Why the Best ‘Customer Journeys’ Place Mobile at the Center
Industry
leaders are transforming their businesses by making the user experience on
mobile devices the center of their marketing strategies, according to this
opinion piece by Gopi Kallayil, Google’s chief evangelist for brand
marketing and Bhaskar Ramesh, head of industry, consumer packaged goods, India.
The automobile industry has long thrived in a world where cars
were parked 95% of the time. But that’s all changing. In October of 2016, Steve
Mahan, who is legally blind, tooled around Austin, Tex. in one of Google’s
fleet of self-driving cars — no brake pads, no steering wheel. Just Steve. “It
is like driving with a very good driver,” Mahan told The Washington
Post. “This is a hope of independence.”
Not only could driverless cars help millions who cannot navigate
roads on their own, but they also enable ride-sharing, where cars could shuttle
people on multiple trips during the day. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we can
look at Uber (while there’s currently much controversy around the company,
they’re still a dominant name in the category). Travis Kalanick and Garrett
Camp, founders of the ride-sharing company, created their app to connect
drivers with dependable rides.
Their mission? To make transportation as reliable as running
water, and they’ve done just that, in more than 540 cities worldwide. In
Helsinki, MaaS Global’s Whim released a travel
app that incorporates all means of transport — including walking, e-bikes, and
ride-sharing to trams — to get people to where they want to go. Tap the screen
on your smartphone, and the app shows you the best options, or combination of
options, and handles planning, routing and booking.
Technology and ride-sharing services are disrupting the
long-standing business model of personal car ownership like never before. Some
estimates suggest that when the disruption reaches its peak, and we hit the new
normal, the world might need one-sixth the number of cars currently in
circulation. For this reason, every big auto manufacturer is hurriedly pivoting
to some form of car-as-a-service.
This change doesn’t mean consumers will make fewer trips. It
just means that in a truly digitized world, the user experience with cars will
change dramatically for an average consumer. What makes this new approach to
transport as a service possible? According to The Economist, it is
the rise of the sharing economy, the idea of “usership” instead of ownership.
And smartphones.
We all know we live in a mobile-first world, and this world is
transformational, but do we really understand how mobile is changing the
consumer journey? How it’s changing purchase decision-making? Do we all know
how to win in mobile and use the signals as a learning machine? And how to
execute on those signals? Are we taking advantage of everything mobile has to
offer in creating magical experiences for our brand?
Winning brands do understand this massive shift
in their consumers’ journey and internalize it when designing their products
and communication. Just as we continue to use “cars” for transport, your
product might remain the same, but how you talk about your product and how you
sell to this mobile-first generation will need to change dramatically.
When you solve for this shift, you don’t just win awards, you
truly start winning market share. This article celebrates a few companies who
dared to reimagine their business for the digital world. And they did this by
reimagining their user experience, a term often associated with the online
world to suggest how easy or difficult it is to navigate a website or an app.
Bringing the Consumer Experience to the
Shopper
Over the decades, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies
mastered the art of telling stories through TV commercials and the barometer of
great advertising was its ability to move brand metrics. However, the way
millennials engage with content has changed fundamentally and the fact is they
hate “interruption.” To win with this audience on consideration, brands need to
grab their attention and go beyond reach.
Let’s look at the beauty industry. In an offline world, selling
lipstick meant glossy TV ads, glamorous Hollywood stars, and a beauty advisor
at the retail outlet who gave recommendations to customers about the right
shade of red. Cut to the digital world. Millennials seldom watch TV ads. They
adore YouTube stars more than Hollywood celebrities. And they love shopping
online but aren’t as into visiting malls.
Clinique, the iconic beauty brand, gets this. When they launched
their new line of products targeting millennials, the company decided to shake
up makeup by making digital the “new beauty counter.” The campaign, Play With
Pop, features Zara Larsson, a popular YouTube star from Sweden, who has
more than 1 billion views and 3 million subscribers.
Clinique chose Larsson’s popular “Lush
Life” video to communicate the core insight that a woman’s
lipstick choices reflect her mood on a given day. The execution mirrors the new
consumer journey that Clinique decoded to bring alive the insight exclusively
online. Each color in the interactive video goes with a separate remix of the
song in question, and each mix had a different video and look.
The campaign saw best-in-class results for the Play With Pop
campaign. As a result of the exposure, searches for Clinique had gone up four
times. A 10% lift was seen in consideration to buy beauty products among the
core users in the age group 18 to 34. And Larsson, herself, has amassed nearly
500 million video views for her song “Lush Life,” keeping the campaign and
Clinique super-relevant.
