Redefining Retail

7The Post‐Digital Customer Journey

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer” as Drucker famously stated in his 1954 book The Practice of Management.¹ But as we've seen in the previous chapter, there is no way a company can succeed in this mission unless it understands what its prospective customers need and desire. And even more important: a company must understand how those desired customers behave along the journey from the moment they first realize their want to the moment they obtain (or don't) what they want. Understanding customer behaviour and tracking the customer journey is a vital element of a company's very existence.

The customer journey has always been determined by personal, social, and cultural factors, “as well as being influenced,” according to Katherine N. Lemon and Peter C. Verhoef, “by consumer motivation, perception, emotions, and memory. This, in turn, influences the customer buying process—a journey that entails the recognition of a need, a search for the best means to fulfill that need, and evaluation of the available options to finally arrive at the ultimate decision of what, when, where, and how much to buy, and how to pay for these purchases.”² Due to the explosion of channels and touchpoints that we've experienced from the Retail 3.0 phase onward, and the unprecedented quantity of alternative products and services available, this journey has become far less linear and predictable than it was in the past. People still start the journey by ...