Podcast Summary: What Is A Customer Journey With Daryl Fielding

In this episode of the Cambridge Marketing Podcast, Kiran Kapur talks to Daryl Fielding about what truly drives customer decisions. Drawing on experience with brands like Cadbury and Dove, Fielding explains how understanding real customer triggers beyond digital touchpoints can transform marketing. They discuss insights from the Dove Real Beauty campaign and the creative challenges behind building purposeful brands.

 

Podcast Transcript:

Announcer (00:02):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships@marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur (host) (00:13):
Welcome to the Cambridge Marketing Podcast. My guest today is Daryl Fielding, who held senior roles in marketing at Vodafone and Mondelez and is now a portfolio board director, author and charity, CEO. Daryl. We're going to talk about customer journeys today. So let's start with what is a customer journey?

Daryl Fielding (00:34):
So a customer journey is the full path that your customer or stakeholder takes from that very first twinkle in the eye that might end up with them buying and using and possibly sharing their experiences of your product or service. And in many cases these days, people only plot that customer journey when people are engaging with the brand digitally, if that happens. But of course there's far more to it than that. They can track which elements of a website or app people click on and click through on their dwell time and things like that. But the whole picture is much broader and more complicated, and you need to fully understand what drove them to that site, how they got there, what their first trigger was, right the way through to whether they recommend that product to a friend. So the customer journey is a much more well-rounded picture than just the digital element of a sale.

Kiran Kapur (host) (01:38):
That's great. It's a sort of broad overview. So can I ask you for an actual example?

Daryl Fielding (01:41):
Yes. We first discovered the real magic of the customer journey when we were trying to figure out the Tassimo brand at Mondelez actually. And we plotted in detail exactly what had happened. And of course, like most brand teams, there were many, many, many assumptions made as to what happened to drive the sales of that. We advertised the brand on television quite extensively, and we assumed that people had awareness of Tassimo, their coffee machine, their brewer, their old fashioned brewer, as opposed to the Nespresso style machine that Tassimo the family that Tassimo belongs to. Their brewer broke, their old fashioned brewer broke. We assumed that they were aware of a few brands because they'd seen them advertised and that then they sort of Googled them, checked them out and went in store. And when we looked at what actually happened when we interviewed customers and we tracked what they actually did, we found that there was a completely different trigger to purchase.

(02:51):
And actually what was that trigger? Was them visiting a friend's house who had just acquired one of these new type machines and therefore we had been spending a fortune operating on incorrect assumptions around that particular product. And we shifted our marketing in line with the truth of what the customer was doing, where we rewarded massively the individuals who purchased the product so that they would become very, very passionate advocates for Tassimo. And we also invested very, very heavily in digital and point of sale, and we actually pulled money away from TV advertising because it didn't play a very particular big role in driving sales of this particular type of product. So that's an example of a customer journey. What was the trigger? What made them start to think about buying it? How did they buy it? How did they experience it? And that sharing element, the word of mouth part for that particular brand was absolutely enormous.

(04:05):
So that's one example that inspired us at Mondelez to sort of institutionalise this thinking and making it make it part of our marketing process, which was to map the customer journey. And we created a tool that was quite sophisticated actually. We invested money in the technology for it, but it also had to work in big sophisticated data rich markets as well as smaller markets where they didn't have an awful lot of research. So we would ask lots and lots of questions about the elements of that customer journey that they could answer from their understanding and experience or from really good robust data and create a proper picture of what actually happened for any brand when the customer engaged with it and it led to a sale or not actually when people didn't buy it. We also wanted to know what was happening. And we deployed this process with over a hundred teams and a hundred brands when I was there. And in 98% of cases there was a light bulb moment about, oh my God, we thought this is what the customers were doing, or we had assumed this is what the customer was doing, and actually it wasn't what they were doing. They felt they discovered something very different when they really looked into actual behaviour and therefore they would change their marketing accordingly. And they all got great results from that better insight and standing.

Kiran Kapur (host) (05:46):
So what I found really intriguing was the two things there that really caught me. One was I tend to think of the customer journey as once the customers come on board, but in fact in Tassimo's case, you were looking at the pre customer journey and seeing that as part of the whole journey.

