A Retail Customer Journey Should Be A Story

Read the full Forbes article here.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to Deb Gabor from Sol Marketing on a podcast. She focuses on customer experiences, especially customer journeys as hero journeys in the literary sense.

The Hero’s Journey

If you’re not familiar, or have forgotten everything you learned in high school Language Arts (I wouldn’t blame you for that), here’s a quick refresher. The hero’s journey is the path that the main character takes through a story, typically one based heavily on mythology. It’s not the only possible path, but it’s used a lot in genre fiction.

The main character receives a call to adventure, sometimes refuses the call multiple times, then answers that call. On the journey, he or she receives “supernatural aid”, meets a “threshold guardian” that sends them into the world of the unknown, receives help along the way, meets challenges and temptations until he or she hits the “abyss” or the dark point in their journey, achieves enlightenment (sometimes in the form a physical object) and returns to the “real world” to bring that enlightenment to others.

Deb’s article describes different types of archetype characters within the classic hero’s journey as the types of roles your brand can play in enabling a customer’s journey, everyone from the jester brand who entertains (think Old Spice) to the magician brand that delivers magic (like Disney).

But the hero’s journey can be used in many ways beyond thinking about the role of the brand. As much as I think Deb’s profiles are a good way for brands to think about how to find a strong and powerful brand voice, that exercise is still all about the brand. What about the customer?

The Shopper’s Journey

One place where I really see retailers struggle with shopper journeys is in understanding shopper objectives. I talked about this in my last article exploring the idea of what a shopping trigger really is. Whether you think about this as an objective or a trigger, it comes down to, what problem is the customer trying to solve? Those problems can vary significantly among your customer base – it could be as tactical as “my favorite sweater has a hole” and as strategic as “I want to be known as a fashionista among my circle of friends”. Two customers, same age, same spending habits, could click on an email featuring the exact same sweater for reasons that could span these two extremes.

Retailers often confuse “she clicked on the email with the sweater” as the trigger/objective, when that action is really something else entirely. In fiction, the inciting incident and the call to adventure – two very important parts of starting off the hero’s journey – are often confused by new writers. The inciting incident leads to the call to adventure, but they are not the same thing. Harry Potter gets a letter in the mail inviting him to be a wizard (inciting incident) but does not answer the call to adventure until he gets on the motorbike with Hagrid (yes, I am a nerd).

In the same exact way, opening the email might be the inciting incident. But it is NOT the call to adventure. This is an enormous miss in how retailers interact with shoppers. And it amazes me how reluctant retailers are to ask the simple question: “What brought you here today?”

Shopper A might say, “I love my old black sweater but it got a hole so now I need to replace it and this one kind of looks like it.” Shopper B might say, “I saw this awesome black sweater that looks like something I saw on Instagram and I just had to have it.” In terms of meeting shopper needs, shoppers A and B have two completely different adventures ahead of them.

And the “enlightenment” that happens at the end of their journey might be the same new black sweater, but if you want to win customers’ life-long loyalty, shopper A’s journey might have a happier ending if you could repair her sweater instead of replace it with a new one. With that as a backdrop, can you see that if you tried to take shopper A & B through the same exact shopping journey, how one or the other – or both – might still leave with the same black sweater, but feel vaguely unsatisfied? And how that might impact their perception of the brand the next time there is an inciting incident?

Making the Shopper the Hero of Her Journey

Everybody loves to be the hero. Even villains are often cast as “the heroes of their own story” – they just happen to be the one with the unhappy ending. Shoppers love to be the hero too. Why do you think all those unboxing videos and haul videos got so popular? Watching those is like being the home villager, watching the adventurer return to show off the sword they retrieved from the stone. Oohs and Aahs are an appropriate response.

So how do you make sure the shopper is the hero of their journey? First, the phases of the literary mythic journey line up pretty well with all the variations on customer journeys – the inciting incident, the call to adventure, the crossing the threshold into the unknown, the dark moment, the enlightenment, and the triumphant return. Let’s break down each of these.

Inciting Incident

This is the small action that makes the hero receptive to a call to adventure. In fiction, this is Luke Skywalker finding Leia’s message in R2D2, or Harry Potter’s letter to Hogwarts. In retail, this is opening the email, or potentially even something even as benign as, while driving home, seeing the retailer’s logo on the sign over the store. It’s the awareness that something might be about to change.

