Customer-journey mapping

Practice 02

A journey map is a description of decisions. It is frequently drawn as a description of screens, which is a different and much less useful object: it records where a reader was rather than what they were deciding, and it therefore cannot say why they stopped.

The correction is small. Label each stage with the question the reader is holding at that point, not with the artefact they are looking at. A map that reads “is this for someone like me”, “what would this cost me to try”, “what happens if it does not work” is a map that can be checked against real material.

Questions, not stages

Stages are borrowed vocabulary and they vary by field. Questions are stable, because they come from the reader's position rather than from the seller's process. Anyone deciding anything of consequence moves through some version of: is this the right category, is this the right instance, is this the right moment, and what is the cost of being wrong.

Written that way, a map immediately shows which questions have material addressed to them and which do not. The commonest gap is the fourth: a great deal of marketing answers the first three and leaves the reader to resolve the risk question unaided.

Ordering

Readers do not move through questions in a fixed order, but they do move through them in a constrained one: the risk question rarely gets asked before the category question is settled. The useful property of a map is not that it predicts a path, but that it makes the dependencies visible, so that material answering a later question is not placed where only an earlier one is live.

Checking the map against material

• For each question, name the specific unit that addresses it.
• Where nothing addresses it, mark the gap rather than assigning it to a stage that already has material.
• Where several units address the same question, ask whether the repetition is reinforcement or indecision.
• Where a unit addresses a question the reader is not yet holding, note the position, not the content.

What the map is for

It is a working document, not a deliverable. Its value is entirely in the checking step, and a map that is drawn, presented and filed has produced a diagram rather than a finding. The version worth keeping is the annotated one, with gaps marked and the annotations dated so it is clear which material has been checked and which has not.

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