Daryl Fielding (06:03):
Absolutely. And I think that is the sort of rather reductive definition of it at the moment that I'm sort of encouraging people to go wider. What on earth makes people in the first place even think to go to your website or to go in store? What's the trigger? What's that awakening point? And the other aspect that I think is neglected in this mix, particularly when you have physical stores, is the shopper marketing piece. I will, if you wish me to do a whole other session on shopper marketing because it's an absolute passion and I've introduced it at, I introduced it at Mondelez and I also introduced it at Vodafone uk, but it really is what people actually do in the shop and it's so unconscious with customers that they often don't even realise what they're doing. And therefore in order to unpick that and figure out what's happening, you really have to sort of watch 'em a little bit of anthropology or a little bit of ethnography to figure out what was happening.

(07:21):
And we did that to tremendous effect with Cadbury Dairy Milk because we had a system that we used in this shopper marketing and the shopper part of the customer journey where we deconstructed what happens to customers in a shop into five sections. Do they see the category? Do they scan the category? Do they spot your product or brand? Do they show any interest? They pick it up and have a look at it and do they put it in their basket? So it is deconstructing what happens at each stage. And what we found with Cadbury Dairy Milk was that 75% of people who walked down the chocolate aisle in a supermarket actually saw the category where Cadbury Dairy Milk was quite a lot of aisle avoidance in the chocolate category. "Well, I'm not going down there, I'll just be tempted". Yes, exactly.

(08:19):
But if you get down there, 75% of people will actually take a look at the sort of bars of milk chocolate. And then do you just see that category then? Do you have a sort of more scanny type look? Do you take a quiz at it? I don't think taking a quiz was one of the five Ss, but that's what that means. And 64% of people who walked down did that, but only 24% actually spotted Cadbury Dairy Milk. So there was a drop off of 40% there. So of the people looking at bars of milk chocolate, only a quarter of them actually spotted Cadbury Dairy Milk. Now for the brand leader, that's a hell of a drop. And we realised the reason for that was because the bars of chocolate was stock in the shelf ready packaging, which is the cardboard boxes that people put on the shelf on their side.

(09:19):
So you just saw the Purple Edge rather than the bit of the large Cadbury Dairy Milk branding on the face, the large face of the bar. And the marketing and sales team at CDM did know that there was a problem there, but they didn't know the scale of it and they didn't realise that potentially they were losing sort of 40% of their potential sales. And the cost of actually changing that in such a big production line was around about £10 million. And they'd always resisted investing that money because they just didn't realise how much difference it would make if they spent it. So actually that investment was made and we first had front facing packaging for the launch of the bubbly bar at the time, which was their aero competitor. And the sales were phenomenal. I think we reached our three month sales target in four weeks.

(10:21):
The difference it made to the results of the business, just making that small change, which seems very simple on the surface, but actually is quite costly to retool a factory and produce something differently was absolutely amazing. And actually we didn't need another drumming gorilla, actually. What we needed was a cardboard box and elastic band and a stick. And after, when I talk about marketing to people, sometimes it's really simple. It's as simple as availability and the ability of the customer to actually see the product. And that's very elementary and distribution availability is a huge part of marketing and understanding that bit of the customer journey and understanding it with some quantification was a game changer for the success of that brand. There were lots of other elements in the marketing mix that we also developed, but that was a really fundamental one. And it's quite a nice story. Sometimes I do like people to know that marketing isn't always rocket science. It can be quite straightforward as well.

Kiran Kapur (host) (11:34):
One of the things I loved when we were talking before was you were very open about the fact that marketing isn't always beautifully planned out. So I know you worked on the Dove brand, and I think there we always assumed that there was a light bulb moment and this wonderful campaign just arrived. And from what you said, it wasn't quite like that.

Daryl Fielding (11:55):
No, it wasn't. And I think there is a narrative that looks like the seamless logic of a bunch of geniuses, which is that we did research, we found that 2% of women in the world didn't feel that they were beautiful. And so we then created this campaign. And actually in all honesty, it was more of a muddle than that. We had an ambition to create a highly differentiated, relevant and iconic brand with Dove. And that was the ambition of the most fabulous global brand director Sylvia Lao. She wanted to be as good as Apple or Nike. And at that time the notion of purpose branding had not been invented. So we were trying to figure out why they were so good at what they did and she spoke to them and we realised that they stood for something over and above the product functionality. They had more meaning for their customers at a deeper level.

