[VIDEO] Christopher Day: The Consumer Decision Journey

Christopher Day, CEO at DemandJump, responds to a McKinsey article written about the consumer decision journey. 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Christopher: That's a great question and it makes me think about why we formed DemandJump in the first place.

I recently read an article that was put out by McKinsey & Company and the article talks about the consumer decision journey and how consumers are moving outside the traditional marketing funnel by changing the way they research and buy products.

I thought this was a particularly interesting piece that describes how marketing spend is largely wasted unless consumers are actively shopping.

McKinsey believes that the marketing funnel has changed to a circular journey or decision-making process. We believe this as close, but still not quite right.

The decision making journey is actually a spider web because the world doesn't work in a linear or circular fashion, rather the world is actually a network of networks [I mean] there are billions of interactions happening every day across channels and industries that create this idea of networks and once we map all of these interactions we can see our customers unique network in which they compete every day to try and capture customers.

We discovered this a couple of years ago and explained it more in detail in our 'Think Spiderwebs Not Funnels' blog that we published back in November of 2015, but for a quick analogy, imagine for a moment if you were building a self-driving car.

You would first need a map of the roads or the road network and be able to see the dynamics of cars passing through it.

Well, marketing is no different. To effectively market in today's complex world, companies must understand the map or the unique network in which they compete to sell their products and services.

Businesses that do not understand their actual network or competitive the ecosystem [we believe] will struggle more and more to be successful in today's complex world.

I think Mackenzie went on to talk about how marketers struggled to identify the most influential touchpoints, this is because marketers still cannot see their network

This is what we've solved at DemandJump.

So by understanding our customers unique network, we can then solve for the most influential touchpoints across digital channels that our customers didn't focus their marketing efforts upon.

We believe that now more than ever, marketing is a function of revenue and budgets are our ever-tightening so the ability to understand the network is just not critical to effectively compete in a marketplace, but there is now a requirement to make tighter budgets more effective.

Our customers are using the domains of TrafficCloud to enable them to be in the right place at the right time. We agree with McKenzie thinks that the epicenter of consumer driven marketing is absolutely the Internet and it's crucial during the consumer evaluation phase, but the key is knowing where to market.

 All dates is only half the equation to success. This is the difference between success and failure.

This does require a slight shift in the mindset of a marketer. Tactics including 'send it and forget it', programmatic buying; they simply don't work well anymore in today's environment.

And businesses that continue to rely on these archaic tactics are going to lose market share. Now there are many great tools out there that exist to assist markers for things like retention and experience engagement journey, but the most important component of the marketing stack today is to find a platform that shows you exactly where to compete cross channel in a company's unique network 

We're seeing an average of 229% return on investment with our customers that have transitioned to this new way of thinking.