INMA_A01.QXD

Once different personas have been developed that are representative of key site-visitor

types or customer types, a primary persona is sometimes identified. Wodtke (2002) says:

Your primary persona needs to be a common user type who is both important to the busi-

ness success of the product and needy from a design point of view – in other words, a

beginner user or a technologically challenged one.

She also says that secondary personas can also be developed, such as super-users or

complete novices. Complementary personas are those that don’t fit into the main cate-

gories and which display unusual behaviour. Such complementary personas help

‘out-of-box thinking’ and offer choices or content that may appeal to all users.

Multi-channel customer experiences

Remember that the customer scenario or user journey on the web site is only part of a

wider customer experience which involves multiple channels. The importance of multi-

channel strategies should also be built into assessing customer behaviour and their

perception of the online customer experience. The importance of digital channels in

influencing the overall customer experience is indicated in Mini Case Study 2.2 ‘Lexus

assesses multi-channel experience consistency’.

ONLINE BUYER BEHAVIOUR

The luxury car brand Lexus has worked with the Multi-channel Marketing Best Practice Club at the

Cranfield School of Management, UK to assess the relative importance of consistency between

channels. The pertinent results of this study are presented in Table 2.6. It can be seen that, as might be

expected, the showroom experience is very important to the overall attitude towards the brand and

purchase intent. The importance of the web site experience quality is also notable and especially its role

in the propensity to recommend – the Lexus customer can readily recommend the web site to a friend or

a colleague. So, it is the interactive channels that deliver the best experience, as would be expected.

Mini Case Study 2.2

Lexus assesses multi-channel experience

consistency

Table 2.6 The impact of channel experience on customer relationship

Lexus communication channel Attitude towards Future purchase Propensity to

the brand intention recommend

TV experience quality 0.362** 0.360** 0.185

Print experience quality 0.203 0.133 0.023

Direct mail experience quality 0.343* 0.204 0.072

Showroom experience quality 0.447** 0.292* 0.217

Contact centre experience quality 0.431* 0.566 0.147

Web site experience quality 0.452** 0.315* 0.309*

Source: Menteth et al. (2005)

* Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level