Peer Review

Creating Customer Journey Maps - Great Ideas for Teaching Marketing

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Reviewed:: Jul 13, 2020 by Business

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

The exercise provides an easy to populate, visually appealing, and quickly adapted custom customer journey from persona to post-sale. The process is very detailed and mostly self-explanatory. It may be used for goods, services, ecommerce, brick-and-mortar, and brick-and-click.

This will help students to understand:

the overall buying decision process aspects of consumer behavior differences in market segments
- by using different brand personas promotion, process, and people marketing mix elements
- by considering brand touchpoints brand management customer satisfaction loyalty and retention Structuring Customer

Type of Material:

Assignment

Recommended Uses:

Homework and class discussion According to the authors, the process should take 30 to 60 minutes. Done in groups, it may take longer to arrive at a consensus, and you can modify input during or after the process. The authors suggest: “It would be a good idea for different groups of students to construct a customer journey map using different brand personas, and then comparing how the customer journeys vary for each of these personas – and to discuss why this would be the case?” It would be interesting to have different groups create the journey using the same persona.

Technical Requirements:

Very limited knowledge of Excel is needed. Guidance is provided, written and a 10-minute video, on how to use it. The developer even provides his email address for questions. Instructions on the website are detailed and self-explanatory, almost superfluous, given the ease of use for the Excel file. The Excel file is easy to populate. Excel cells are protected from user error (e.g., listing the same number twice or going beyond the scale’s values) and some cells locked.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

To identify the processes in consumer decisions and buying.

Target Student Population:

Undergraduate Consumer Behavior or Integrated Marketing Communication class

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Consumer Behavior, Branding, Principles of marketing

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

Students would find this engaging, useful, and enjoyable. The template is aesthetically appealing. Almost exhaustive lists (are limited in how many can be chosen) are provided for the categories, and you have the ability to write in additional categories unique to a buyer or process.

The assignment is clear and concise. The Excel spreadsheet includes instructions that provide the necessary knowledge to use the software.

Concerns:

A weighted attribution model like in Google Analytics would be helpful (validity of that model is questionable), but it may be beyond this lesson.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

This activity/assignment provides students a hands-on application providing insights into the consumer decision process. It should be engaging, and the interactivity with the spreadsheet enhances the learning potential.

Concerns:

None

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:: The site is clear and uses a consistent layout. The Excel spreadsheet includes the necessary instructions--and students should not find it complicated.

Other Issues and Comments:

The persona is limited, which is understandable given the input data required and the size of the output graph. It is missing motivations and frustrations. Also, it is limited to five items. A picture and bio (including demographics) for the persona would be nice; given the possibilities, this may be difficult to implement. Step three (under persona) requires important measures for the purchase decision. Here, a tradeoff analysis should be used, or you risk having everything important.

Under awareness and WOM/visibility, influencers should be added (does include later “a celebrity brand”).

Under search, comparison site is listed, but does that include online review sites (e.g., Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.)?

Under purchase, it is unclear what “used a trolley” means? Is this an advertisement on a shopping cart? Ordered online should be detailed more: company website, social media account, aggregator like Amazon, etc.

Post-purchase should include enrolling in a loyalty program. For the Fine-tune Map section, you should identify what is the highest: one or 10 (ordinal data).

In the final map, lower values are shown as unimportant.

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