Marketing can be guilty of being the dog that barks at every passing car – there is always something shiny and new to get distracted by, says Phil Barden, managing director of Decode Marketing and author of Decoded. The Science Behind Why We Buy in conversation with the Strand Review of Books.
He explains that, as a result, marketeers can lose sight of the fundamentals – human behaviour. He states: “Ultimately marketing, or sales, or advertising is all about behaviour change. We want people to buy our brands, buy more of our brands, switch to our brands and tell their friends about our brands. It is all about human behaviour.”
A lot of time, money and energy can be wasted doing what is thought to be new and cool if it misses understanding:
- why we, as consumers, make the choices we do;
- why we like certain brands and not others; and
- how communication works in the brain.
Brand marketeers are encouraged to optimize the path to purchase as that can help. Taking a behavioural lens to a customer journey and analyzing what the behaviour is now and what the desired behaviour is, should help with successful mapping. Different techniques should then be applied across the various stages of the journey. Classic A/B testing is one tried and tested option.
Key too, is consistency of messaging and consistency of look and feel across the different journey points. Often different people in separate departments are responsible for unrelated touchpoints or sectors of the customer journey. Unless they are all aligned, and what is trying to be achieved is properly understood, the journey can become disjointed.
Gaps can then open up between the strategy and execution. And the whole approach is compromised.
There are several ways digital print can help optimize the customer journey with consistent, informative, and impactful communications.
It can help create:
- timely, targeted, educational promotions and refined offers with cleaner, more accurate, and better segmented data;
- impactful personalization that makes the customer feel individually valued;
- a marketing asset management) system can also be adopted to help ensure brand guidelines are met and a consistent look and feel is applied across the different journey points;
- engaging messages and visually exciting communications that can enliven print on a wide range of media with spot colours, fluorescent effects using neon toners, white toner, and metallic effects;
- memorable interactions with tactile substrates that can be employed to stimulate the sense of touch for a greater feeling of connectivity;
- increased interactivity between on- and off-line worlds with printed QR codes and augmented reality (AR) for a more seamless experience.
The combination of the above can determine a connected journey that recognizes the individuality of the customer and makes them feel valued. It builds trust. It gets results.
Digital printing technology can thus support your marketing clients in their quest for building and sustaining optimized customer journeys.
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