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Marketing Canvas - Moments
This article offers an in-depth exploration of 'Moments' in the marketing journey - crucial touchpoints that define customers' interactions with your business. From discovering your product to post-purchase stages, these Moments shape customer perception and engagement. We delve into how to identify and understand these Moments, employing strategies like Google's SEE-THINK-DO-CARE framework. The piece also covers evaluation methods for your Moments strategy, offering a scoring system that helps businesses pinpoint areas of improvement. Through a real-world example, it illustrates how this concept can be applied practically, fostering effective, empathetic marketing strategies. This article is a must-read for marketers, entrepreneurs, and anyone eager to enhance their customer experience and overall business success.
Last update: 4/12/2024
In a nutshell
The Moments sub-dimension in the Marketing Canvas focuses on identifying and understanding the critical points in the customer journey before, during, and after engaging with your value proposition. These moments capture customer actions, thoughts, and emotions, revealing their objectives and pain points. Understanding these moments helps businesses design experiences that resonate with customers, foster loyalty, and improve satisfaction.
For example, Green Clean might analyze moments such as researching eco-friendly cleaning products, comparing options, purchasing a product, and using it at home. By understanding what customers think, feel, and do at each stage, Green Clean can tailor its messaging, support, and product experience.
Introduction
The Moments sub-dimension in the Marketing Canvas is part of the Journey category, focusing on mapping the customer’s experience with your brand. Moments are the key touchpoints where customers interact with your value proposition and form impressions of your brand. By understanding these moments in detail, you can align your strategies to meet customer expectations and create memorable experiences.
Unlike other elements that focus on broad strategies, Moments zooms into the specific instances that shape customer perceptions, ensuring that your value proposition delivers value consistently.
What are moments?
Moments are the specific instances in the customer journey where they engage with your brand or value proposition. These can occur before, during, or after a purchase, encompassing everything from initial awareness to post-purchase advocacy.
For example:
Before Purchase: Researching sustainable cleaning products online.
During Purchase: Comparing Green Clean to competitors and making a buying decision.
After Purchase: Using the product and deciding whether to repurchase or recommend it.
Moments are characterized by:
Customer Observations: Based on real customer behavior and feedback.
Actions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Capturing what customers do, think, and feel at each touchpoint.
Customer Objectives: Understanding the goals customers aim to achieve during each moment.
Moments: an in-depth perspective
Mapping moments requires detailed insights into customer behavior, focusing on:
Observations and Identity: Moments must reflect real customer behaviors and identities, gathered through interviews and observations.
Comprehensive Coverage: Identifying all relevant moments before, during, and after engaging with your value proposition.
Customer Emotions and Actions: Capturing the thoughts, feelings, and actions of customers at each stage.
Customer Objectives: Understanding what customers aim to achieve during each moment and aligning your strategy accordingly.
For example:
Observations: Green Clean might discover that customers feel overwhelmed by the variety of “eco-friendly” claims during research.
Emotions: Customers may feel relief when they find a transparent and trustworthy brand.
Actions: Comparing labels or searching for certifications like “EcoCert.”
Objectives: Finding a safe and sustainable cleaning solution for their family.
Mental Models - Moments in the Marketing Canvas
Translating moments into action
To enhance the customer experience, businesses must identify and refine the moments that matter most to their audience. This involves:
Mapping the Journey: Defining moments across all stages of the customer journey.
Aligning with Objectives: Ensuring each moment supports the customer’s goals and minimizes friction.
Optimizing Touchpoints: Improving interactions to meet customer expectations and create positive experiences.
Questions to consider:
Have you based your moments on real customer observations and interviews?
Have you identified moments before, during, and after the purchase?
Do you understand what your customers think, feel, and do at each moment?
Have you clearly identified the objectives your customers aim to achieve during each moment?
Statements for self-assessment
For a comprehensive evaluation of your understanding and application of the Moments concept, rate your agreement with the following statements on a scale from -3 (completely disagree) to +3 (completely agree):
Your moments have been defined based on customer observations and interviews. It reflects his/her identity.
