Brand-owned Touchpoints
- These are the interactions of customers with an organization that are solely controlled by the organization,
- Examples of these are all brand-owned media platforms, also brand-controlled elements of the marketing mix for example the packaging or the attributes of the product itself.
Partner-owned Touchpoints
- The touchpoints are the customer interactions that involve an experience that is created by the firm itself and one or more partners of said firm.
- The partners involved can be marketing agencies and communication channel partners.
- An example would be apps developed by a firm but are available on the Apple App Store.
Customer-owned Touchpoints
- These customer interactions refer to ones which the brand or partners or others have no control over it is purely based on customers’ own experience.
- Customers decide on what their own needs are during the need recognition phase of the buying process.
- The customer’s choice of payment is a good example of a customer-owned touchpoint.
- The time at which customer touchpoints are most recognizable is during the post-purchase stage of the buying process. Here they are able to figure out for themselves if they are happy or disappointed with their purchases.
Social/External and Independent Touchpoints
- These touchpoints recognize the important roles of others in the customer experience.
- There are many external touchpoints that can influence a customer during their buying process, for example, other customers, peer reviews, independent information sources such as TripAdvisor, or social media influencers.
We also need to understand the consumer journey to understand the impact of different touchpoints on our digital marketing strategy.
The Customer Journey consists of three stages:
- Pre-Purchase
- Purchase
- Post-Purchase
Each touchpoint mentioned above is prevalent in each stage of the customer journey. It is important for companies to get information from these touchpoints and then feed it back into previous experiences of each part of the customer journey this information can then be combined to help predict what the future experience of the customers will be in regard to your brand and can also help with the development of strategies to help ensure that these future experiences are greater than ones previous.