Multichannel Customer Journeys: Mapping the Effects of Zmot, Showrooming and Webrooming

Abstract

This study is focused on multichannel shopping, which refers to the integration of various channels in the consumer decision-making process. The term was coined in the early 2000s to signify the integration of offline and online shopping channels. It has since evolved to encompass the proliferating number of channels and media used to formulate, evaluate and execute buying decisions. With the explosion of mobile technologies and social media, multi-channel shopping has indeed become a journey in which customers choose the route they take and which, arguably, needs to be mapped to be understood. Recently, these new multi-channel consumer behaviors have led to fresh developments in marketing practice, such as showrooming and webrooming, as well as the growing importance of what Lecinski (2011) from Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT). Taken collectively, these effects indicate that people are exposed to increasingly complex multi-channel shopping journeys. This complexity, however, is added only from the marketer’s perspective. From a consumer perspective, those new behaviors have emerged as a way of simplifying the decision-making processes in the ever-expanding digital universe. Existing consumer decision-making models were developed in pre-internet days and have remained for the most part unquestioned in the digital marketing discourse. Darley, Blankson and Luethge (2010) concluded that there is a ‘paucity of research on the impact of online environments on decision making’, which has also been observed in the multi-channel context. After a review of the extant models (e.g. Engel, Kollat and Blackwell 1978), we found that that there are still many gaps in the extant literature within the multichannel context and it is proposed that the lack of research in this area may stem from the limited applicability of existing models. Our research proposes the customer journey as an alternative conceptualization of consumers’ multi-channel behaviors. Our study adopts an inductive approach allowing for realistic patterns to emerge of how consumers use and react to different media and channels in their shopping journeys for cosmetics. First-hand reports of consumers’ shopping experiences were gathered utilising multi-method qualitative data collection including (1) personal diaries and (2) interviews. Twenty respondents (all women) were asked to record their thoughts, feelings and actions related to cosmetic products in a diary over a two week period, using everyday, personal language. The resulting sample of 16 research diaries was obtained and each one was followed with phase 2—an individual interview, to elucidate on diary entries and collect more targeted information. The data from both phases was analysed using thematic analysis, an encoding process that helps to generate lists of themes and is useful for discovering patterns in phenomena (Boyatzis 1998). It was also used to group respondents into segments, based on similarities and differences in their reported journeys. The empirical findings from this research therefore explore and map actual customer journeys, benefiting both practitioners and academia. Our study provides a threefold contribution to practice: (1) it systematises what are widely used yet largely misunderstood practices (ZMOT, webrooming and showrooming), (2) it defines the key multichannel influences across different stages of decision-making and (3) it segments actual customer journeys into three distinct patterns journeys: Impulsive journeys, Balanced journeys, and Considered journeys that brands can use to optimise their multichannel strategies. The study also contributes to on-going theory development by challenging the established decision-making models that have been developed in pre-Internet days.