Traveling with Companions: The Social Customer Journey

Abstract

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.

Customer Experience Journeys: Loyalty Loops Versus Involvement Spirals

“…The initial service cycle of customer experience journeys is widely understood as a highly deliberate, multiphase, customer decision-making process, motivated by internal and external triggers (Court et al 2009; Hamilton et al 2020; Spenner and Freeman 2012). Firms compete for customer attention during every phase of this process: (1) the initial consideration of multiple brands, (2) the active evaluation of those brands, (3) the moment of purchase, and (4) the consumption experience.…”

Evolution of Consumption: A Psychological Ownership Framework

“…Psychological ownership is a central theme, but the list engages with a variety of major themes in marketing research. In consumer behavior, our framework informs research examining how technology is changing the self-concept, as well as critical relationships between consumers and technologies, goods, brands, and other consumers (e.g., Hamilton, Ferraro, Haws, and Mukhopadhyay 2020). Table 5 about how to maintain the attachments, value, and loyalty to goods and brands that consumers derive from psychological ownership.…”

Digital Environment in Global Markets: Cross-Cultural Implications for Evolving Customer Journeys

“…Following prior academic literature and business press articles on the customer journey (Hamilton et al 2020; Lemon and Verhoef 2016; Lee et al 2018), we consider the customer journey a three-stage process: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. 1 The pre-purchase stage includes customer interactions in the navigation path before purchase.…”

“…The contribution of this article is twofold. First, although customer journeys have been studied in detail in many contexts (Hamilton et al 2020; Lemon and Verhoef 2016; Shankar and Tsai 2018), our article is the first systematic study of the differences in customer journeys across global markets. Despite the importance of this topic, how the customer journey differs between cultures is underexplored (Lemon and Verhoef 2016).…”