(12:59):
So we set out to achieve that and we started to look at what we could do in the beauty category that was different to all of the other brands. And we had on the wall all of our competitors, Nivea, Pantene, L'Oreal, Shiseido brands that were mass market beauty brands. And we were sitting there looking at them and going, God, they all look the same, all populated by sort of perfect, probably teenage girls looking more in need of a good lunch than the unguent that was being sold if we're frank, even girls who were from Asia representing the Asian brands just kind of looked very similar to the brands in the West. I mean everybody looked, it was very homogenous.

(13:53):
And we were a team of mostly women sitting there going, oh, they all seem to be rather playing on it people's insecurities. And actually looking at these ads makes me feel a bit crappy. I feel I don't measure up to these kind of lovely girls that we are looking at. And we started to develop a hypothesis which was, I wonder if that is true and I wonder if there is a better way of presenting a beauty brand. And that was really the starting point where we had a hypothesis and we went and consulted psychologists actually including Susie Orach, who famously treated Princess Diana for bulimia, another experts in the field of women self-esteem and images in the media. And we got tremendous insight from that, that women actually were demeaned and their self-esteem was impacted by the way that beauty was presented to them. And that was the jumping off point that led to the campaign that has now been running for 18 years or so.

(15:10):
But it took us, once we got the strategy, it was really hard to execute it actually the strategy was done with a combination of intuition and then validation of the insight with psychologists as opposed to research with the consumer. It was well validated, but then it was really challenging to get the work because we had to balance both the representation of the women so that women could look at them and go, they look nice, and then they don't look like models. That is a brand that's inclusive of me. So it was quite challenging to actually deliver the work. And we had lots of missteps. We created loads of ads that we put in the bin, actually some quite expensive pieces of photography. And so that was the tricky bit. And that probably took us about 18 months before we actually got the images. And I think the photographer who was ranking really understood what we were going for and managed to deliver it.

(16:25):
And we always cast what we call real women, women who don't have an agent, who are not professionally in any kind of industry where they represent themselves, and he could just bring out that sparkle and that moment of self-belief. And I think he was the best photographer we ever used, and he was the photographer that delivered the campaign in the first instance. But there were quite a lot of missteps along the way, but we sort of knew what we wanted, but we didn't know what it looked like. So it felt rather as though one was sort of crawling over broken glass to a distant light rather than this sort of rather elegant bit of logic that some people present as the way that it was accomplished. I guess I sort of don't know. I was the person that led the development of the advertising at Ogilvy, and I dunno whether I'd rather be noted as a sort of seamless genius or somebody that can navigate their way to a light over broken glass. But I guess what I like to land with people is that if you're trying to do something really amazing, it is hard. It's difficult, it'll be a muddle, you'll fail. You have to start again. You have to question what you do. So I think anyone that's really ambitious is going to find that challenge. And everything I've ever done that seemed really effortless at the time, turned out to be mediocre.

Kiran Kapur (host) (17:57):
Thank you. I think that's very encouraging for the rest of us. I think we all sometimes feel like good grief, it's more broken glass here than an organisation. Well, the reason I wanted to ask about that was it seems so different from the customer journey and from what you're saying you almost had 18 months before you got to a customer journey. Is that fair?

Daryl Fielding (18:14):
Well, I think there's a slight difference in the two elements of branding and marketing. I think the customer journey is really about the marketing activities that you need to deploy. I think with dav it was figuring out the brand and how it would manifest itself in its advertising. I mean, we were defining the brand by choosing advertising as the emblem of what it stood for. I think if we were to do a customer journey for Dove, we would start to go, right, you're about to buy a deodorant. What goes on in your mind? And then we would map that behaviour. So I think those are two very different elements of the marketing mix. And I think there's the figuring out of the brand and how it executes, how it presents to the world, and then there is that, how do we market that? And that's often you can figure out a brand globally, but how you market it, I think you have to do it country by country and product by product. It's a more practical part of it. So it's sort of it. So what we're talking about a little bit is the difference between branding and marketing and positioning and the activities that you get that lead to a sale.

Kiran Kapur (host) (19:34):
Thank you. I think that's one of the clearest descriptions I've heard of the difference between strategy and tactics. And we get asked it all the time as a college, so it's great to hear it so clearly. The last thing I wanted to come back on was you actually talked about in the customer journey at Mondelez, you were actually talking about the non-customers. So the people that don't choose your product. And I know some of that was people perhaps just not seeing your product, which was the problem with the Dairy Milk. But was there anything else that you sort of picked up as to why people wouldn't choose the product?

