The Gap Between Models and Reality

Every marketing team has a customer journey map. Awareness, consideration, decision, purchase. Clean stages with clear transitions. The problem? Real customer journeys look nothing like this.

Actual behavior is messy. People enter at random stages, loop back, disappear for weeks, and convert through paths that make no logical sense. They research on mobile and buy on desktop. They see your ad but convert after a Google search. They read reviews before they even know what you offer.

The Invisible Touchpoints

Traditional journey mapping captures obvious interactions, website visits, email opens, ad clicks. But most of the journey happens in the spaces between these touchpoints. The conversations with friends, the background research, the unconscious processing that happens between exposure and action.

These phantom touchpoints are invisible to most analytics, but they're often more influential than the measured ones. Understanding where they exist and what role they play is the difference between optimization and transformation.

Orchestrating the Untrackable

You can't measure phantom touchpoints, but you can account for them. This requires thinking probabilistically rather than deterministically. Instead of asking "what caused this conversion?" ask "what conditions make conversion more likely?"

This shift in thinking allows you to design for influence rather than attribution. You create conditions that make the invisible parts of the journey work in your favor, even when you can't measure them directly.

The Space Between Actions

The phantom customer journey exists in the space between awareness and action, where conscious thought blends with unconscious processing. Most brands ignore this space because it's unmeasurable. Advanced operations treat it as their most important opportunity.

When you design for the spaces between touchpoints, when you account for the invisible majority of the customer journey, you stop optimizing for metrics and start engineering for outcomes.