Be Useful in the Consumer’s Life
When it comes to sports apparel, Nike has inspired generations
by communicating its philosophy that “If you have a body, you are an athlete.”
The message had a higher order of appeal than just to hardcore athletes, which
is working brilliantly for the company. For Under Armour, an underdog brand,
getting into the sports apparel consumer’s consideration is a tough challenge.
It used to be that consumers bought sports apparel twice a year. But in an era
when consumers interact with their mobile phones 200 times per day, connecting
with the consumer on two occasions annually is suicidal.
Sports brands need reasons to engage daily. In the old world,
most sports brands would have bought sponsorships at stadiums, hoping users
would see the halo effect on their TV sets and the sales were worth those
millions of dollars. Under Armour decided on a different direction. They chose
to own the user experience around fitness 100%.
Early in 2016, Under Armour acquired MyFitnessPal.com, a
free calorie-counting and weight-management app and website, for
$560 million. This investment means that Under Armour is now interacting with
its consumers and providing utility three to four times a day. MyFitnessPal has
more than 80 million registered users. That’s 80 million new registered users
for Under Armour overnight. Together, MyFitnessPal and Under Armour’s existing
apps serve 120 million users.
In October 2016, Under Armour combined MyFitnessPal with a new
partnership: Mindbody, a cloud platform for wellness businesses. Now, users
can book exercise classes through their app.
Members get to the app from within the MyFitnessPal app by selecting “More” at
the bottom of their home screen, then “Find a Class,” which will take them to a
list of nearby fitness activities.
In pursuing his vision that the company’s Connected Fitness unit
will “fundamentally affect global health,” founder and CEO Kevin Plank has
adopted what Inc. refers to as the “world-changing ambitions
more common to a Google or Facebook.” It’s this tech-first, user-journey-led
thinking that is making the company a game changer in the tough sports apparel
market.
Make It Easy to Experience the Brand
In another industry, Starbucks saw that when people were waiting
in line to order, they were on their phones. And when they were waiting for
their orders? Again, on their phones. They also saw that once the line reached
a certain length, people would go somewhere else to get their coffee. So the
company decided to create an app to streamline the coffee buying experience.
Today, 20% of all Starbuck’s transactions are mobile.
Starbucks introduced Mobile Order & Pay, building a new consumer
experience around mobile that benefits both the company and its customers.
Pre-order/pay avoids peak-time lines so the company doesn’t lose any customers.
Staff productivity is optimized. Maps show users how to get to a location,
which is especially helpful when they’re travelling or aren’t near their
regular Starbucks.
And because people can pre-load their rewards cards with a
minimum of $25, Starbucks receives more money upfront, before the coffee is
brewed. It’s interesting to note that Starbucks thought more like a tech
company than a retailer in solving for the user experience. Their CEO, Kevin
Johnson, didn’t come from the coffee industry or retail; he came from software,
which certainly must have played a role in the way the company looks at its
business. Beyond being a magical user experience, the app is a learning machine
that is enriched with every user transaction, making it a significant
competitive advantage for Starbucks over time.
Marketers who take a consumer-first approach (focusing on
customers’ needs and behaviors to make their lives better) versus a
medium-first approach (focusing on creating a campaign based on the platform
such as YouTube or Facebook) will be able to engage with their consumers much
better.
So, where do you begin?
1. Put on
a CEO lens and look at the mobile opportunity to transform your business and
reshape the user journey for your product.
2. Understand the micro-moments (those
tiny moments in our lives when a particular topic, need, or interest surfaces)
and define the new user journey for your category.
3. Connect
with the consumer during the moments when they’re most receptive.
4. Engage
users with impactful messaging that either entertains, educates, serves as a
supreme utility app or involves them in co-creating the messaging.
5. Stop
measuring redundant digital metrics such as click-through rates, completion
rates, bounce rates, and page visits. Instead, focus on measuring outcomes —
sales, purchase intent — leveraging all the data available to help you, and use
analytics platforms to make faster and better decisions.
Summary
User experience is often associated with the online world to
suggest how easy or difficult it is to navigate a website or an app. The
faster, smarter and more intuitive apps score higher with the user. Today,
users “live” online — changing the user journeys for your entire business, not
just digital, dramatically.
In a world where there are four connected mobile devices for
every TV set, brands and businesses that embrace this new user journey are
transforming the way they sell and the way they talk. This article is about
celebrating thought leaders and their winning ways in reimagining the user
experience for running and transforming their businesses — and leave them with
a simple go-to framework that the authors advocate to global leaders on where
to begin.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/best-customer-journeys-place-mobile-center/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-04-20
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