Creative teams need to meet customers where they are and stop expecting them to step into the funnel. Data-driven marketer Jessica Best explains how involving more teams in the experience design process can highlight more on-ramps in the customer journey.
When Jessica Best describes Wingstop’s campaign for April 20—better known as 4/20, the unofficial holiday for cannabis consumers—it elicited chuckles from her HOW Design Live audience. The 2018 iteration of the campaign featured a twist on the classic “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” jingle from the 1950s, with the update featuring the restaurant’s products dancing to “Let’s all go to the Wingstop.” Each version of the commercial, released throughout the day, gets a little trippier.
While giggle-inducing, the campaign is a great example of following the customer journey, says Best, director of data-driven marketing at Barkley. The quick-service restaurant never would have known to target this demographic had they focused exclusively on the marketing funnel, which Best says is more keyed to what the company wants consumers to do. The customer journey, on the other hand, flips the script to learn what the customer is doing and what they feel at each stage of the process. The company was listening to consumers online, finding the terms “weed” and “Wingstop” frequently mentioned together and pointing to a new route in the customer journey—and an experience design opportunity.
This is Best’s passion as a data-driven marketer, to locate customers and meet them where they are. She hypes the benefits of designing a customer journey map, which includes design in the literal, creative sense. She presented on the topic at the 2018 HOW Design Live conference in Boston and will speak again at this year’s event in Chicago. Best’s presentation is for an audience of designers, to illustrate how important it is that they understand the consumer’s motivations. But it’s also a reminder to marketers to involve their design teams earlier in the process. The Wingstop insight came by way of the customer service team, an example of what can happen when more teams have a hand in solving the “why?” in a customer journey.
MN: Anytime I read about design and marketing, much of the focus is on individual assets: video, logos, infographics, things like that. It seems as though marketers might be missing an opportunity to get the design team involved in the full customer journey. Have you found that a lot of markers aren’t thinking about how design works in the bigger picture, versus individual assets?
JB: Yeah—it’s easy, right? It’s easy to focus on the piece at hand, it’s easy to focus on the brief, the design assignment instead of focusing on the design opportunity. In a lot of cases, the design assignment is for the logo on the outside of the takeaway bag, but the design opportunity is, “How do we surround that pickup experience for a to-go bag at a quick service restaurant? What are the pieces of that experience that have design components?” Just staying within the design space, there’s point of purchase, there’s window signage, there’s everything from how you’re greeted when you walk in or what materials you see when you’re sitting there considering your order.
It’s easy to focus on what projects have been assigned to you as a designer or even as a marketer instead of thinking about what the more holistic opportunity might be.
MN: That sounds like the difference between people working in silos and actually crossing departments.
JB: That’s a big piece of this. We talk a little bit about the difference between capital D Design and lowercase d design. Lowercase d design asks, is it beautiful? Does it add beauty? And capital D Design is more like, does this solve a problem? Wayfinding signage, for example, would be both lowercase d design but also design with a capital D, meaning it’s solving a problem. Is it useful? Is it intuitive? Those types of words are where we start to really fall into the larger design system and not just creative design.
MN: When I think of the intersection of marketing and design in the customer journey, I think of the mobile. We hear all the time about how poor mobile experiences keep customers from engaging with the company. Would you say that mobile is one of the best examples of how good design matters in the customer journey?
JB: It can be. The bigger picture is to see the impact of how a bad mobile experience can make a difference in how a customer sees your brand. It’s one of those things that didn’t exist 10 years ago that we have to think about now. The lack of attention to that becomes really noticeable. The loss of customers, the loss of traffic, the loss of the purchase becomes really noticeable on that end.
We just haven’t gotten our brain around experience design. That’s the opportunity of not just how do they make the purchase, it’s how do we help put them on their own journey to purchase our product—as hopefully our product is part of the solution for their own journey.
MN: How can marketers better involve design within that? How can those conversations change?
