Webinars
Traveling with Companions: The Social Customer Journey
When customers journey from a need to a purchase decision and beyond, they rarely do so alone. In this session, Professor Ryan Hamilton will discuss the social customer journey, which extends prior perspectives on the path to purchase by explicitly integrating the important role that social others play throughout the journey. The importance of “traveling companions” is highlighted, with a focus on those who interact with the decision maker through one or more phases of the journey. The social customer journey concept integrates prior findings on social influences and customer journeys and highlights opportunities for new research within and across the various stages. The session will provide actionable marketing implications relevant to organizations’ engagement in the social customer journey, including managing influencers, shaping social interactions, and deploying technologies.
Read the paper: Traveling with Companions: The Social Customer Journey
Commentary: The Case for a Healthier Social Customer Journey
Commentary: Toward Formalizing Social Influence Structures in Business-to-Business Customer Journeys
speaker
Ryan Hamilton is Associate Professor of Marketing and Caldwell Research Fellow at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His research investigates shopper decision making: how brands, prices, and choice architecture influence decision making at the point of purchase. He is a leading scholar in the area of retailer price image, exploring how customers form store-level price impressions and how those impressions influence consumer behavior. His research has been published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Letters, Management Science, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and has been profiled in the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, USA Today, Financial Times, and CNN Headline News. In 2016, Ryan co-authored a book, The Intuitive Customer, which applies the insights from research on consumer psychology and decision making to more effectively managing customer experiences. He has also produced two lecture series, “Critical Business Skills for Success: Marketing” and “How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making,” for The Great Courses. He was a 2013 Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar and in 2011 was named one of “The World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under the Age of 40” by Poets & Quants. Ryan has an eclectic background that includes both an undergraduate degree in physics and time spent performing stand-up and sketch comedy. He is the proud father of five young children, which means he spends much of his time exhausted and slightly rumpled. This also gives him some social cover for his unabashed enthusiasm for Legos and superhero movies. He has never run a marathon and has no intention of ever doing so.