When customers journey from a need to a purchase decision and beyond, they rarely do so alone. This article introduces the social customer journey, which extends prior perspectives on the path to purchase by explicitly integrating the important role that social others play throughout the journey. The authors highlight the importance of “traveling companions,” who interact with the decision maker through one or more phases of the journey, and they argue that the social distance between the companion(s) and the decision maker is an important factor in how social influence affects that journey. They also consider customer journeys made by decision-making units consisting of multiple individuals and increasingly including artificial intelligence agents that can serve as surrogates for social others. The social customer journey concept integrates prior findings on social influences and customer journeys and highlights opportunities for new research within and across the various stages. Finally, the authors discuss several actionable marketing implications relevant to organizations’ engagement in the social customer journey, including managing influencers, shaping social interactions, and deploying technologies.

This research investigates the effects of refraining from a purchase temptation at one point in time on choices made at a subsequent opportunity to purchase or consume a tempting product. Four experiments involving scenarios and real decisions demonstrate that the salience of restraint at a prior impulse buying opportunity causes consumers to reward themselves subsequently by choosing indulgence over non-indulgence. We show that indulgence is likely to increase only when prior restraint is salient and hence can be used as a justification. As expected, an index of reasons for vs. against buying mediates the relationship between prior impulse purchase decision and indulgent choice. In further support of the mechanism, we find that prior indulgence can have the same effect as prior restraint, if the prior indulgence is made justifiable. Finally, we show that prior shopping restraint can increase indulgence without a corresponding increase in self-esteem. These findings extend our understanding of self-regulation and demonstrate that everyday consumer decisions such as responses to impulse buying opportunities can have consequential downstream effects.

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