JB: The easiest answer is to bring (designers) in first. Bring them in earlier than we’re currently doing. That’s something that you’ll hear the lead designer at Barkley’s say often: The earlier that you can bring him in, the more we are thinking about the design opportunity and not just trying to fill the design project on a deadline.
What is the challenge that we’re trying to solve? Well, we need a menu. OK, what does that menu going to do? It’s going to help people choose what they want to order. OK, in that case does adding pictures to that menu make it easier for somebody to just choose what they’re looking for? We had a quick service client, for example, people would come in, they would see the menu and they would physically take a step back because it was so overwhelming. That’s not just a lowercase d design problem, that’s an experience problem. We have the wrong things on that menu.
If you take that to a designer at the point at which you’re saying, “We’re noticing that we’re not selling the highest return on investment item,” or “We’re noticing that customers aren’t having a positive experience,” or “We’re noticing that the time that somebody spends in our restaurant is five minutes longer since we’ve rolled out this new menu design—so how do we redesign that?” Well if we asked that question first, if we bring in a designer at the “why?” stage instead of just the “what?” stage, then they have the ability to solve for that bigger problem.
MN: Can you give me an example of when a designer was involved with some of the initial conversations and they noticed what none of the marketers on the team had thought about?
JB: Blue Cross and Blue Shield, an insurance company, one of the things they were working on is, what does the American consumer need and want from their insurance and health care providers? Not “What is the right way to market our insurance services?” I have to quote [Executive Design Director Paul Corrigan] here: “Ask a more beautiful question.” Back all the way up. We’re not selling this insurance product. Why? What do consumers need from their health and insurance providers? We can’t sell something that isn’t the right product for your audience. We’ve got to come at the “why?” stage. We’ve got to come in at this stage where we listen to what customers are looking for, what they hate about their current insurance provider or their healthcare provider, how sterile doctor’s offices are or how you have to deal with somebody different when you go to a doctor, versus when you get your claims reviewed. All that was very separate.
Blue Cross decided to open their own primary care clinics. And that’s what Spira Care is. We got to be part of everything from naming it to what the insurance packages look like and what the benefits look like in that package. The spaces are designed by our experience design team here at Barkley. It was very different from a typical marketing team task, but we got to start with a bigger, earlier question.
MN: Can you give me an example of the opposite happening: when the marketing team started to drive forward without the design team and the result maybe wasn’t cohesive?
JB: Unfortunately I have a lot of those examples. I don’t have to call out any names but the symptoms of that are more like, say, when you’re in the fifth round of creative revisions. That means we didn’t understand the problem well enough. We didn’t ask the tough questions or we didn’t start early enough. Maybe it wasn’t outlined well enough for us to internalize it and for the design solution to actually solve the problem.
MN: A lot of people look at design in terms of the logo, using the right colors, the right font. How does it go beyond that and help create a cohesive customer journey?
JB: Brand system is what we call the font, the colors, the sizes, the treatment—that type of thing. For example, I’ve worked with Hallmark before and they did a project launch for baby clothes and they dictated hue or the tint or the exposure level of the photography they wanted us to use across all channels. As they were preparing social and email and cross-channel assets, they had an Instagram filter that made it look like their brand. That specific, bright, crisp color, smiling faces, all of that is really part of your design.
If we stretch that one step further, then the messaging is part of the system, too. At Barkley we call it your editorial authority: What is yours to talk about and what is not yours to talk about? And this is kind of in the wake of news-jacking, when something that had nothing to do with your company would be popular on Twitter and a brand would be like, insert a funny quip about that thing here. If you don’t have the authority to speak on politics or you don’t have the authority to speak on travel, then don’t. Spend your time with the influencers or the topics or the messaging and the tone that really fits your brand. Designing that up front is one of the things that’s most prevalent across most channels, because copy rarely changes as often as design does.
MN: Have you ever seen examples of brands trying to hide something that doesn’t work with their brand voice just by designing it to look or sound like them?
