The
Experience
Journey:
A New Model for Consumer Marketing
By Jack Morton Worldwide

New realities, new journeys / 3
Defining the experience journey / 5
3 Brands getting experience right / 7
Mapping experience journeys / 11
Learn more / 13
/2The Experience Journey
What’s inside

/3The Experience Journey
New realities, new journeys
Craig Millon
Like all of us, marketers need maps.
For marketers, the most fundamental journey
to track is the one customers go through to
purchase their products. Maps help marketers
set strategy and priorities against this journey.
How else would they know when and how to
invest in order to create the right moments in
time and the right relationships over time – to
drive sales, to inspire referrals and to
earn re-purchase?
Across industries, consumer journeys have
changed radically in recent years. There
are many more brand choices and infinitely
more sources of information about them.
There are new ways to seek out and share
recommendations. And – picture a shopper
using a mobile phone to scan a bar code and
comparison shop a toothbrush – consumers are
empowered in ways that couldn’t have been
imagined a generation ago.
With consumers’ journeys so radically different,
so too are the models marketers use to
map them.
Fig. 1 McKinsey’s 2009 “Consumer Decision Journey”
Moment of
purchase
Initial
consideration
set
Trigger
Information gathering, shopping
Ongoing exposure
Active evaluation
Postpurchase experience
Loyalty loop 3. Ultimately, the consumer
selects a brand at
the moment of purchase
2. Consumers add or subtract brands
as they evaluate what they want
1. The consumer
considers an initial
set of brands,
based on brand
perceptions and
exposure to recent
touch points
4. After purchasing a product or service, the consumer
builds expectations based on experience to inform the
next decision journey
Second Moment
of Truth
(Experience)
First Moment of
Truth (Shelf)
Stimulus
Which becomes the next person’s ZMOT
Fig. 2 Google’s 2011 “Zero Moment of Truth”

Stimulus Consideration Purchase Use
SHARING PATH
LOYALTY LOOP
Time
CompetitiveSet
Fig. 3 Jack Morton’s 2013 “Experience Journey”
/4The Experience Journey
people get closer to purchase. Google took this
last implication further with its “zero moment of
truth” model (fig. 2), which emphasizes the extent
to which consumers’ active information-
gathering has grown in scope and influence in
recent years.
As I said, maps help marketers set strategy
and priorities against consumer journeys. Both
McKinsey’s and Google’s models showed
marketers that they needed to change: for
example, by spending less on above the line
advertising and more on search, shopper
marketing, customer experience design and
programs that generate referrals and
word of mouth.
I’m indebted, as all of us at Jack Morton are, to
McKinsey’s and Google’s thinking. But as a brand
experience agency, we have a different (but
complementary) view of how things work, which
builds on their models: it’s called the
experience journey (fig. 3).
Back when I was being trained as a marketer,
the “purchase funnel” reigned as the assumed
manner in which consumers moved to purchase.
Consumers were thought to move from being
aware of several brands with a sector to a
smaller group of brands they’d consider once
real shopping started. The goal of marketers was
to move the consumer logically down the funnel
to become the one chosen brand at the end.
Re-purchase and recommendations were tacked
on at the end, but were assumed to work with
similar linearity. New consumer journey models
– especially those put forth by McKinsey in 2009
and Google in 2011 – have destroyed this once
set-in-stone approach.
As McKinsey’s research-based report proved ,
consumers don’t move logically and inexorably
in one direction, but rather in a layered loop,
with postpurchase experiences informing future
decision journeys (fig. 1).
Rather than limiting choices as they commence
shopping, people actually add brands to
their consideration set. And rather than being
passively led down the funnel by company-
driven marketing, consumers rely more on active
information-seeking about brands; company-
driven marketing becomes less influential as
1
2

