Customer Journey Framework

Welcome to Grow Club. The place where thousands of founders, CEOs & marketers learn the strategies behind the world’s most successful brands & creators. If you like what you see click the button below to join us for free.

INTRODUCTION

This week I am going to do something a little different. Instead of deep diving into a strategy story or case study, I am going to give away a tool I helped to develop many years ago. A tool that I frequently use to help better understand customers’ pain points & in turn how brands can leverage them to drive growth. Curious to find out more? Let’s begin…

THE PROBLEM WITH PERSONAS

I have been in the strategy game for a long time. Working with brands at every stage of growth from startup and scaleup to enterprise level. Regardless of their stage of growth, one problem seems to arise time & time again…wasting tons of time & money on consumer research. So before I lay out the tool I use let’s first highlight what many brands get so very wrong.

Many of you might relate to the following situation:

• An expensive research agency is hired.

• Thousands of interviews were performed

• Detailed consumer persons were developed

Each of these personas will have dug deep into the nuance of their many ‘different’ audiences. How they differ in age, attitudes & demographics. Yet the inconvenient truth is none of this rarely matters. Now before some of you become outraged or drag this email into the junk folder, let me explain myself.

The big issue with personas is that they define WHO buyers are rather than WHY they buy. They become more obsessed with character differences than the fundamental pain points & what will drive people to purchase. This is a distraction because (i) it assumes all people of a certain age/type are the same and (ii) it fails to realise many different personas can share the same paint points. The example below of Ozzy Osbourne & Prince Charles perfectly illustrates how very ill-informed personas can be.

To better illustrate this point let’s do a bit of a thought experiment. Imagine you are the owner of a gym brand & you are trying to attract more consumers. Which of the following information about your audience do you think would be more useful?

1. Bryan is a 42 y/o dad of three, from New York, he works in catering, earns $50K/yr and likes to watch baseball on TV.

2. Bryan feels increasingly exhausted after quitting sports years ago, due to his increasingly hectic life.

Clearly, number two is infinitely more helpful because it reveals the pain points the brand can tap into and answer: a hassle-free gym experience that can easily fit into a hectic life.

These pain points are far more useful because they reveal the pain points brands can trigger/speak to in order to drive purchase & nudge behaviour. They also tend to be bigger & more universal, spanning many different personas. It’s not unrealistic to imagine, for example, a busy young student working two jobs whilst studying for college, suffering from the same ‘hectic life’ pain point as Bryan. This latter point is especially important because it enables you to go after a broader audience & we know broad reach is far more effective when it comes to brand growth.

So now we know that pain points are superior to personas how can we best identify them and work with them? Well, this is where the customer journey framework comes in…

THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY FRAMEWORK

The customer journey builds upon the famous ‘Jobs to be done framework’ and creates something more bespoke for marketing. Something which is will be far more effective at a brand level, spanning the four Ps (ie Price, Promotion, Product & Place). Specifically, it is designed to convert a consumer from a non-buyer to a raving advocate. And in turn, always aiming to drive acquisition and reach (ie advocates bring new consumers into the fold).

How does the framework work? Well, first we need to begin by asking five essential questions that help us truly understand the pain points & the role the brand should play in order to nudge people into purchase and eventually advocacy. These five questions are as follows…

THINK
What are the big point points your audience is thinking about?

FEEL
How do these paint points make them feel?

DO
What is the current behaviour based on these thoughts & feelings?

ROLE OF BRAND
What is the desired behaviour change we want the brand to affect?

ASSETS
What are the owned, earned or paid assets we should leverage to affect change?

Understanding these broad paint points and the associated feelings & behaviours, helps us to better understand what nudging we need to do at every stage of the journey.

To help illustrate how this journey might work I have expanded on the gym example below.

But Will I want a copy of the framework?! Ok sure no problem you can find a link to it for free HERE. Simply make a copy and move it over to your Google Drive.

All I ask for in return is that if use it credit me and this newsletter. I have found someone else has been passing off my work as their own over the last week which was disappointing and honestly makes me want to stop writing. So please do take the time to share this newsletter and help us to continue growing.

WINNERS

Thanks to all of you who filled out the research survey the other week. Big congrats to our winners Yasin & Pollyanna. I will be in touch tomorrow to book our 1:1s.

CONCLUSION

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. What do you think of this different approach & format? Reply to this email & let me know. Always keen to get feedback and improve.

Will Poskett,
Founder of Defiant