insights! episode #45: Jeff Bezos and the secrets of success behind the customer journey

Joubin Rahimi:

Great that you back for new episode of "Insights"! My name Joubin Rahimi and today about topic customer journey and role of Jeff Bezos in it. In this episode we deal with how you get from first brand awareness to close and beyond. We talk about why important to really understand customer's needs and bottlenecks along this way, to successfully help customer and ultimately yourself too.  

 
Every one of you probably knows Jeff Bezos. He was born in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not exactly the place you think of when it comes to start-ups. Normally you'd think more of Silicon Valley or the East Coast, like Boston, New York, and so on. Jeff Bezos has a fortune of over 200 billion dollars, and he must have done something right. One of his famous lines is "Everyday stay on" — always keep at it. It's always about how best to cover, capture and support the customer's needs. Jeff Bezos started by selling books and revolutionised the book market with that. We all know that. Over time he kept growing bigger, expanded his range and created a marketplace where other sellers can offer their products. On top of that he founded AWS (Amazon Web Services), a service many companies use, as well as his own logistics and brands. So he's a self-made millionaire who rose from small to very big. Jeff Bezos definitely deserves respect. But he deserves even more respect because, of the roughly 147 million people... Actually, of the roughly 330 million people in the US, over 300 million are Amazon Prime users. That means almost half of all Americans have a Prime account and pay 99 dollars a year for it. By comparison, only about 60 million Americans have a valid passport. This ratio shows how far-reaching Jeff Bezos' service has penetrated the market. And that has a lot to do with the customer journey.  
 
But what exactly is a customer journey? There are various approaches and models for this. One of the models I'd like to mention was developed by McKinsey in 2019. It includes the phases awareness, consideration, conversion, retention and advocacy.  
In the awareness phase, people become aware of the product or service. In the consideration phase, they examine the product and compare it with other options. They ask themselves whether they really want it and when they want to buy it. The conversion phase is the actual purchase process, which can bring various hurdles. In the retention phase, people use the product and possibly need spare parts or other services as well. In the advocacy phase, people actively recommend the product and talk about their own experiences. By the way, people are ten times more likely to share negative experiences than positive ones. That makes it all the more important for us to design the whole process to be as rich and experience-led as possible and to make it easy for the customer. McKinsey developed this model in 2009.  
However, there are other models that go further, such as marketing 4.0. The book, which we link in the blog and the posts, we can recommend. It's based on these concepts. 

 
Ultimately, however, this process is not just a linear sequence with a beginning and an end. When we buy something, we typically don't think in terms of start and end, but rather as an ongoing cycle. Especially when we buy from a company or brand we return to regularly, we need to consider the whole cycle.  
 
In this context, I'd like to mention another model, the "Moment of Truth" by Alan George Lawley, developed in 2005 while he was working for Procter and Gamble. This model consists of four phases. The first phase is the "Zero Moment of Truth", which occurs when a user googles something. At that point, marketing has already taken place. You may have seen an online ad, clicked on it, or discovered something, and then search online. That's the so-called "Zero Moment of Truth", where you say: "Yes, I'm now engaging with this brand, this product or this product category". This is followed by the "First Moment of Truth", which concerns the quality promise. Does it match what I expect and what the advertising promised me? The "Second Moment of Truth" is the point of purchase, and after that there's the possibility of speaking positively or negatively about the product on social media.  
 
These are the four phases, and metrics can also be derived from them, such as the number of reviews and ratings for a product. And even more interesting is that this is also an important KPI we should watch. Where do we look for reviews and ratings? Is it Google? No. Is it some other retailer? No, it's Amazon. Amazon has become the review machine. Whether Jeff Bezos recognised this early on himself or it was a happy coincidence is unclear. But the sheer volume of reviews across all products makes clear that Amazon is the place where you find reviews. Google is trying to gain a foothold in this area, and that's highly significant within this "moment of truth" model.  
 
Consider how you could be the bottleneck-solver for one or more of these points in your customers' customer journey. Did you like this? Give us a like, follow us or comment. Feel free to share your controversial views and give input.