer something they are unhappy about, it won’t create the repeat value you think it should.
An era of synchronous and asynchronous purchases
It’s not just our content these days that’s responsive. Even our purchases are. You add things to a cart online and return later to buy it at an appropriate time. If the experience is logged in or synced you may not pick up where you left off from the same device even. So then does the consumer journey live across moments, devices, timelines? It now certainly does.
An absence of loyalty = an absence of loyalty
With so many apps, disjointed customer experiences, unconnected and connected purchased within the same brand platform or ecosystem and getting nothing in return is a sure shot way to see more disappointments and drop offs because in the era when loyalty worked very well, you got something in return atleast, we got very used to being rewarded. Now, all journeys seem unrewarding otherwise.
Mountains and hills of obstacles
When your UI is really dark and by dark I don’t mean the colour palette, I am talking about user-unfriendliness. When finding the simple open or close button is an uphill task. When experiences are untested, best practices are not being followed, the sellers are largely unknown, codes are expiring faster than acquiring them, when logistics says we don’t deliver to your popular area. Example - when a popular restaurant can’t deliver to a popular suburb or neighborhood or the shipping is costly or things get broken in the last mile or for some reason unplanned now the pincodes are overlapping, you can be assured of drop outs and people never returning to your experience.
To navigate this new world, one has to go online and offline to observe things, patterns, reviews, behaviours, data, numbers both qualitative and quantitative so see the real reasons as to what makes or breaks this path for a particular product.
I studied one such path that of joggers – a product I love myself and from a consumer’s point of view and perspective. Not necessarily from a logistics, supply chain or shipping perspective as I don’t have access to that data. But, it was interesting to see the multitude of touchpoints, twists and turns.
The next time you are brainstorming on how to develop, position, deploy, package or even design a blog or a helpdesk for your customers try to follow the path of your product in the real world and spot the answers to your questions along the way. If your products are already out there – you can study them right from the warehouse to the shipping to the store and its final receipt to post-purchase and after sales.
Here are some observations I’ve made of a path related to purchasing joggers and what all happens before, during and post purchase of the product or products. If you’re building an online or offline store, maybe this observation from lived experiences will inspire you to think of your purchase ecosystem. Essentially, I’ve tried to study how people buy them online and offline, what factors affect them and where does a transaction possibly happen or not.
Every path to purchase is not the same. It’s a maze full of obstacles.