Last post we talked about the customer journey and its importance to marketers.  One problem if you fail to follow the journey is your marketing tactics just don’t work.  Simple analogy – if you walk into a car dealership to look at a car, and the salesman walks up to you and asks “Do you want to buy?”,  it is unlikely you will respond. You might even leave. There is a mismatch between where you are in the journey and where the salesperson thinks you are.

Now enter the cannoli.  I like a good cannoli — a cannoli from Mike’s Pastry in the North End is the best (some might claim Modern is better).  Today a box of Cannolis showed up in the office courtesy of a vendor.  They were hand delivered by the sales rep.  The sales rep actually tweeted to the person in our office he wanted to meet that a box of pastry was on its way.

So we had some great afternoon snacks.

Each time a marketing program gets run against us, as a marketing team I like to see what people think.

Fundamentally, the problem with this program is the mismatch in the journey.  We are only vaguely aware of what this vendor did, and now that we had some cannoli we at least understand what they do.  So if the goal was awareness,  then yes they hit their awareness target.  But if the goal was for us to have a meeting with the sales team or even take a phone call,  the program failed.  Given the sales rep delivered these, and wanted to hand deliver them to the prospect in our office, that was the goal.

The issue here is we aren’t in the market for what this vendor is offering, and even if we were, we wouldn’t just take a call with a vendor since they bought us something.  Maybe we are weird or odd, I don’t know.  In the past year we received:

• chocolate
• champagne
• miniature shopping carts
• fruit

Among other items.  Nothing resulted in a meeting or even a phone call.

The buyer’s journey needs to match.  If it doesn’t,  the odds of success are low.

Off to eat some free food.