In the age of connectivity, what has changed most is the concept of the customer journey. The most widely known framework before the connectivity era was AIDA, attention, interest, desire, and action, proposed by advertising and sales pioneer E. St. Elmo Lewis. A further modification of this is the 4As proposed by Derek Rucker.
What is the 4A customer journey?
The 4As are awareness, attitude, act, and act again, and this new framework was characterized by the addition of a new phase, “act again,” instead of combining the interest and desire phases into one.
While AIDA’s goal is action, that is, to make the customer take a “purchasing action,” the goal of the 4As is to act again, to make the customer repeat purchase.
What is the 5A customer journey?
Before the connectivity era, individual customers determined their own attitudes toward brands. In the age of connectivity, however, customers are influenced by various communities, both online and offline, which ultimately determine their attitude toward a brand. In other words, we have entered an era in which it is impossible to predict the customer journey if we ignore social influences.
Kotler’s customer journey for the new era is Aware, Appeal, Ask, Act, and Advocate. The important point is that the ultimate goal of a brand should not be to “get” customers to buy again, but how to lead them from “awareness” to “advocate”.
While loyalty used to be explained in terms of customer retention or repurchase rates, Kotler explains that loyalty is ultimately defined as “the willingness to recommend a brand”.
In other words, the goal of Marketing 4.0 is to get customers to “recommend” and become enthusiastic fans (recommenders) of a brand even if they do not repurchase or use the brand.