In continuation to Rahul Vengalil’s consumer journey, here follows the second story of the series
Consumer journey has become more complex by the day thanks to the onslaught of technology led media platforms. To understand consumer journey for my brands, I have been using self-reflection on how I ended up buying certain things, and then create a hypothesis from it. This is my journey of how I knowingly bought Speedo.
I was afraid of water for a really long time. My friends loved this as I would act as the guardian to wallet, shoes, clothes, etc whenever we went to a beach. I just wouldn’t touch the water at any cost, and this has been the case for a really long time.
Every year I used to make a resolution of learning to swim, and as resolutions go, forget about it within the first few weeks. The closest that I came to this was in early 2016, when I decided with my wife on swimming lessons. She even got the admission form to a swimming class and decided that we will join after our holidays in March. In that excitement, we bought the swimwear from Amazon in a jiffy.
We believed in Amazon to show us the right product & bought a brand which fit the price. The AURA OF A TRUSTWORTHY BRAND CAN RUB OFF ON OTHER BRANDS AS WELL
As luck would have it, April is also the start of the Summer batch for kids & that was the end of our swimming dreams. We decided to wait till after summer to start the classes. That never happened. As time went by, I put on a ton of weight, overlooked every aspect of health, quit my job to live the entrepreneurial dream. Little did I know that I was just running on some sort of adrenaline rush and my health was at its worse. c
Two months into the new venture, I went down with a pretty bad lower back spasm. The doc asked me to reduce my weight & get fit. I started running and slowly picked up pace and within 2 months I was at the doc again with another back pain. This time I decided I will really focus on my fitness level. By then my wife also joined Zumba classes. Unfortunately, my wife twisted her knee soon, which was the end of Zumba. The umpteen physio sessions did give relief to her knee, but recovery wasnt complete. That’s when my colleague introduced me to aquatic physiotherapy for recovering joint pains. Thus swimming was back on the table and this time for real.
The trigger for changing a routine is always personal & important. The same goes with preferences to certain brands.
We joined the classes, we searched for & found the swimwear which was bought over 2 years back and hit the water. Somewhere in between, we met a friend of ours, who was a regular swimmer & it was his suggestion which changed a lot for us. He had asked us to check out Speedo YT channel while learning the basics of swimming. It would help us in understanding nuances which the instructors normally miss out on.
We would have watched over 10 videos on different swimming techniques and one day while packing our swimming bag I saw a very familiar logo on our swimwear, that of Speedo. We had bought it 2 years back, started our swimming sessions, but never thought about the brand we were using until and until a relationship was built with the brand Speedo.
A customer needs to be made aware of the brand ethos, as the first step of becoming a loyalist. If a brand fails to do that, you are just a product.
We spent close to a month figuring out our strokes, jumping in every available pool that we could find, correcting our mistakes and so on. We were staycationing in one of the hotels with a pool when I realised that I was blind as a bat with the dark goggles I had till then. That’s when I decided that I will buy a new pair of Goggles. The next stop was the Speedo showroom to pick up my new set of Goggles. I spent 7x more on Speedo than my previous Goggles and I would say it was worth it.
Once a customer buys into a brand, price is just a number. A perfect example of this is the way Apple products are sold each year.
The long & short of this journey is that even though my friend recommended the brand of Speedo to me, the brand had created enough & more content in the format that I wanted, and when I wanted which made me buy into the brand. Imagine the opportunities that brands possibly miss by not creating all the different use cases or consumers journeys where they can engage with the consumers. Brands should also look at life time value of their consumers rather than short term goals.
After all I bought into the brand SPEEDO, two years after I bought the product.
Authored by Rahul Vengalil – Founder & Chief Executive Officer – Whatclicks
