ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why companies generally want to build long-term relationships with customers. The core stages in the customer journey are customer acquisition, customer retention and customer development. The customer journey is a representation of the stages that customers go through in their relationship with a company or brand. Customers also interact with others, experts, friends and colleagues who can form part of the overall experience with a brand or company. In a business-to-business context, customers may shift out of a targeted demographic as they age and progress through the family life cycle; their personal circumstances may change, and they no longer find value in product; they may even die. New-to-category customers are customers who have either identified a new need or have found a new category of solution for an existing need. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a heterogeneous market into homogenous subsets, maybe even down to the level of the unique customer.
