Essay Sample on Mapping Success: Navigating the Customer Journey in Sports Merchandise Marketing

In marketing, the customer journey refers to the buyers’ path through various touchpoints to their decision to buy the product or service. Customers do not buy products first when they see them in the market, but the customer gathers information first, before deciding on whether to purchase it or not. However, technology has revolutionized marketing and modernized the customer journey whereby now buyers are buying items from the internet without going to shop. This paper aims to use sports merchandise like rackets; and shoes to design a customer journey model and inform a customer journey using data collected from customer feedback.

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The first step is identifying customers' needs to determine what kind of sports merchandise the buyer wants to purchase. After identifying the needs of a customer, the company needs to develop these wants and create awareness among the customers about a particular product that can satisfy their needs. The company creates awareness about these sports merchandise by advertising them on Social media, television, emails, YouTube, and content marketing, which entails blogging, search advertising, online display advertising, messaging, magazines, and radio. Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, which users can use to hyper-target their ads (Shi and Clara, 2011). The target market here could be players, fans, and other groups who require sports products.

The second stage, which a marketer needs to do, is to ensure that the business sports merchandise is available online or on social media because modern customers spend most of their time searching for products on websites and business locations online. Felix et al. (2016) define this act of promoting products and services on social platforms as social marketing. Such information is essential to customers, for they are always interested in gathering the right information about products, which satisfies their needs. After customers finish doing the market search about sports merchandise sold, they look for more information about stores in their locality, that are selling the same product. If a shop is listed online, customers will be able to find it with ease, and they will be likely to come in person to the business premises.

In the third stage, buyers may be interested in searching for more information about the business online before they spend their money. In this stage, buyers have the desire to evaluate alternative sports merchandise from different stores that satisfy them and want to get the best quality sports product. The information here that customers are interested in is the price and quality of the sports product. In this stage, customers will read reviews online from other customers who happened to rate the business the product, and the service they offer. If they get negative reviews, they will continue searching until they get positive reviews about a particular shop selling similar sports products. Therefore, marketers should be aware of the effects of online discussions on businesses and products. A business should have a good rating online to attract more customers.

The fourth stage is the conversion point. The customer here usually has arrived at the consensus of buying the sports product they wanted after having analyzed it from similar shops and individual connections. Most business enterprises have websites where they list their products for customers to view while browsing. Other businesses have adopted E-Commerce to allow consumers to purchase products online and be delivered to their doorsteps. If the customer likes shopping in the store, the business can list available products, so that when the buyer comes to shop, he can be able to buy. Customers here usually have to take time and use the money to buy the sports products they need, such as sports shoes, rackets, or balls.

The last stage is the advocacy step. Here buyers can analyze whether; the sports product they bought was useful. For example, a lawn tennis racket can determine how the grips are, whether is it strung well, and is of the right quality. If they find that it is of the required standard, they can act as the brand ambassador for that product and influence their friends to buy from your store. This will create loyalty in them and love associating themselves with that sports product and the shop where they bought it.

An example is a shopper who went shopping in a retail mall and found out that all the sports merchandise was on offer, and even the retail shop gave out free tickets for shoppers to go and watch the Formula One race. The customer got so excited that he had to write it on social media thanking the retail shop. Suppose the customer happens to have a bad experience with your product. In that case, he will rate your product poorly on websites, which will destroy your store's reputation, and you will likely lose many potential customers. Therefore, a business should always be able to watch and handle customer complaints carefully; otherwise, if their reputation is ruined, customers will move to new stores to shop.

By developing a customer journey, it is advisable for marketers to review customer feedback often. Your business may be successful; you need to check what people say about your products, social media platforms, and how they perceive your product. The second way of collecting information from customers is by setting up a customer care service desk. This is because they will be calling most of the time to seek clarification about your products and know where your business is located. They can also call when filing complaints about something that did not go the way they expected. The information collected will help develop your customer journey by improving your communication channels to the customers, developing the right marketing mix, and the segmented market. However, data collected from shoppers are entitled to privacy the exact limit of data needs to be synchronized and controlled (Gupta et al., 2018).

