What failed brands teach marketers about the customer journey

Every interaction with your brand shapes how a customer perceives it. From awareness to post-purchase engagement, these interactions determine whether they buy from you or look elsewhere. It’s not three strikes and you’re out — one mistake can cost you the purchase.

Poor customer experiences cost businesses $3.7 trillion last year. That lost revenue doesn’t disappear but rather flows into other channels… like your competitors. When you miss an opportunity, it’s a chance for another company to build a relationship with a new loyal customer.

Negative experiences also precede your company name in reviews and bad word of mouth, eroding trust and making it harder to attract shoppers. This churn creates a compounding effect: the more customers you lose, the harder it becomes to recover, both financially and reputationally.

Let’s stop the cycle before it starts. These are the most common pitfalls in the customer journey, with examples from the graveyard of deceased businesses. Spooky! Let their tales be a warning to you.

Ignoring the customer’s point of view

Too many leaders laser focus on their wants and needs to the detriment of customers. A company with its blinders on ignores the circumstances around it, and it can cost it its status at any stage of maturity.

From validating your business idea to updating your website, everything should be done with customer feedback. If you ignore user testing, shoppers can walk away from their carts or leave forms unfinished because of the website issues piling up. Looking at the customer’s point of view requires anticipating their needs and proactively working toward a better customer experience.

If you don’t conduct user testing, you run the risk of building on assumptions. We’re often too close to our product to see its imperfections, and this ignores the emotional aspects of customer interactions (like the frustration of long load times, or the anxiety of buying an item and never receiving a shipping notification).

Real-world example: Toys “R” Us

Once the dominating store for retail toys, Toys “R” Us is a cautionary tale against ignoring the customer’s point of view. 

If Toys “R” Us had been more proactive in gathering customer feedback, it would have noticed shoppers' preferences trending heavily toward online retail. Instead of building its own digital presence, the brand outsourced online sales to Amazon with its logo and reputation attached to every purchase. 

Unfortunately for Toys “R” Us, shopping on Amazon means a wealth of other similar products to compare. This meant shoppers might go for other listings offered on Amazon at better prices. Toys “R” Us neglected that parents would be bargain hunting by comparing prices online, and it had given shoppers the perfect place to do that by handing their digital experience off to Amazon.

If Toys “R” Us had wanted to invest in their physical locations, it failed at that gambit, too. Competitors like Lego and Disney were destination toy stores, with movies playing, toy demos, eye-catching designs, and enthusiastic staff. They were toy stores where parents could shop and kids could play. Toys “R” Us didn’t invest in the experience, sticking to a traditional warehouse-like format.

Toys "R" Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017. This is a cautionary tale against ignoring the customer POV. Beware.

Superficial personalization

“Dear [NAME].” This is the wild call of a company using superficial personalization. If this is the extent of your personalized marketing, you’re prey to one of the most common customer journey pitfalls.

Customer data is at a modern marketer’s fingertips. Because data is so readily available, many platforms offer you surface-level personalization options under the guise of harnessing data. Customers can sniff out these impersonal personalization attempts because they’re overplayed.

For instance, most e-commerce platforms serve product recommendations. With poor tailoring, the recommendations come off as tone deaf or irrelevant. If you don’t use a shopper’s search or purchase history, you’re likely making too many off-base recommendations and missing out on upsell opportunities.

Companies also miss the mark with one-size-fits-all loyalty programs. Layman’s advice recommends they make one,  so they do. Then, they don’t do any additional personalization to make the loyalty program tailor-made for each loyal customer.

This all happens because we aren’t leveraging available customer data meaningfully. The right tools help you activate data in real-time for hyper-personalized campaigns that you could only achieve through some level of automation. (And Simon Data could help you do this!)

Real-world example: Fab.com

After its successful launch in 2011, Fab.com was selling off its assets to PCH by 2015. The company had raised $336 million to start and sold for $33 million. What happened?

The once-popular, design-focused e-commerce platform forgot the heart of its brand: personalization.

Fab.com once sold a hand-picked, niche inventory of about 1,000 items, but it needed to scale. The personalization technology it used couldn’t keep up with demand. When that number jumped to 11,000 items, Fab.com lost sight of its value proposition, offering products you could find on competitors like Amazon for cheaper. It also dropped the flash sale offering, which was a key differentiator.

Fab.com enabled personalized recommendations by letting users link the app with other social sites. However, their issue was scaling. Perhaps the technology hadn’t caught up with this business idea (and Fab.com’s overinflated spending), but users were finding less niche products that reminded them of why they joined the app in the first place.

‍

Fab.com’s failure highlights how even online-only businesses, despite having access to vast amounts of data, can fail to implement meaningful personalization. Superficial efforts attract customers initially but don’t build long-term loyalty.

Disjointed customer experiences

Have you ever downloaded an app from a respected global company and found its functionality…lacking? Slow load times, unclear hierarchy, and dead links plague the apps of some of our biggest household names.

Disjointed customer experiences threaten the entire journey. These disconnects result from internal and external disparities.

