Why Journey Maps Fail to Deliver Journey Management

Another week down and the world is a very different place with announcement of the American Election. Some feel this is a major step forward, others a terrible step backwards. Given that this newsletter is about how to manage customer journeys, it is safe to say that regardless of Republicans or Democrats being in the White House, businesses across the globe must continue to delivery great experiences and ensure that customer are able to reach their goals when embarking on customer journeys.

We engage with customers in many markets and naturally we are continually looking to find opportunities to work with customers to that want to manage their journeys and drive better outcomes. It is what we do as an organisation and there are very good signs in the market that our corporate clients value what we do. At the same time, the space is new and emerging and thus we are passionate about spreading the gospel about what we see works and what does not.

In the first newsletter in this series, I outlined about a poor approach means failed ROI and wrote about the best practices of Journey management. The link here

In this week I would like to take the time to describe the very large chasm between Journey Management using Journey Analytics and Journey Orchestration vs Journey Mapping.

There are several very good journey mapping solutions in the market. A link to a website that goes through these is here

The “Why” Behind Journey Management

It is worth exploring the “why” behind journey management. It starts with understanding how people (humans) make decisions. All decisions are emotional and thus to get customers to change behaviour (buy at all, buy more, stay longer or make recommendations), you first have to appeal to their emotional side. You need to go no further than the USA election to prove this point but lets look back in history.

If we go back in history, the first good example of the notion of emotional decision making is evidenced in the genius of Frederick the Great of Prussia back in the 18th century. He was looking for ways to feed his nation and lower the price of bread. He proposed the potato as a suitable new addition to the nation’s diet but peasants resisted growing it. They said that potatoes looked dirty and had no taste. So King Frederick decided to rebrand it as a royal vegetable, planted a royal field with potato plants and ordered his guards to protect them.

Now here’s the real kicker — the guards were instructed to pretend not to notice in case local peasants tried to steal from the King’s garden. Before long, peasants started stealing these “royal potatoes” and growing them in secret. And boom, suddenly everyone was eating potatoes. Frederick understood this: if something is worth guarding, it is worth stealing.

Potatoe King – Frederick the Great

If we fast forward to today, and consider the amount of marketing hitting consumers today, it is the equivalent of hundreds of Fredericks’ schemes every day unleashed by thousands of companies. The result is that the average consumer’s day looks like this:

The Average Consumer Today

The above hypothesis has been further confirmed by the research of a Neuro Researcher – António Damásio. Damasio’s Research observed the decision making of brain damaged individuals. He concluded:

• That patients whose link between the amygdala (part of the limbic system) and neocortex (rational brain)  have been damaged exhibit extremely poor decision-making skills.
• The amygdala is a storehouse of emotional reactions
• Signals are processed in the amygdala BEFORE they reach the neocortex.
• Therefore people make decisions as a function of their past emotional experiences and that emotional processing occurs BEFORE rational processing

A customer’s decision to purchase, leave a supplier or recommend a provider is thus partly a function of the service delivered BUT also very much a function of their emotional reaction or perception

In his book “Demand, Creating What People Love Before they Know They Want It”, Adrian J Slywotsky outcomes that Magnetism is achieved through multiplying Functional and Emotion (a great read for any marketer).

Journey Management vs Journey Mapping

With this background, it is then useful to consider if you should be focusing on an approach of Journey management vs Journey Mapping

The key questions that I believe customers that are aiming to drive outcomes should be asking include:

• What are customers actual journeys?
• Which customers are reach the journey goal?
• Which customers are either stalling or dropping off?
• Why are certain customer reaching the goal and why are certain customer dropping off?
• What can be done to change the number of customers dropping off vs those that are reaching the goal?
• When I implement changes to drive behavioural outcomes, what is the impact i.e. were my initiative successful?
• How can I optimise my interventions further?
• What are the profit metrics for customer dropping off vs the profit metrics for customers that reach the goal?
• How can I leverage tools such as real time marketing and real time personalisation to drive better outcomes?
• What is the relationship between what customer do vs what they feel?
• How long is it taking customer to get through journeys?
• Where are customers getting stuck?
• How can I user generative AI powered by customer context to drive customers forward

Clearly Journey Mapping has value but it answers a very different set of questions such as:

• What do we, as management and consultants, think the experience of our customers is as they migrate across journeys?
• What do we think are the poor points of the journey vs the compelling parts of the experience?
• Can we produce a map so that we have a notion of the customer journey (regardless of the fact that it is a very rough approximation)?
• How do we product a single aggregated view of all journeys (accepting that it will not be segmented based on differing customer needs)?
• Can we design a good theoretical journey experience (accepting that the real world might differ to the designed experience)?
• What other tools and technologies are needed to actually drive outcomes?
• How do I make some progress with improving the experiences that customers go through without fully investing in a solution that achieves an actual outcome?

As you can see from the questions above, the purpose and outcomes of a journey management approach and a journey mapping approach are very different. It is true to say there is a higher level of investment required in Journey management (enabled through Journey Analytics and Journey Orchestration) but equally the returns are far greater.

As an analogy between the different of a spreadsheet when analysing expense and sales data vs a full-blown budgeting and customer profitability system. They both have value but the progress that can be made with one is significantly greater than the other.

When to Choose Journey Management and when to choose Journey Mapping

To look at this from another perspective, consider the following comparison table when considering what approach to take: