Touchpoints and the customer journey: from the funnel to the messy middle

A touchpoint is any moment when someone meets a brand: an advertisement, a search result, a review, a conversation with a friend, the packaging, the invoice, a call to customer service. A customer journey is the path a person, or a group of people, takes from first noticing a need to buying, using and recommending (or abandoning) a brand. Both terms are in the glossary.

• Every contact communicates. Duncan and Moriarty put messages, stakeholders and interactivity at the heart of their model of brand relationships², and McKinsey's research lists advertisements, news reports, conversations with family and friends and product experiences among the touchpoints that shape impressions¹.
• The funnel became a loop. McKinsey's 2009 consumer decision journey replaced the narrowing funnel with four phases and a loyalty loop¹.
• The middle is messy. Google's research with The Behavioural Architects describes buyers cycling between exploring and evaluating before they decide⁴⁵.
• Business buyers are groups. Gartner describes B2B buying as a set of jobs a buying group must complete, often in conflict⁹¹⁰.

Integration starts from a simple observation: people do not separate "marketing" from everything else a company does. Duncan and Moriarty argued that communication happens at the corporate and marketing levels as well as in marketing communication itself². Lemon and Verhoef, in a much-cited 2016 Journal of Marketing paper, observe that customers now interact with firms through myriad touchpoints in multiple channels and media, that customer experiences are more social, and that delivering them requires firms to integrate multiple business functions and even outside partners³. Omnichannel research makes the same point from the retail side: the task is the synergetic management of the numerous channels and customer touchpoints⁸.

A practical way to sort touchpoints for planning (our classification, not a standard):

• Paid: advertising in every format, sponsorship, paid search, paid social, retail media.
• Owned: the website, app, newsletter, packaging, stores, events the brand runs.
• Earned and shared: press coverage, reviews, creators, word of mouth, social conversation.
• Product and service: the product itself, delivery, invoices, support, returns, the people who answer the phone.
• People: sales teams, partners, employees speaking for the brand, in person or online.

The last two groups are where integration usually breaks. A brand can spend heavily on a promise in its paid media and break it in a single service call. In IMC terms, both are messages, and the customer weighs them together.

Two habits keep the list honest. First, write each touchpoint from the customer's side ("I search for a price", "I call about a late delivery") rather than under the organisation's channel names; the customer's words show where several teams touch the same moment. Second, mark how far the brand controls each one: fully, partly or not at all. Reviews and word of mouth cannot be scripted, but they are earned or lost by what the controlled touchpoints deliver.

For decades, planning used the funnel: awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, with brands dropping out at each step. In June 2009, David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susan Mulder and Ole Jørgen Vetvik of McKinsey replaced it with the consumer decision journey, based on the purchase decisions of almost 20,000 consumers across five industries and three continents¹.

The model made three points that still drive integrated planning¹:

• Consideration is formed before the search. Impressions gathered from touchpoints when people are not shopping decide which brands enter the starting set. Exposure that looks wasted at the time is not.
• Evaluation adds brands. People add and remove options as they research, so a brand outside the initial set can still enter, if it is present where people look.
• The journey loops. After purchase, the experience either sends people back into a loyalty loop or into a new search. Communication after the sale is part of the journey, not a separate customer-service matter.

McKinsey also argued that the shift from one-way communication to a two-way conversation requires a more systematic way of satisfying customer demands and managing word of mouth¹. For an IMC plan, that means service, community and social care belong in the same brief as advertising.

In 2020, Google and the behavioural science consultancy The Behavioural Architects published Decoding Decisions: Making Sense of the Messy Middle, about what happens between the trigger that starts a purchase and the purchase itself⁴. Their model describes two mental modes: exploration, an expansive mode in which people gather information and options, and evaluation, a reductive mode in which they narrow them down. People cycle between the two until they decide⁵.

The research also identified six cognitive biases that shape choices in the middle, and found that their effect depends more on the product category than on the country⁶. Google later built on the work with a further report on marketing in the messy middle⁷.

What it adds to the journey model:

• The middle is not a stage you pass once. Planning has to keep the brand present and credible across repeated loops, not only at the start and at the checkout.
• Small cues matter where people compare. Reviews, clear prices, availability and proof sit in the middle of the loop. These are often owned, earned and service touchpoints rather than advertising.
• Category beats geography. The same plan cannot be copied across categories even within one country, while a category plan can travel further than expected. Consistency and adaptation picks this up.

Business-to-business (B2B) journeys add two complications. The buyer is a group, and most of the time it is not buying.

A group with conflicting goals. Gartner describes the B2B buying journey as non-linear, closer to a set of buying jobs (problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building and supplier selection) than to a sequence of stages⁹. In a 2025 survey, Gartner found that 74% of B2B buyer teams showed "unhealthy conflict" during the decision, defined as conflicting objectives, disagreement on the best course of action, or being overruled by decision-makers outside the group; buyers who experienced relevance for the group as a whole were three times more likely to report a high-quality deal¹⁰.

Less contact with sellers. In a 2026 survey of 645 B2B buyers, Gartner found that 67% preferred a buying experience without a sales representative, while reps remained the most important source of information at specific points: researching the business problem, identifying a preferred supplier and securing internal support, and finalising the purchase¹¹. A further 2026 Gartner survey found that 69% of B2B buyers turn to sales reps to validate insights generated by AI¹³.

Most buyers are not in market. John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in work for LinkedIn's B2B Institute, estimated that only a small share of business buyers, about 5% in a given quarter, are in market for a category; Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo argued in Marketing Week that marketers should therefore build memory among the 95% who are not yet buying¹².

For an integrated B2B plan, this means content each member of the group can use and share internally, sales and marketing telling one story, and brand communication that keeps reaching people long before they are in market. See the lead generation hub.

Map touchpoints to objectives, not to departments. A starting grid for one journey:

Then, for each journey you plan:

1. List every touchpoint, paid or not, and who owns it. Product, service and sales touchpoints usually have owners outside marketing; bring them in.
2. Mark the moments that decide: what puts you in the starting set, what wins the comparison, what makes people come back¹⁵.
3. Give each touchpoint one job tied to an objective: brand awareness, conversion, retention and loyalty or advocacy and referral.
4. Check the message is the same idea everywhere. The touchpoint changes the format, not the promise. See the brand platform and the message house.
5. For B2B, plan for the group: one piece for each role in the buying group, and one shared case the group can agree on¹⁰.
6. Agree the signals before launch, and read them together. Objectives and KPIs and measuring effectiveness go further.

• McKinsey Quarterly, "The consumer decision journey" (2009)¹.
• Duncan and Moriarty's relationship model²; Lemon and Verhoef on customer experience across the journey³; Verhoef, Kannan and Inman on omnichannel⁸.
• Think with Google on the messy middle⁴⁵⁶ and its follow-up⁷.
• Gartner on B2B buying jobs⁹, buying-group conflict¹⁰, rep-free buying¹¹ and AI in buying¹³; Weinberg and Lombardo on the 95:5 rule¹².
• Next in this track: the brand platform and the message house.