A personal customer journey story

How I came to 'discover' the Customer Journey approach? Well… this is a remarkable story so to say. For this we go back years and years in time, when I was young and looking for some love… You know, when you're at that age that you want to 'get some of that', but have no clue about how to catch that fancy fish from what is called the opposite sex.

Truly. Women. I had no clue. None. Didn't understand them at all. Creatures of magically unpredictable behavior. Except they always seem to fell for that 'jerk guy'.

But, being a man on the lookout for some love, driven by that inner need to find a compassionate partner, one starts to go where no-one has gone before: exploring unknown territories that could cause fatal attraction. Or, to put it more in entrepreneurial terms: I was in the business of wooing female customers for that wonderful product called 'me', not asking for money but for their life time to share with me :-)

Well, it happened to be that this 'Customer Journey' of having the right woman somehow end up at my (or her) place late at night had some standard ingredients. Without those ingredients, there would be no enjoyable evenings, no late night kissing, and no second dates. At the beginning of my quest, the ingredients for a successful marketing campaign were unclear to me. So I run some experiments, see what happens, and then adopt the winning approach.

Four slaps in the face, two 'go-or-I'll-kick-you-in-the-balls', three hundred fake phone numbers and one threesome later, I started to get the clear insight of how to go about all this dating women game. I started to get lucky. And after a few times, I even found one special lady that is now in what can be called the repeated purchase business.

Anyway, wooing the right woman to get into a relationship with you, has more similarities than differences when compared to attracting and keep customers for your retail or small business company. You need a great product, a good understanding of your target market, a working plan of marketing action, and some slicky sales skills.