JB: I can’t think of an example off the top of my head but I go back to that news-jacking thing. Do you remember, there was an AT&T ad on the anniversary of 9/11? I thought yeah, it looks exactly like an AT&T ad, but it’s way outside their editorial authority. You do not sell cell phones because it’s the anniversary of 9/11. I mean it was just so far off. The tone didn’t match, the reverence didn’t match. And it stinks of advertising. It doesn’t take a skeptical millennial to smell that of advertising. It’s icky, that’s the most formal way I can say it.
MN: That example sounds like a conversation didn’t happen between the marketing team and the design team.
JB: That is the whole reason for a design team to not be just taking orders, but to be part of the kick-off, part of the solution. That is how we fix it. You have more people in the discussion earlier on and frankly it also should be something that you run by the person who doesn’t work at an ad agency.
MN: What got you thinking about how design really plays a role in the customer journey?
JB: I have become a representative or the voice of the customer journey because my path to being a data-driven marketing director was through database marketing, email marketing specifically. I sit between the social media team, the creative team, the video team and the paid media team. One of the things that has always been owned by that CRM or data-driven person is the idea that you don’t just have ads based on what somebody just did, but based on your relationship and the history of that relationship and where in that relationship you are with that person. In that sense, email has always been prepped for the customer journey. That sense that you change your relationship with somebody over time has always been my M.O.
Then we ladder that up and talk about how an email address can be key to curating the content in social or in paid media along that person’s journey. Because we had a key, we know who that person is now and we can help follow that person with what they need at that point in their own journey. Three years ago Forrester really started taking off with this idea that companies that focus on the customer journey and not necessarily the sales funnel are the ones that are finding the most success. Those people who understand the customer’s ethos and what they need and when or what they’re thinking or feeling—and that sometimes it’s not even our turn to talk.
MN: Can you talk more about the differences in customer journey versus the traditional funnel?
JB: I have a client that is a nonprofit for higher ed loans. The mission of the company is to try and drive down the number of people who graduate university or leave university with crippling debt. In this case, we could wait until somebody is looking for a loan and then target them and hope that they are finding all these great resources for how to borrow. Or, we realize that the point at which they are picking a school is actually a better entry point for us because the same mission-driven organization doesn’t believe that every school is equal and that your return on investment in going to a university on the beach in Florida for $50,000 dollars a year is not likely to pay you back the dividends that you’re investing when compared to a state school.
On the flip side, there are entire parts of the journey that are not ours as advertisers to own. When you think of the sales funnel, what do we say to people when they’re researching? What do we say to people when they’re shopping? What do we say to people once they’ve bought? What do we say to people to get them to buy again? That’s the sales funnel. That is what we want them to do at different stages of their relationship with us. The customer journey flips that around and says, what is the customer doing? What are they thinking and what are they feeling at each stage of their process?
MN: Are you designing a new customer journey with each new product?
JB: What we found is that personas vary it more because the customer journey is consumer-focused. It’s from their perspective. A, it should always be research-based, but B, it should be something that a customer sees and goes,“Yeah, that’s exactly what I do,” as opposed to when we go through a sales funnel. We build an awareness, preference or consideration, purchase and retention, those are sales funnel stages. The customer might not even recognize those or they might have off-ramps that we’re not even considering because all we’re looking at is the happiest path.
There are off-ramps for a journey, too, but the customer journey should always be from the perspective of the customer: What do they need, when, how are they feeling about it, where are they researching it? Then we as marketers go, “Oh, you’re looking for information like this in this place?” That’s a brief. Now it’s marketing, but we’re letting the customer research drive that, we’re letting the customer’s mentality and needs drive that instead of saying, “Well, first I need somebody to be aware of me.”
MN: That sounds like it could be a little bit scary for marketers, letting go of the funnel template. How do you get people comfortable with allowing the customer to lead?
