Welcome to the Crystal Maze aka the customer journey

I quite like diagrams like this.

It reminds us that marketing isn’t a trite exercise, it can be complicated, almost a science, maybe even like engineering.

I am clever. You are clever. We are clever.

But then you think on, and you find them so annoying you forget to open the fridge door in between zoom calls. What do you want me to do with it? This is when it starts to go wrong.

We use them as a blue print for the customer experience. If the buyer process is complicated, then so must the experience be.

Then just to make sure it is complicated enough, we take this Crystal Maze and optimise it. Optimising it makes it perfect. And everything in the world is good.

No, it doesn’t. It just makes something less bad. Especially if you don’t know what metric you should be optimising it against.

99% of people on this planet can’t follow IKEA assembly instructions, so what makes you think they get a moment of clarity when they come face to face with your brand and its Tron line UX.

So, get to the point.

Identify what customers want, decide what the goal is and make it easy for customers to get there. Then perhaps consider encouraging a dialogue rather than putting all our digital energy into avoiding one.

B2B digital experience should in theory be easier than B2C. The job is to identify quality rather than process quantity. Clearly, we find it too difficult to let go of the ‘get as many people into the top of the funnel and see what happens approach’ to marketing.

And that’s frustrating.