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Interview with Julia Görnandt, SKIM "No 'one size fits all' for Journey Research"
Interview with Julia Görnandt, SKIM
"No 'one size fits all' for Journey Research"
Customer journeys are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to disentangle. Conventional methods can hardly cope with this complexity. How do we get out of this dilemma? Julia Görnandt from the Berlin market research institute SKIM wants to have found the solution to make customer journeys comprehensible again.
Hi there, your webinar on May 11 is about customer journeys. This is a topic that has been "en vogue" for several years - how relevant is it really today?
Julia Görnandt: Touchpoint management - and thus a deep understanding of customer journeys - is very relevant for our clients. I would even say that it is becoming more and more relevant as the number of steps consumers take before making a purchase is increasing and is becoming more variable as a result of digital transformation. The complexity of the topic is increasing. Therefore, journey research is a must-have topic for market researchers.
At the same time, the topic is also a passion for us at SKIM and I personally find it super exciting. We are all consumers, experience customer journeys every day and are sometimes overwhelmed by the many touchpoints ourselves. It is therefore great to learn from this complexity in projects and to translate this into 'consulting' and actionable marketing measures – a really interesting challenge.
Today's journeys have become so complex and layered that they can make you pull your hair out, right?
Julia Görnandt: That's correct! And that was exactly the challenge we are presented with and that motivated us to find a solution so that we can keep all of our hair in the future. :)
But joking aside, today's customer journeys are extremely complex and we're fully aware of that. We have seen that traditional methods cannot cope with this complexity. The approaches that are normally used often see oversimplification and over-averaging as the solution. But this in turn does not reflect reality... We ended up in a dilemma. Fortunately, today we have various analytics methods that open up possibilities for us to make the complexity of the journeys comprehensible, while still retaining the necessary nuance and depth.
Can you always identify and analyze every touchpoint? Or are some of them left out from time to time?
Julia Görnandt: Modern omnichannel customer journeys include countless touchpoints. Capturing and analyzing all of these would be incredibly time-consuming, but we also don't think that's necessary and it's not the goal - we have to focus on the really important and influential touchpoints and get a deep understanding of these.
In our experience, the objectives of a journey study can be very strategic - that is, from a "bird's eye view" - or very detailed. In the case of a strategic question, prioritization must be carried out and the relevant set of touchpoints must be analyzed.
If, on the other hand, the objective is very detailed – or “zoomed in” – then tools such as 'passive metering' are often used. Touchpoints are not predefined in such case but are identified from the data itself and can therefore be more and more diverse.
Ultimately, the number of meaningful touchpoints for the analysis is related to the objective and the underlying business question, as well as the question of which touchpoints are the focus of a study.
There are just as many individual customer journeys as shoppers today, you write in your webinar announcement. How do you handle this? Investigate all? Lump them all together? Or identify the most important ones and just focus on them?
Julia Görnandt: In the first step, it is important to record the many individual journeys within a representative sample of your own target group. It is important to not just assess the use of the touchpoints, but also their sequence and the frequency of use.
As soon as you have grasped this, it is important not to lump them together. Modern analytics tools enable us to take the multitude of journeys into account and at the same time translate them into manageable segments. And accordingly, these segments are not defined by needs or demographics, but by the journeys themselves.
In the last step, of course, it makes sense to identify the most important and promising journey types within all the journeys found and to focus on them. In this way, companies learn how to connect with their (potential) customers at the most important journey touchpoints.
Which journey approaches do you use today to get overcome the complexity – or even confusion? Which methods and procedures are state-of-the-art?
Julia Görnandt: We believe that there is no 'one size fits all' for journey research.
We would roughly divide modern journey approaches into three categories: qualitative, quantitative using analytics and 'passive metering'. (Passive metering is the passive data collection of the online behavior of panelists who consent to this data collection. They surf the internet quite naturally, sometimes over long periods of time, and allow their online behavior to be researched.)
The right solution must always be determined individually and depends on the specific research question, the target group, the industry/category and other factors.
How complex do you think the journeys that participants make to your webinar are? Can you draw one just for fun?
Julia Görnandt: There are also many paths in our specialist community that lead to our webinar - especially those of a digital nature. Here is an example of a possible segment journey map starting with the Marktforschung-Depesche:
ABOUT
As Director DACH, Julia Görnandt leads the SKIM team in Germany. She works closely with leading consumer health and consumer goods companies in the DACH region to understand how purchasing decisions can be made across channels and brands can influence them. Julia is a graduate psychologist and previously researched at SKIM at Stanford University in California.
Interview published in German on marktforschung.de