You have identified all moments before, during, and after buying your value proposition.
For each moment, you have clearly identified what your customers think, feel, and do.
For each moment, you have clearly identified what are the customer objectives.
Interpretation of the scores
Negative scores (-1 to -3): Negative scores indicate a lack of understanding or incomplete mapping of customer moments. This may result in missed opportunities to address customer needs, leading to friction in the journey and reduced satisfaction. Immediate action is needed to observe, analyze, and map customer behaviors more effectively.
A score of zero (0): A neutral score reflects partial insights or an incomplete understanding of customer moments. While you may have identified some key touchpoints, gaps remain in addressing customer thoughts, feelings, or objectives. Further research and refinement are required to create a comprehensive journey map.
Positive scores (+1 to +3): Positive scores suggest that you have a thorough understanding of customer moments and have effectively mapped their actions, thoughts, feelings, and objectives. This deep insight allows you to create seamless, satisfying experiences that align with customer expectations and foster loyalty.
Case study: Green Clean’s moments
Misaligned Understanding (-3, -2, -1): Green Clean fails to map critical customer moments, focusing only on the purchase stage. The brand overlooks key interactions, such as research or post-purchase usage, resulting in a disconnected customer experience that fails to meet expectations.
Surface Understanding (0): Green Clean identifies some customer moments but does not fully capture customer thoughts, feelings, or objectives. For example, while the brand recognizes that customers compare products, it does not address the emotional stress of choosing among eco-friendly options.
Deep Understanding (+1, +2, +3): Green Clean comprehensively maps customer moments, from initial awareness to post-purchase advocacy. By identifying what customers think, feel, and do at each stage, the brand tailors its messaging, simplifies decision-making, and provides ongoing support. For instance, Green Clean offers an online guide to decoding eco-labels, addressing customer stress during the research phase and aligning with their objective of making informed choices.
Conclusion
The Moments sub-dimension is essential for understanding the key touchpoints that shape the customer journey. By observing real customer behavior, identifying actions, emotions, and objectives, and refining interactions, businesses can create seamless and satisfying experiences. A well-mapped journey fosters loyalty, trust, and advocacy, ensuring your value proposition resonates with customers at every stage.
Sources
Mental Models, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_model
Google, Micro-Moments, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/micro-moments-understand-new-consumer-behavior/
More on the Marketing Canvas
Resources for Course on Customer Experience
List of resources (books, articles, video, website) that I recommend you to visit if you are interested in the Customer Experience topic. I am using these resources during my classes @SolvayBrusselsSchool and during workshops.
In this post, you will find a collection of resources that I am using and maintaining for my different classes and workshops on this topic. Unfortunately I couldn't list everything that I am reading or watching and I have only selected some vital fews that mights inspired you. It is also a good start if you are interested by this topic. The list contains websites, books, articles and videos.
Cheers
Laurent
Recommended WebSites
- Adaptive Path: Adaptive Map, Discover the four steps of experience mapping
- Mental Models: Why are mental models important?
- Service Design: Customer Journey Map Tool
- Brian Solis: The Futur of Customer Experience
- Think With Google: Experience & Design
- Strategy-Business: Customer Strategy
- Deloitte Insights: Articles and Multimedia on Customer Experience
Recommended Books
Easy to read and a good start if you are curious about Customer Experience from a Marketing Perspective. A lot of good tools and and a powerful process.
Customers are powerful. They have a loud voice, a wealth of choice and their expectations are higher than ever.
This book covers ten principles you can use to make real world improvements to your customers’ experiences, whatever your business does and whoever you are.
One step further on this subject with the notion of Moments of Truth. Brian Solis is a though leader on Digital Transformation.
In his new book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design bestselling author Brian Solis shares why great products are no longer good enough to win with customers and why creative marketing and delightful customer service too are not enough to succeed. In X, he shares why the future of business is experiential and how to create and cultivate meaningful experiences.