/5The Experience Journey
Defining the experience journey
their experience journey depending on their
particular circumstances.
• The experience journey puts even more
emphasis on the variability of any consumer
journey circa 2013. There is no singular
consumer journey; there are infinite and
multidirectional consumer journeys.
All of this is an accurate reflection, we believe,
of the more competitive landscape and complex
media environment in which we all now live
– with the added layer of experience as the
differentiator that wins consumers’ consideration,
commitment and word of mouth.
In the experience journey model, brands win at
moments in time and moments over time –
by creating rich, technology-enhanced brand
experiences that keep consumers engaged
by the brand throughout the journey. These
experiences extend as the threads that
keep consumers connected from stimulus to
consideration, purchase and use.
Research proves out that experiences define
brands throughout consumer journeys. Based on
the input of consumers surveyed in 2011 , we
know that the vast majority will only recommend
brands based on experience – and that just as
many expect brands to do “something special”
(like an experience) to even get their
attention (fig. 4).
Like the McKinsey and Google models, the
experience journey begins with a stimulus and
moves through consideration, purchase and use
– but there are key differences. Most importantly,
experience is the continuous thread linking the
journey itself. That’s a fundamental difference,
built on the strong belief that it is compelling,
differentiating experiences that keep consumers
engaged with brands these days, and less
subject to distraction by the competition.
In addition:
• We also see a “loyalty loop” cycle around re-
purchase (which requires brands to invest in their
after-purchase interactions and customer service
as potential strengths).
• We extend referral (both giving and seeking
out) from isolated moments to a continuous
path of sharing across the whole experience
journey. Sharing your experience with a brand
is not something that happens at the end of the
process but throughout the process.
• We map time across the X axis and
competitors across the Y axis – allowing us to
help clients across different industries to map
Fig. 4
Experience is the owned media that earns media
Source: Jack Morton research, 2012.
Global
Average
US Brazil China India
76 79 74 78 78
75 65 71 84 78
I only advocate brands when I have had great personal
experiences with them
With all the media and information available to me, if a brand
wants to get my attention it has to do something special
3

/6The Experience Journey
Experience is also there defining the journey
when we ask consumers, “What are the
most important influences on your purchase
decisions?” Among the top five influences cited
by consumers, referrals fueled by experience
(recommendations sought from or given by
friends and family) are ranked number one
and number two; number five is the in-store
experience itself (fig. 5).
Not surprisingly, experience is important to
brands – but there’s a gap between how good
corporate leaders think their experiences
are and how their customer rate their actual
performance. Bain & Company surveyed
customers of 362 companies. “Only 8% of them
described their experiences as superior, yet
80% of the companies surveyed believe that the
experience they have been providing is indeed
superior.”
From an 80% assumed superiority to 8% actual
delivery represents a big gap – and still another
reason for marketers to embrace the experience
journey model.
4
Fig. 5
Most valuable sources of information for purchase
Source: Jack Morton research, 2012.
Global
Average
US Brazil China India
56 65 55 58 44
55 61 53 61 43
Friends and family from whom you sought opinions
Friends and family who volunteered their opinion
47 61 41 48 37
47 55 45 45 43
44 55 46 41 35
Research you conducted on the internet
Product reviews by experts (eg.g, in magazines, on Web)
In-store experience or media

/7The Experience Journey
3 Brands getting experience right
The value to brands in
architecting consumer
experience journeys is clear.
The brands that succeed now
and in the future will be
brands that build relationships
at moments in time and
moments over time on the
basis of experience. We call
these experience brands. They
deliver more than a product or
service – they offer the shared
value of an experience.
Recent research shows that
people are more likely to
consider experience brands
over the competition. They
are more likely to recommend
them. And they will even pay
more for them .
Experience brands consider
and plan for the total consumer
experience – from stimulus to
consideration to purchase and
use. They don’t view tactics
in isolation but rather as part
of journey that is organized
and based on macro consumer
insights, macro technology
changes and the belief in a
“new journey for a new age”.
So what are some examples of
experience brands? Here are
three of our favorites :
5
6

/8The Experience Journey
Coke.
1
Ranked by many as the world’s most valuable
brand, in recent years Coke’s marketers have
led a brand renaissance that’s built around
a simple, inspiring promise – happiness –
which is played out across the experience
journey. Is it possible not to love its award-
winning experiences – such as its Happiness
Machines, or its partnership with Google to
re-create its landmark 1970s “I’d Like to Buy
the World a Coke” anthem in a new, digital
form? Also noteworthy: its “content 2020”
content marketing strategy includes not just a
compelling vision (“liquid and linked”) but also
clear priorities about the allocation of resources
and priorities.

/9The Experience Journey
GoPro.
2
Experience brands understand that brands
are verbs and that doing is ultimately more
impressive than telling. That’s so true of GoPro:
the brand for wearable and helmet cameras
solicits content from customers doing what its
products celebrate – having adventures – and
uses that content as its marketing. Rather than
telling people about what they can do with
its products, it shows them what using their
products could look like – and it extends this
strategy across the experience journey. GoPro
is an exemplar of search – an area that many
brands neglect.

