Psychological Insights into the Customer Experience Journey
Abstract
Consumers are time-starved, strategic and goal-directed. Understanding what their needs are and how they go about satisfying their needs is the key to developing winning marketing strategies. Behavioral research can offer valuable insights about the customer experience journey, starting with their motivation, through information search, preference formation, choice and finally loyalty. In this lecture, the speaker will first discuss how our basic needs for survival may shape our consumption goals and influence how we engage with brands. Once a consumption goal is put in gear, consumers are in information search mode. However, their evaluations and brand choice decisions are not only influenced by what information they learn, but also by how they learn. The customer experience journey is also rich with feelings and emotions. But does putting consumers in a good mood always work? Or would sending them on a guilt trip be more effective? She will also discuss how consumers respond to emotions they experience along their experience journey and how their responses in turn impact decisions they make. While consumer preference is shaped both by thinking and feeling, yet preference does not necessarily drive choice. She will offer examples of how choice architecture and heuristics may give rise to seemingly irrational or economically suboptimal decisions, and will close by discussing what drives brand loyalty and how loyal customers react when their brand is under siege.
About the speaker
Prof. Angela Y Lee received her BBA in Marketing and Travel Industry Management from the University of Hawaii, an MPhil in Economics from the University of Hong Kong, and a PhD in Management from the University of Toronto. She joined the marketing faculty at the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University in 1995 and is currently the Mechthild Esser Nemmers Professor of Marketing.
Prof. Lee’s expertise is in consumer learning, emotions and goals. Her research focuses on consumer motivation and affect, cross-cultural consumer psychology, and nonconscious influences of memory on judgment and choice. Her publications appear in both marketing and psychology journals and she is the co-editor of Kellogg on China (Northwestern University Press, 2004). She was the recipient of the 2006 Stanley Reiter Best Paper Award for her research on self-regulation and persuasion, and the 2002 Otto Klineberg Award for the best paper on international and intercultural relations. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Marketing Research. She is a past president of the Association for Consumer Research and serves on the board of the American Marketing Association.
Prof. Lee was elected to be a Fellow of American Psychological Society in 2015 and of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2009. She was also named as Marketing Science Institute’s (MSI) Young Scholar in 2001.
