11 Understanding the Customer’s Journey

 Figure 2, Customer shopping for a new phone plan
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Now that we know how customers generally make purchase decisions, we will look at a tool that marketers use to understand their specific customers and how these customers come to buy their specific offering. When you buy a gaming PC at Staples, your decision making process looks different than when you buy a mouse at Staples. For each customer and each type of product they are buying, the process will look completely different.

The customer journey (sometimes called the buyer journey) traces the very specific steps each customer goes through to find out about and then eventually buy your specific offering. It will look different for each company and each offering. When Marketers seek to understand their customers’ journey, they build out a journey map that helps marketers to visualize what the customer is going through in each step of the process.

Last item for this week: Read this article to learn about customer journeys and journey mapping. Reading – Customer Journey map