I was going over some notes taken during a recent WARC webinar presented by (my boy) Faris Yakob and came across a slide on the customer journey. I’m a fan of customer journey having created a facsimile I call Twitch Point Planning. Twitch Point Planning attempts to “understand, map and manipulate a customer closer to a sale.” In effect, it’s a customer journey, but using media twitches.
The WARC presentation on customer journey had a wonderful slide entitled “Start with what customers are doing rather versus what we want to say.”
I love this advice. It may be the anthropology major in me, but this is just such a rudimentary planning perspective. Everything needs to start with the consumer. As planners we can decide not to heed consumers’ behavioral advice, but we need to understand it.
Consumers first. Peace.