One of the most common issues is inconsistent messaging across channels. This can occur when you don’t frequently audit channels, unearthing old, deprecated information, and keeping all information in alignment with current practices. (Think of all the old help pages that contain outdated policies. It’s even more embarrassing if it’s an automated email lining the customer journey with inaccurate information.)

Inconsistent messaging can also come from disconnected offline and online experiences. If phone support is seamless but mobile support is tedious, guess which channel customers will use! Your brand should follow the same code no matter the channel.

Discord also comes internally. Inconsistent messaging is usually the result of siloed departments and data. For instance, your marketing team updating all the content pages might not be aware of the new cancellation policy CS follows.

This disconnect between teams causes repetitive customer information requests that bog your support teams down, adding more frustration to the customer experience.

Real-world example: HomeGoods

HomeGoods is thriving, but its online store is long dead. The company closed its e-commerce site in 2023 in favor of buckling down on in-person retail experiences. This is contrary to modern customer marketing wisdom. Why?

Like Fab.com, HomeGoods thrives by offering customers a “treasure hunt” — the feeling of picking up an item that seems unique to you. But for HomeGoods, rolling out an e-commerce site meant a disjointed customer experience. 

The products HomeGoods offered online had to have enough stock to justify the website listing. Each in-person store’s stock is different, meaning it’s difficult to offer a consistent online experience. 

The site’s index didn’t align with the in-store customer journey, with hierarchy like “Rugs” and “Furniture & Lighting.” In-store shoppers meander until they find their treasure; there’s a TikTok trend dedicated to the random and delightful sense of discovery at HomeGoods.

There isn’t a good way to translate HomeGood’s in-store sense of discovery to an online market — yet. But personalization capabilities in the digital sphere grow more efficient by the day.

Failure to measure and optimize

A company without actionable data is on a slow path to obsolescence. 

A big failure of many companies is a lack of clear success metrics. How can each function tie its success to a hard number?

One of the most important OKRs is customer lifetime value, and it’s staggering how few companies attempt this calculation. When they ignore the potential of repeat customers, they also ignore early warning signs of churn that would be key to expanding CLTV.

If you don’t optimize based on data, you miss opportunities to proactively improve your marketing and instead work reactively. Because customer marketers are usually stretched thin, we rarely have time to reflect on data, but it’s the most important task we can undertake.

Real-world example: Blockbuster

We all saw the decline of Blockbuster before the fall, so why didn’t the company itself react? It failed to measure and optimize the customer experience.

At first, Netflix wasn’t the home streaming service that brought convenience to the couch; it started with convenience at the mailbox with DVD-by-mail service. Customers who preferred to rent movies were expecting a night in, and driving to a physical Blockbuster location added another step on their to-do list. 

Redbox, too, was growing in popularity because customers could combine stops (say, a grocery run and a movie rental) into one, rather than making a separate trip to Blockbuster.

Before Blockbuster went under, news outlets caught onto the rising popularity of Netflix and Redbox…and the fall of Blockbuster.

If Blockbuster had reacted to analytics and optimized its business, it might have had a chance in the digital world.

Action Items for Improvement

The customer journey is often broken. How do we correct course? We can break down our triage into immediate steps and long-term prevention strategies.

Immediate steps

For fast returns, let’s focus on what we already work with. 

Customer feedback offers warning signs before fallout. That’s why you need to implement comprehensive customer feedback systems. If you’re tight on bandwidth, customer chatbots and asynchronous feedback are paramount. Bake survey and review requests into your purchasing process for proactive feedback!

You can also make customer experience teams cross-functional. Open up communication with other teams and create a routine for this communication.

Keeping the theme of unifying, you can also unify customer data platforms for quicker data consolidation and activation. The task of measuring and optimizing from data becomes less daunting if you don’t have to gather it manually from disparate sources. Thankfully, unifying customer data can be simple with the right platform!

Once you unify data platforms, establish clear metrics and monitoring processes so that you report regularly on those results. That keeps you from missing any fluctuations.

Long-term strategies

To stop the cycle of damage control, you’ll also need sound long-term customer marketing strategies.

The first shift is cultural: build a culture that is customer-centric. Customer-obsessed companies are close to their shoppers, keeping feedback as a continual conversation. Customer-centric companies also invest in personalization company that makes customers feel valued, reducing churn.

Mapping the customer journey reveals gaps. To reduce these gaps in the long term, create seamless omnichannel experiences, lest you end up like HomeGoods’ shuttered e-commerce store. Omnichannel experiences are easier to achieve with platforms that can link campaigns across channels (and with teams that work cross-functionally — see step 1).

‍

Lastly, develop predictive analytics capabilities that will catch changes in customer behavior before it’s too late. Predictive analytics can identify seasonality, trends,  churn, retention, and other factors that will flag opportunities and issues.

Conclusion

Following the same best practices as competitors no longer cuts it. Customers want personalized experiences that are unique to your company; many pitfalls occur from bland, sloppy approaches. 

That’s why it’s important to continuously improve: your skills, your campaigns, and your tech stack. Better technology gives you the edge on all three, so consider a CDP to activate customer data. Don’t end up in the graveyard of poor customer experiences!