Recommended Articles
1998 - Harvard Business Review - Welcome to the Experience Economy
First there was agriculture, then manufactured goods, and eventually services. Each change represented a step up in economic value--a way for producers to distinguish their products from increasingly undifferentiated competitive offerings. Now, as services are in their turn becoming commoditized, companies are looking for the next higher value in an economic offering. Leading-edge companies are finding that it lies in staging experiences. To reach this higher level of competition, companies will have to learn how to design, sell, and deliver experiences that customers will readily pay for. An experience occurs when a company uses services as the stage--and goods as props--for engaging individuals in a way that creates a memorable event. And while experiences have always been at the heart of the entertainment business, any company stages an experience when it engages customers in a personal, memorable way. The lessons of pioneering experience providers, including the Walt Disney Company, can help companies learn how to compete in the experience economy. The authors offer five design principles that drive the creation of memorable experiences. First, create a consistent theme, one that resonates throughout the entire experience. Second, layer the theme with positive cues--for example, easy-to-follow signs. Third, eliminate negative cues, those visual or aural messages that distract or contradict the theme. Fourth, offer memorabilia that commemorate the experience for the user. Finally, engage all five senses--through sights, sounds, and so on--to heighten the experience and thus make it more memorable.
Read on HBR here
2002 - Harvard Business Review - The One Number You Need to Grow
Companies spend lots of time and money on complex tools to assess customer satisfaction. But they're measuring the wrong thing. The best predictor of top-line growth can usually be captured in a single survey question: Would you recommend this company to a friend? This finding is based on two years of research in which a variety of survey questions were tested by linking the responses with actual customer behavior--purchasing patterns and referrals--and ultimately with company growth. Surprisingly, the most effective question wasn't about customer satisfaction or even loyalty per se. In most of the industries studied, the percentage of customers enthusiastic enough about a company to refer it to a friend or colleague directly correlated with growth rates among competitors. Willingness to talk up a company or product to friends, family, and colleagues is one of the best indicators of loyalty because of the customer's sacrifice in making the recommendation. When customers act as references, they do more than indicate they've received good economic value from a company; they put their own reputations on the line. And they will risk their reputations only if they feel intense loyalty. The findings point to a new, simpler approach to customer research, one directly linked to a company's results. By substituting a single question--blunt tool though it may appear to be--for the complex black box of the customer satisfaction survey, companies can actually put consumer survey results to use and focus employees on the task of stimulating growth.
Read on HBR here
2007 - Harvard Business Review - Understanding Customer Experience
The article discusses the importance of monitoring customer experience. Several examples are presented demonstrating customer dissatisfaction in a variety of situations. Customer experience is defined, and several methods for measuring it are discussed. The results of a recent Bain & Company survey of customers of 362 companies is presented. Methods of collecting customer data at "touch points," instances of direct contact either with the product or service itself or with representations of it, are detailed.
Read on HBR here
2016 - McKinsey - Customer Experiences
Collection of ideas, articles, thoughts and interviews about Customer Experience. Currently 2 entire collections examining how companies can create competitive advantage by putting customers first and managing their journeys.
Read on McKinsey here
2016 - PWC - 10 Principles of Customer Strategy
It’s no longer enough to target your chosen customers. To stay ahead, you need to create distinctive value and experiences for them.
Read on Strategy-Business here
2017 - Altimeter - The Customer Experience of AI
This report explores the impact of AI on the customer experience, lays out a set of operating principles, and includes insight from technology users, developers, academics, designers, and other experts on how to design customer-centric experiences in the age of AI. More than anything, business leaders today should begin to treat AI as fundamental to the customer experience. This means thinking about the values it perpetuates as an essential and eventually indistinguishable expression of product, services and the brand experience.
Read on Altimeter here
Recommended Videos
This is a full keynote based on the story of my latest book 'when digital becomes human'. Presented this on the biggest retail conference in Istanbul. Enjoy! More about Steven Steven is an expert in customer focus in a digital world.