Daryl Fielding (20:06):
There wasn't anything in store about why they wouldn't, but at Mondelez we had very high standards for preference of the product with blind taste testing. So we would always have to exceed the scores in a taste test with the biggest competitor in any one market without the branding on those products. And what we had discovered was that Cadbury Dairy Milk was not preferred to its main competitor, and therefore we would assume if that were the case, that would be leading to a loss of sales. So we embarked on a product improvement programme as well. So that was another example of where we took action to enhance the experience of the product. And we didn't change the flavour profile. We basically had a slightly finer grind of cocoa and we changed the shape of the cubes to something that was curved so that the melt in the mouth was improved.

(21:18):
So there was sort of organ epileptics as they call it in the industry that were altered rather than the flavour of the chocolate. We also felt that the customer's assessment of the packaging was a little tired, and so we embarked on making the packaging more modern and motivating and invoking the flavour variance across the range. So fruit and nut cadry, Dairy Milk, and other variants of CDM. So we did have a real soup to nuts kind of speaking, a review of everything that we could identify where the product was, the marketing mix was potentially weak and set about improving it.

Kiran Kapur (host) (22:10):
Gosh, so there really was a look at every single marketing mix element by the sound of it.

Daryl Fielding (22:15):
Absolutely. It was an overhaul. It was a brand overhaul. The only thing that was fine was the advertising. Everything else needed something doing, and that was a programme of works that probably took about five years in total. Some of it happened after I left. The packaging finally materialised about two years after I'd left. But you go, oh, there's a packaging we did all that time ago.

Kiran Kapur (host) (22:43):
I think that's great. You've also given us a lovely example of how long things take, because again, I think there is a view that you sort of wake up in the morning and Oh, Dove's going to change now and then it just clicks and it happens within three weeks, it's all done. But of course it doesn't work like that in real life.

Daryl Fielding (23:00):
No, and actually I was chatting to some youngsters about brands about a year ago, and one of them said to me, "why is a lot of the brands in the world such shit?" And I said, "because excellence is hard". If excellence was easy, everything would be fabulous. And it isn't. Excellence is hard, and I think if you're working for a large organisation, there are processes and protocols and approvals, but also retooling a factory is something that can't be done overnight. It does take time. It has to be managed. It always makes me slightly smile that when you talk about these kind of brands that you buy in a supermarket, they're always called FCG, and the F stands for fast. I mean, generally things are quite slow, I guess people buy them quickly. That's where the F comes from. But largely because it's a physical product that takes time to change, and if something is accounts for millions or even billions of dollars worth of sales, then the justification for doing that and the investment required to do that can also take some time to convince people internally that we do need to invest the 10 million here or the 70 million there.

(24:21):
The sums of money are significant. And I guess if you're a smaller business, it's also significant. You have to sort of save up for the changes you want to make.

Kiran Kapur (host) (24:30):
Oh, definitely. I think, yes. I mean, £10 million makes one's eyes water, but if you're a small business, even a thousand pounds can be a lot of money. It depends on, it's all scale. Yes,

Daryl Fielding (24:39):
I think it's all scale. I think no matter how big a business you're in, you've never got enough money for your ambitions. I think when I was a Vodafone uk, the turnover of the business unit was 6 billion pounds a year, and we'd still be going, we haven't got enough money to do that. To some things. You go, how come? It seems quite an organisation of scale.

Kiran Kapur (host) (25:09):
Darl Fielding, that was an amazing insight into a world of marketing many of us will not be working in, but really helpful to look at customer journey and strategy and branding and using marketing metrics to justify expenditure, however big or small your organisation is. Thank you so much for your time.

Daryl Fielding (25:27):
Yes, you are most welcome. And as a last point, I think, doesn't matter what size of organisation you are, finding out what the customer is actually doing, whether you do it with big research budgets or just watching them personally will add value, understanding your customer is what this is all about, and you need to do that whether you're in an organisation big or small.

Kiran Kapur (host) (25:48):
Fabulous. Thank you very much indeed.

Daryl Fielding (25:49):
Thank you.

Announcer (25:51):
The Cambridge Marketing podcast from Cambridge Marketing, college, training, marketing and PR professionals across the globe.