Mining the buyer journey for competitive advantage

The paradigm of keeping customers is well understood. Customer loyalty is based on meeting the expectations of your customers at every touch point (e.g., marketing communications, sales, product/service usage, support, website, etc.) a company has with its customers.

Millions of dollars are spent annually by businesses to survey their customers to measure just how well they are doing against customers’ expectations and where and how process and/or communication changes may be warranted.

Acquiring customers is another challenge. Succeeding here is primarily about having an outstanding product or service.

The engine is the brand strategy (i.e., positioning, targeting and messaging). The two, however, may not be sufficient to be truly successful. Just as market research surveys have provided valuable guidance on how to retain customers, they also can guide the customer acquisition process. Specifically, much attention has been given in recent years to understanding the “buyer journey”. Here the focus is on understanding all the steps the buyer takes before he/she hits your touch points. The goal of this research is to identify all of the external touch points that a buyer (potential customer) takes early on in their decision-making processes, where a company can affect the buyer decisions.

Buyer journey research is one more input into the brand strategy that can provide competitive advantage by answering these two big questions: