The focus of this chapter is the customer journey, a concept that has emerged from business practice and that now commands the attention of practitioners and academics alike. The customer journey is defined as the sum total of all customer interactions with a product, brand or organization across multiple channels and touchpoints. The customer journey is still primarily a concept from business practice and is an immature field for academics. As a result, we draw upon existing literature streams, which are not directly focused on the customer journey but which deliver key insights and enable us to build understanding. Specifically, we draw upon multichannel management and services management research and demonstrate how these knowledge streams help to build understanding of the dynamics of the customer as they move along their journey. We present a detailed examination of one specific form of customer journey, the shopper journey, and assess the drivers of shopping channel choice and journey configuration. The evolution of the shopper journey from single channel, through multichannel, to omnichannel is discussed. The chapter then moves on to discuss the service journey, broadening the journey perspective from the act of shopping to the holistic experience of service consumption. The key role of the customer in co-creating value along the service journey is identified, and we note the importance of personalization and of understanding customers’ relational needs to service journey optimization. Next, we examine the role that customer journey mapping can play in helping organizations to understand and improve their customers’ current journey configurations and in informing future service journey design. The challenges inherent in measuring the customer experience along the journey are discussed, and alternative customer journey metrics are evaluated. The chapter concludes with our reflections on the current state of knowledge, and we identify future directions for customer journey research and also future challenges for business practice.
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Pub Date : 2020-11-24DOI: 10.4337/9781781005224.00012
John A. Czepiel
1 COMPETITOR ANALYSIS Competitive marketing strategies are strongest either when they position a firm's strengths against competitors' weaknesses or choose positions that pose no threat to competitors. As such, they require that the strategist be as knowledgeable about competitors' strengths and weaknesses as about customers' needs or the firm's own capabilities. This chapter is designed to assist the strategist understand how to gather and analyze information about competitors that is useful in the strategy development process. It discusses the objectives of competitor analysis and proceeds through the processes involved in identifying important competitors and information needs, gathering necessary information, and interpreting this information. The ultimate objective of competitor analysis is to know enough about a competitor to be able to think like that competitor so the firm's competitive strategy can be formulated to take into account the competitors' likely actions and responses. From a practical viewpoint, a strategist needs to be able to live in the competitors' strategic shoes. The strategist needs to be able to understand the situation as the competitors see it and to analyze it so as to know what actions the competitors would take to maximize their outcomes to be able to calculate the actual financial and personal outcomes of the competitor's strategic choices. They must be able to: 1. Estimate the nature and likely success of the potential strategy changes available to a competitor; 2. Predict each competitor's probably responses to important strategic moves on the part of the other competitors; and 3. Understand competitors' potential reactions to changes in key industry and environmental parameters. What then should one expect from competitor analysis? Underneath all of the complexities and depth of competitor analysis are some simple and basic practical questions, of which the following are typical: Which competitors does our strategy pit us against? Which competitor is most vulnerable and how should we move on its customers? 2 Is the competitor's announced move just a bluff? What's it gain if we accept it at face value? What kind of aggressive moves will the competitor accept? Which moves has it always countered? IDENTIFYING COMPETITORS Identifying competitors for analysis is not quite as obvious as it might seem. Two complementary approaches are possible. The first is demand-side based, comprised of firms satisfying the same set of customer needs. The second approach is supply-side based, identifying firms whose resource base, technology, operations, and the …
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