Get to grips with CX and the customer journey now, or else...

Demographica CEO, Warren Moss.

You say you’re business is customer-centric and that CX is a core focus, but be honest - is it really? Moss says there’s no denying the power of marketing strategies to create product or service awareness. But with so many agencies focused on just this, you need a specific innovative skillset and strategic commitment to it to stand out from the crowd.

Tying in with that, one of the specific challenges for the future mentioned by marketer respondents in the ScopenAgency Scope findings was that of finding agencies that understand consumer journey. Here, Moss sheds some light on why that’s so crucial and how to go about understanding the consumer journey and customer experience the right way.

Let’s start with an overview of your Scopen 2017 Agency Scope wins and the role of design thinking in any marketing strategy.
The category we're most proud of coming tops in was the one focused around understanding the consumer journey. Recently I've sat in a lot of 2018/2019/2020 strategy sessions with our clients and all of them, bar none, have spoken about how they are applying design thinking when it comes to their customer value propositions (CVP).

Team Demographica.

Design thinking as a concept is totally customer centric, putting the needs of the customer front and centre when it comes to designing of the various propositions.

The art of anthropology and B2B communication

Claire Denham-Dyson  24 Nov 2017

Demographica has been advocating design thinking for a few years now, so it's real validation for us that it's been recognised. When I couple this with our anthropological approach to communication, it gives us great confidence that we're on the right track as a communications partner to our clients.

Why is it important to understand B2B businesses in particular in the direct marketing space?
B2B communications are fundamentally different to B2C. Some of the deeper understanding comes into play when you consider the following:

• In B2B, purchase journeys are significantly longer and more complex, fluid and often repetitive when compared to B2C, which is often linear
• The B2B buyer is almost always more than one person with multiple influencers, so communication needs to cater for the buyers and the influencers, and lastly
• The B2B buy generally carries a much higher risk than the B2C buy.

#AfricaMonth: Demographica's Warren Moss on the business of B2B marketing

Leigh Andrews  29 May 2017

Given they’re the basis of any successful strategy, why are customer experience or CX and the customer journey such tricky areas to excel in?
Customer journeys can often be pretty generic when they are analysed with an inside-out filter from within a company. We regularly see bankers designing CVPs for their banking clients, insurance practitioners designing CVPs for their insurance clients and ICT specialists designing CVPs for their clients. When this happens, you get customer journeys that are from the point of view of the internal business and don't take into account true customer pain points, triggers and motivators.

Lightwise © – 123RF.com

At Demographica, we use anthropologists to uncover the human motivators and trigger points which are often missed but are more likely the more real triggers. Most companies don't know how to harness the power of anthropology in marketing communications and Demographica has some world class IP around this.

Elaborate on the challenge of the future for marketers: Finding agencies that understand the consumer journey and customer experience.
I’m a big believer in specialist agencies. I think that marketing communications is a complex art and science and deep expertise in a particular category and/or vertical is what delivers true results for clients.

Seems 2018 will be the year of the specialist agency. Hopefully the importance of CX with comes into clearer focus as a result. For updates, follow Demographica on the following social platforms: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.