Data collected from customer feedback and reviews can help a marketer who deals with sports products develop market segments by ensuring they target the right groups when advertising sports merchandise. Segmenting the market is dividing it into smaller groups to ensure that if you are making a particular product that is intended for a particular group. The importance of segmenting this market is to ensure when advertising your product that you are targeting the right people, to Inform about product development and your potential customers, reveal areas that customers have addressed you to improve in your marketing strategy; it will also help a business improve its business focus, for example, if it is sports merchandise manufacture, the company will establish its own brown identity.

Demographic segmentation is splitting your target market based on observable characteristics such as sex, family size, occupation, age, and gender (Reid et al., 2009) .geographic segmentation, on the other hand, is dividing the market based on their setting. Behavioural segmentation is classifying the target market based on buyers’ behaviour: which are loyalty, online behaviour, and their rate of consumption. Psychographic segmentation deals with characteristics that are emotional and mental to consumers.

While developing the customer journey, you should incorporate a marketing mix in the marketing of your sports merchandise to your target audience. The mix defines your marketing objective in your desired market. The marketing mix is made of 4Ps, which are price, product, place, and promotion. When customers are shopping, they will be very interested in knowing the value of sports products available in different stores. Products are the items that marketers sell. The place is the point of sale; it could be a physical place or the distribution channel used so that goods can reach the customer. Promotion is the activities that are done to ensure buyers know the product, which are advertising, sales promotion, direct relations, and the public relationship between the organization and consumers (Blythe and Jim, 2009).

Sending alert messages to your customers through text messages, MMS, and social chat apps allows them to reply and call you; this enables engagement and interaction with the customer. Direct messaging is subsumed by mobile marketing, where media sends messages directly to customers' phones (Sezgin and Erkan, 2016). This reduces cost by ensuring that all appointments are adhered to and improves customer experience. Social media is also useful when developing a modern customer journey because it helps build brand awareness, and customer loyalty and builds links to marketers and customers. Social media also creates conversion about a brand. Creating blogs such as LinkedIn creates an environment for businesses to link up online (Deis Michael and Kyle Hensel, 2010). Other Social media apps that marketers use to reach customers are Instagram, Yelp, TikTok, Whatsapp, Facebook, and Twitter because these are the social media platforms that are mostly used by Youths. For example, a sports merchandise company uses a famous athlete to market their products to fans, instead of fans going direct to inquire about these products in stores.

Conclusion

In summary, the customer journey is similar to marketing; therefore; all the five stages of the customer decision-making process should be followed. Marketers should collect data about customer reviews and analyze them to ensure that they are selling products right group targets at the right place and right time. Marketers should use both mainstream and social media for advertising their products for the information to reach as many customers as possible.

References

Blythe, Jim (2009). Key concepts in Marketing, Los Angeles: SAGE Publications Ltd. https://www.worldcat.org/title/key-concepts-in-marketing/oclc/670411317

Deis, Michael H. Kyle Hensel (2010). “Using social media to increase advertising and improve marketing”. Entrepreneurial Executive: 87

Felix R, Rauschnabel P, Hinsch C (2016). “ Elements of strategic social media marketing: A Holistic framework”. Journal of Business Research.70:118-126 https://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeejbrese/v_3a70_3ay_3a2017_3ai_3ac_3ap_3a118-126.htm

Gupta, Sachin, Scheider & Mathew (June 1, 2018). “Protecting customer’s privacy requires more than anonymizing their data”.Havard Business Review. Retrieved January 24, 2020. https://hbr.org/2018/06/protecting-customers-privacy-requires-more-than-anonymizing-their-data

Reid, Roberts D & Brojanic, David C. (2009) Hospitality Marketing Management (fifth Ed.). John Wiley and Sons, p.139

Sezgin Ekran (2016) E-consumers in the era of new tourism. Berlin: Springer. P.21.ISBN 978981100085. Entrepreneurial Executive: 87

Shih & Clara (2011). The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to market sell and innovate. Boston: Prentice-Hall. p.111 https://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Era-Tapping-Networks-Innovate/dp/0137085125