You will be able to name the stages of a customer journey and describe what the customer is thinking at each.
A mother in Tampines sees her son's latest maths test and his mark has dropped again. That evening she doesn't search for a tuition centre. She worries, talks to her husband, maybe asks another parent at pickup whether their child has tuition. A few weeks later she is reading reviews. A month after that, she messages three centres. Six months on, if things went well, she is telling a friend at a birthday party which centre to call.
That whole stretch, from the first worry to the recommendation, is the customer journey. Your marketing only works if you know where on it a person is, because someone at the start needs something completely different from someone at the end.
There are many versions of this model, with different names and numbers of stages. A common one runs like this: awareness, consideration, decision, retention and advocacy. The first three happen before the first purchase. The last two happen after it, and they are the ones small businesses forget.
Keep in mind that the stages describe what is going on in the customer's head, so the same Instagram post can reach one person who is barely worried and another who is ready to book.
Awareness means the person knows they have a problem and also knows that businesses like yours exist to solve it. The mother who notices the falling marks but thinks her son will catch up on his own is not yet aware in this sense. When she starts to think "maybe he needs tuition", she is.
At this stage people often can't name a single provider, because they are still thinking about the problem itself. The questions in their head sound like "is this normal?" and "what do other parents do?"
Consideration is the comparing stage, when the person knows the kind of help they want and is working out which provider to choose. They read Google reviews, look at prices, ask friends and relatives, check whether a centre is near the MRT, and look at what classes are on offer. More and more people also type the question into an AI assistant, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, and read whatever it says about the options near them.
By now the questions have become specific: how much it costs per month, how big the classes are, how long the teacher has taught P5 maths, and whether anyone they know goes there. This is where most businesses first hear from a customer, though the customer has usually been comparing for a while before that first message.
At the decision stage, the person picks one option and acts on it. They book a trial class, pay the deposit, place the order. Choosing to do nothing is also a decision, and a common one. A parent who finds the comparing too tiring may decide to wait until after the holidays.
The questions here are about risk. What if my son hates it? What if it doesn't help? Can I stop after one term? Whatever makes the first step feel safe matters most at this point.
Retention is whether the customer stays or comes back. For a tuition centre, that means the family re-enrols next term. For a bakery, it means the customer orders again for the next birthday. Advocacy is when a customer tells other people about you, whether in a review, a message in a parents' group chat or a remark at a party.
Small businesses tend to ignore these two stages because most of their effort goes into reaching strangers, which is why there is often so much room to improve here. A past customer already knows you, already trusts you enough to have paid once, and you usually have their phone number. A reminder or a follow-up message to them often costs far less than reaching a stranger who has never heard of you. And when a satisfied parent recommends you, the next family starts the journey already half convinced.
Priya, who runs the maths centre the mother eventually picks, found this out the slow way. For two years she put all her time into posts aimed at new parents. Then she looked at where her current students came from and saw that most had been referred by another family. She had never once asked an existing parent for a referral, or messaged a family whose child had left to ask whether they'd return for the PSLE year.
The model is only useful if you can say what the customer is thinking at each stage, in their words rather than yours. "Awareness phase" is marketing language. "Is it normal that he's struggling with fractions?" is what the parent actually thinks. When you write content or a message, it is the second one that you need to answer.
In the activity below you will do this for one product you sell. Choose one that a real customer bought recently, so you can remember the questions they actually asked you, before they paid and after.
For one product you sell, write what a customer is asking themselves at each of the five stages, in their own words.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).