Consumers are at best passively loyal.

Today, omnichannel shopping has made gaining loyalty even more challenging. So, the retailer must start by listening to the consumer – individual consumers and not amorphous segments. These insights must be translated to identify needs, preferences and desires.

The key to customer journey mapping is understanding intent at each touchpoint. It’s not enough to know who among your customers is at what point on that journey, but why she’s there – and what she’ll do next.

That will tell the retailer what to present at a given touchpoint to a given customer.

This May 2018 article from the Harvard Business Review throws light on this vexing topic. https://hbr.org/2018/05/how-do-consumers-choose-in-a-world-of-automated-ordering