/10The Experience Journey
Red Bull.
3
The most successful experience brands start
off by finding unmet consumer needs and then
innovating experiences and products to fill
those needs. Red Bull did that almost 30 years
ago by innovating the energy drink category
itself. Its promise – Red Bull Gives You Wings
– is a higher-level aspiration that’s borne out
at every conceivable touchpoint along its
experience journey: from the annual Flug Tag
to Red Bull Racing and other sponsorships, from
one-off stunts like the Red Bull Stratos mission
to the edge of space to the brand’s consistently
significant investment in experience-
based marketing.

/11The Experience Journey
Mapping experience journeys
Brands don’t become experience brands by
accident: they get there by planning.
Planning isn’t just figuring out what to do when.
It’s about the context and connection across
brand experiences. If those experiences exist in
isolation, consumers can become confused and
fall through the cracks.
That’s why we work with clients to concept,
plan and execute brand experiences within the
experience journey framework.
What that looks like varies dramatically by
sector and situation. For example, an experience
journey for a fast food brand (fig. 6) has a much
shorter time frame, fewer competing brands
and a smaller incidence of sharing than an
experience journey in the automotive
industry (fig. 7).
Stimulus
4 Brands
Consideration
10 Brands
Use
SHARING PATH
LOYALTY LOOP
Time - 1 Year
CompetitiveSet
Fig. 7
Experience Journey: automotive industry
$
Stimulus
5 Brands
Consideration
2 Brands
Use
SHARING PATH
LOYALTY LOOP
Time - 1 Hour
CompetitiveSet
Fig. 6
Experience Journey: fast food industry
$

/12Best Experience Brands 2013
That’s the vision; getting there will require a
great experience journey map and strong
agency partners to travel that journey
with them.
Craig Millon is SVP of Digital & Shopper
Marketing at Jack Morton Worldwide.
We’ve developed the work of mapping the
experience journey into a four-step process,
for which we use a simple schema that maps
the experience journey alongside consumer
disciplines (such as live, retail and digital). The
four steps are:
1. Audit each tactical activity and its primary
purpose(s) and intended result(s).
2. Review and map each tactical activity,
associated purpose and intended result.
3. Identify the communication gaps / breaks
along the purchase journey. These can
be tactical gaps (offer), messaging gaps
(consistency) or discipline gaps (digital).
4. Propose solutions that assist consumers in a
seamless Experience Journey.
What does the output look like? That depends
on the brand, of course. But the goal is always
the same: leverage the power of experience
thinking to build relationships with consumers
and claim an advantage in the market. In
the experience journey model, brands win at
moments in time and moments over time – by
creating rich, technology-enhanced brand
experiences that keep consumers engaged
by the brand.
Footnotes
1. David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susan Mulder and Ole Jorgen
Vetvik, The Consumer Decision Journey, McKinsey & Company,
2009.
2. Jim Lecinski, ZMOT: Winning The Zero Moment of Truth,
Google, 2009.
3. Josh McCall and Liz Bigham, New Realities 2012: Consumer
Research from Jack Morton Worldwide, Jack Morton Worldwide,
2012.
4. Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager, “Understanding
Customer Experience,” Harvard Business Review, February 2007.
5. Josh McCall and Liz Bigham,
Best Experience Brands 2013: A Global Study by Jack Morton
Worldwide, Jack Morton Worldwide, 2013.
6. Full disclosure: none of these brands are clients. We’re just fans
of their discipline as experience brands.

/13The C-Suite Project
Contact:
North America: Liz Bigham, EVP, Brand Marketing
E: liz_bigham@jackmorton.com / T: +1-212-401-7212
UK: Richard Vincent, SVP, Head of Consumer
E: richard_vincent@jackmorton.co.uk / T: +44 208 735 2000
Asia: Ben Taylor, President, APAC
E: ben_taylor@jackmorton.com.cn / T: +86 10 8569 9718
Australia: Helen Graney, SVP, Managing Director
E: Helen_graney@jackmorton.com.au / T: +612 8231 4565
Read our blog at blog.jackmorton.com
Follow us on twitter @jackmorton
Visit us online at jackmorton.com
About Jack Morton
Jack Morton Worldwide is a global brand experience agency with offices
on five continents. Our agency culture promotes breakthrough ideas about
how experiences connect brands and people – in-person, online, at retail
and through the power of digital and word of mouth. We work with both
BtoC and BtoB clients to create powerful and effective experiences that
engage customers and consumers, launch products, align employees and
build strong experience brands. Ranked at the top of our field, we earned
over 50 awards for creativity, execution and effectiveness last year.
Jack Morton is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc. (NYSE: IPG).
© Jack Morton Worldwide 2013
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