JB: The biggest ammunition that I’ve had in that vein is if what we build ends up having exactly what the customer is thinking, what they need and where they’re looking for it, no marketer would say no to that. Everything that we do, every client that we have is a solution to some challenge.
Sometimes it’s Dairy Queen soft serve solves the challenge of, “I want something sweet to eat.” It’s not always lifesaving, but there is always a purpose or a solution and they have other solutions that they could consider. If we take a look at what the customer is looking for and where they’re looking for it, I’m literally sitting next to 50 people that would die to have that information. Where we market, how we message to that person and what we offer them, it writes itself. The marcom plan writes itself at that point. It does take more effort, it does take research, even if it’s a single survey, but even if you get into the brain of the consumer with a survey and use that information and quotes from those people in your journey map, that can be where you start to get real.
MN: Does this look like one massive map with maybe a few different starting points and then they’re branching off in a zillion different ways? Or do you create separate maps depending on the persona?
JB: I’ve done both. If we have different products for different personas, then they can do two different ones. The one that we kept coming back around to where we only do persona nuances is the idea that somebody gets into the funnel or into the journey then they might fall out and come back in. Instead of just one line, it’s a line and then a loop. We have to think, how do we get away from the tried and maybe still true method of the funnel? At that point, your map starts to look a whole lot like a funnel, it’s just the information that’s in it is more customer-centric.
MN: When you’re speaking at HOW Design Live, on designing for the customer journey, you are talking almost exclusively to designers. How are you explaining this concept to designers and what are some of the big takeaways that marketers can pass along to their design team?
JB: The biggest thing is for designers to know that this is where marketing should be coming up with some of this stuff and to expect the insights from that journey. Even if it’s as simple as your brief for a design project should include what we know about our customers: What do we want them to do after interacting with the campaign or program or whatever? That customer insight in every brief should come from knowing your customer’s journey.
MN: What was the reaction after you gave your presentation?
JB: I started my presentation with saying, “I’m just going to have to pay [the opening keynote] to speak before me.” He basically set me up for success because his whole M.O. was that brands don’t own their own brand anymore. They don’t own their message. They don’t own their communities. Everything is in the hands of the customer at a point. It basically keyed me up.
A ton of people stayed afterwards because I took his theory, his approach, and was like, don’t think inside the box, don’t just design something: Make a different experience and know that your customer is really the one both co-designing that with you and expecting that of you.
MN: Was there anything else that you wanted to add about the customer journey or how marketers can talk to their design team a little bit better about designing for the customer journey?
JB: No matter how much research you do, the people who are on the front line talking to your customer every day, that voice, a customer representative inside your organization can absolutely change the direction of your marketing campaigns.
A perfect example of that is our content management team, our social media platform managers, the people who were listening to conversations for our quick-service restaurant client Wingstop. Three years ago about this time, one of the trends that they saw was that there were over 30,000 instances of the word “Wingstop” and the word “weed” being mentioned together in tweets. We all get a good chuckle out of that and go about our day—except that then 4/20 rolls around and before it was cool for brands to do this, we realized that we have an opportunity. As our creative director said, that is a giant invitation. We knew that people already associated our food, our experience with a certain culture. We basically had this invitation to participate in this discussion and ended up, three years running, doing some very fun content around 4/20. It’s even more relevant now as marijuana is becoming more available.
Everybody got a good laugh out of the fact that we’re working with this [large] brand that is putting together a marijuana-based campaign. But people loved it because we were listening to the organic conversation that was happening on that front line. We would never have asked, it’s not going to go on a survey. We’re never going to say, “What do you think about a 4/20 campaign for Wingstop?” We wouldn’t have even known to ask that. That’s what bringing in the customer service team at the initial strategic kick-off can do. They tend to have their thumb on the pulse of things before us marketing folks ever get a hold of it.
Sarah Steimer is a writer, editor, podcast producer, and yoga teacher living in Chicago. She has written for Marketing News, Chicago magazine, Culture magazine, the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, and other outlets.