Call to Adventure

This is the big thing that happens that sets the hero on the road to adventure. In fiction, this is Luke Skywalker returning home to find his aunt and uncle dead and his home burned to the ground. It’s pretty easy to pack up for the stars when you’ve got nothing left at home. In retail, it can sometimes be as earth-scorching as that – like when your refrigerator dies, or the airline lost your suitcase as you’re about to depart on your 2-week cruise. It can also have far smaller stakes – like, I want to be on the cutting edge of fashion and I feel like I need to do something to maintain my status. Or, my favorite sweater has a hole in it and my attempt to fix it became a Pinterest Fail.

Crossing the Threshold

In mythic literature, which the hero’s journey draws on most heavily, crossing the threshold may literally be leaving this world for the underworld or something like that. Sticking with Star Wars: A New Hope (who hasn’t seen that one?), Luke crosses the threshold before he even leaves the planet, when he literally crosses the threshold into the cantina and leaves pretty much all he’s known as a farmer kid behind. From there on out he’s in a world that is unknown and unfamiliar to him.

In retail, this is where the shopper moves from needs and objectives to making a selection. The unknown world here can take on many forms: I don’t know if this looks good on me. I don’t know if this is really the best price. I don’t know anything about what I should look for in a new product. I don’t know which brands to trust. I don’t know which retailer to buy from.

Retailers have had to make a painful adjustment in their own reality: before the internet, consumers needed to be aware of retailers as places they went to in order to find brands. Only for very high consideration goods would shoppers really drive from place to place to exhaust their options before making a decision. That’s why department stores have struggled so much over the last 20 years: they used to win based on “come here to find all the best brands”. But now all those brands can be found online, before ever setting foot out to a store. That means consumers now select what they want to buy, instead of who to buy it from, when it wasn’t that long ago that the predominate retail strategy was to win on who to buy it from first, and then convince consumers to select something from what the retailer had on offer. Retailers need to reestablish their role as trusted guide in helping consumers cross the threshold, but also acknowledging that consumers are likely to select their product first, and then figure out where to buy it.

The Try/Fail Cycle

In fiction, this is where the hero struggles before their dark moment. It’s where the learning happens that prepares them to accept the enlightenment that is waiting for them. For Luke, his try/fail cycle was in trying to rescue Leia. Sure, he succeeded, but there were lots of side adventures along the way. At the end of his cycle, he probably emerged into that cargo bay feeling triumphant – he came to rescue the princess, and he was just one run for it away from succeeding. And then he learned that rescuing the princess wasn’t what it took to be a hero after all, when he saw his mentor get struck down by Vader.

In retail, the drama – and the stakes – aren’t nearly so high. But for the shopper, they could feel just as important, and this is where retailers would do well to embrace the emotional content of the try/fail cycle. The paradox of choice is a perfect parallel to the try/fail cycle in fiction – when consumers are presented with too many choices, they often choose nothing at all because the options are too overwhelming. They fail in their try/fail cycle, and the dark moment that waits for them is “I give up. I’m just going home.”

Another aspect of the try/fail cycle is that it is a cycle – it’s iterative. Exploration in many directions (including starting over) is important. Pushing consumers through a narrowly focused path that doesn’t offer the opportunity to iterate can lead to consumers ejecting themselves from the journey entirely – because they feel railroaded and didn’t get the chance to learn for themselves along the way.

The last important aspect of the try/fail cycle is that there are many characters involved. It wasn’t just Luke and Leia. It was collection of characters that helped Luke learn what it takes to be a hero. For shoppers, there is equally an important cast of side characters. That could be their friends and family, or strangers with sage advice, or your brand or representatives of your brand. Each hero assembles their own collection of sidekicks, and retailers who respect and enable that get far more respect than the ones who try to be the only sidekick in the relationship.

The Dark Moment

In fiction, this is the moment where it looks like all is lost. The saying, “it’s always darkest before dawn” comes from acknowledging this moment. You can’t have enlightenment (in fiction, at least), until you have reached the moment where you feel like you have nothing.

