Touch Points In Marketing

Nowadays in the current digital era our lives have changed dramatically. The Internet and digital media have transformed marketing and business since the first website (http://info.cern.ch) went live in 1991(Chaffey, Eliss – Chadwick, 2012). The rise of digital media made a significant impact on the business environment; it changed the way businesses operate and altered industry structures. The new digital environment has created dynamic and complex markets with high levels of uncertainty and competition (Al-Debei et al.,2008).

However, the most striking realization is, that also the consumer and consumer behavior have changed in this new environment. Consumers no longer accept traditional marketing initiatives, but demand a different relationship.

Today, consumers are promiscuous in their brand relationships. They connect with brands through new media channels beyond brand’s control or even knowledge. After a purchase these consumers may remain aggressively engaged, publicly promoting or assailing the products they’ve bought, collaborating in the brands’ development, and challenging and shaping their meaning. Therefore, touch points have changed in both number and nature, requiring a major adjustment to realign marketers’ strategy and budgets with where consumers are actually spending their time.

If marketing has one goal, it’s to reach consumers at the moments that most influence their decisions. Marketing has always sought those moments, or touch points, when consumers are open to influence (Court, Elzinga, Mulder and Vetvik, 2009). Therefore, the importance of touch point planning has increased (Jenkinson, 2007).

The traditional marketing mix or four P’s of marketing (product, price, promotion and place) are no longer sufficient. Internet technology provides buyers with easier access to information about products and suppliers, thus bolstering buyer bargaining power. It also reduces barriers to entry which allows a flood of new

Companies need to attract the “new consumer”. They need to review consumer behaviour and understand the needs of the “new consumer”. With a strong probability, we could say that marketers are facing a ‘crisis of immediacy’ challenge: how to meet consumers’ need to receive content, expertise, and personalized solutions in real time during their shopping experience (Parise, Guninan & Kafka, 2016).

Based on Dörner and Edelman (2015) trends in the new digital world grounded us with a need to understand each step of customer’s journey regardless of channel they are using and thinking how the use of digital capabilities could help brands design and deliver the best possible consumer experience across all parts of the business.

As we could see from the literature customer experience journey can be divided in three individual stages, i.e. pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase experience. As Patterson (2009) stated the customer experience process starts from the moment the customer becomes aware of company and is comprised of multiple independent interactions, transactions and contacts along the way. All these interactions during the customer experience are touch