Imagine walking into your favourite store. There is a familiar smell that radiates off the products that surround you, a friendly sales assistant who asks about your day – your experience is consistent every time you return. It is why you keep coming back! This is what you might perceive to be the typical customer journey, right?

Truth is, the customer journey begins the first time a consumer becomes aware of a brand. The customer journey begins long before you walk through the entrance of the store, and continues long after you walk out too.

In a time before the internet, a customer would typically become aware of a brand through word of mouth, exposure to print advertising or a billboard. However, the age of digital disruption has profoundly impacted this path. Today, there are unlimited variations of a customer journey. This is hugely due to the expansive amounts of digital information available and communicated to consumers, often spoon-fed through their daily social media fix. The abundance of options consumers have available to purchase products or services online makes it vital for an organisation to effectively predict and foresee a customer’s purchasing behaviour from initial brand awareness to brand advocacy.

“The average customer uses 10 channels to communicate with companies”

Scott Rheinlander, SalesForce

The importance of providing meaningful and impactful customer experiences has become an emerging priority for organisations. It is more critical than ever for businesses to make memorable points of contact with consumers in order to remain competitive. As a result, there are a range of digital technologies that allow businesses to capture customer experiences in real-time and assist marketers to evaluate which touch-points are most critical in the customer journey.

ATTRIBUTION MODELLING

A debate that arises from customer journey mapping surrounds the concept of “Attribution Modelling”. In the image above, Bright Vessel visually displays a sample customer journey, mapping out the number of touch-points and then relating them to the corresponding departments.

So, how do you evaluate which touch-point holds the most value? There are many types of marketing attribution models that use different approaches to assign value to specific channels. The question is, how do you achieve consistency across products within an organisation or across organisations? Is it fair to compare apples with oranges?

Although there is a lot of fancy technology for organisations to utilise, if attribution modelling eventually comes to be a legitimate form of asset valuation, this issue will come to be a headache for marketers and accountants alike. Ultimately, it is not an accurate framework and rather, should be used as a guide for businesses. I believe that attribution modelling can definitely be beneficial for an organisation. However, it should not be solely relied upon for decision making nor asset evaluation due to its absence of a range of components.

Do you believe that monetary value should be distributed on the basis of attribution modelling? Do you agree that it should not be the only tool used for decision making?