Again, in retail the stakes aren’t nearly so high, but having just bought a new car myself, I found that I recognized that dark moment in the journey: are we really going to buy this? Are we doing the right thing? In the purchase process of high consideration items like cars and houses and furniture – things you’re going to be stuck with for a long time – there is always going to be that moment where it feels like a point of no return. I’ve signed the papers, there’s no undoing this, I just bought a car. That is the consumer passing through their dark moment in their customer journey – and it shouldn’t be too surprising that, in my car journey for example, there was a moment of celebration on the part of the dealer, where people came buy and shook our hands and congratulated us. Moments designed to move us past the moment of uncertainty as rapidly as possible and to reassure us that we’d done the right thing.

Now, you’re not going to have a moment of darkness before putting a can of peas in your shopping cart. Or at least, I hope your grocery shopping process is not so intense that you feel that moment! But even in a very low consideration journey, where the stakes are very, very low (if I hate the can of peas, I can toss it and be out a dollar and not feel bad about that), there are moments of uncertainty in the shopper process. Is the coupon going to work? Did I spend too much money over my budget? Should I really have bought the Oreos? Grocery retailers are trying to address even these moments of uncertainty, with scan and go mobile shopping, digital coupons, and nutrition-driven recommendations at the shelf. So – if a grocery journey can provide support for an emotional low, then certainly other retailers can acknowledge and support shoppers through that moment.

Enlightenment

In fiction, enlightenment is when the hero receives the “gift” from the unknown world, the important object to bring back. It can literally be an object like a sword in the stone, or it can be knowledge or a new skill. Back to Star Wars, that’s Luke learning how to use the Force. In retail, it’s really easy: whatever they buy is the object of shoppers’ enlightenment. That’s why car dealers make a big deal about “taking delivery” where it is an event with a lot of official activity.

Enlightenment happens in both high and low stakes – you can’t have retail without the receipt of your item. Retailers are usually less focused on this moment, though. It’s taking payment and putting the items in a bag and hustling the shopper out of the store to make room for the next customer. Sometimes that’s what consumers want. I certainly don’t need people lining up and applauding me as I push my cart of groceries out to my car (though I don’t know, maybe that would make the grocery experience better). And if my objective is enlightenment achieved through a quick trip to buy something my kid asked me to get for them on the way home from work, a retailer is not going to be serving me well if suddenly just getting it in the bag becomes a “process” or an “experience”. Retailers need to make sure they’re matching the enlightenment provided to the original quest.

The Triumphant Return

This is another place that retailers tend to ignore. Enlightenment is not enough – you have to take that back and share it with other people. Retailers need to recognize that there is a village eagerly awaiting the hero’s return, even if it’s only to snatch the Oreos out of the bag as soon as it hits the kitchen counter.

Retailers need to acknowledge and support the return – and play their role in making it truly triumphant. That can be as simple as paying attention to your own box opening experience for something delivered to the house, or following up afterward to make sure everything is going okay with what the customer purchased, or providing services that support the shopper and her purchases long after the journey is complete.

The Bottom Line

Yes, this is taking a concept from one universe (fiction) and applying it to another (retail). But retailers too often talk about the customer journey like they are dry, logical steps from one phase to another. They talk about the customer experience in a way that often acknowledges the emotional element of it, but that emotional element doesn’t make it into the journey – which, honestly, are part and parcel of the same thing.

The hero’s journey in fiction puts the emotional content front and center. The whole point of telling the story is to create an emotional connection between the reader and the main character, so that when the character makes their triumphant return, you the reader feel it as closely as if you just went through that journey yourself. Retail could benefit a lot from that kind of thinking – from acknowledging the emotional content of customer journeys, and that there are clear common emotional touch points in every journey.

Retailers can also benefit from thinking about journeys as unique individual experiences. Every consumer has their own shopping objective, and their own try/fail cycle, and their own definition of enlightenment. That doesn’t mean that they are all so unique that you need a million journeys to serve a million customers. There will be common groupings of journeys where the objectives are similar and the expectations for what the journey will be like will be similar. Those are called customer segments – but where the segment is based on objective and behavior, rather than demographic.

The most important take-away here: customer journeys can be so much more than they are today. And the retailers who figure out how to expand their perspective in what goes into a journey (and what comes out of it) have an opportunity to differentiate. But it requires a much different way of thinking about journeys than exists today.