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Consumer Marketplace
Rethinking Journey Maps For Retail And Consumer Goods
Turn conversational moments into purchase and progress
By Ben Le
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For data-driven commercial leaders across retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG), the customer journey map remains essential. The best journey maps not only provide insight, they also generate business value by helping retailers and brands develop new offerings, refine customer experiences, and spark game-changing innovations.
Unfortunately, the traditional journey map no longer reflects the realities of customer behavior. Too often, journey maps are reduced to tactical user flow diagrams by product, merchandising, or marketing teams; in doing so, they flatten complexity and miss the signal-level insights retailers and CPGs need to enable customer progress during critical moments.
To be successful, customer journey maps need to be more dynamic in their approach, reflecting the rhythm and nuances of customer behavior. They should be agile, nonlinear, and responsive to signals.
How leading brands are curating their experiences
Today’s leading brands are transforming their experiences to reflect this new reality, anticipating different movements and detours along the customer journey. They do so by recognizing the unique characteristics of these non-linear journeys — designing experiences that don’t merely flatten these types of movements but ultimately enhance them for customers. There are three key ways that brands support progress within their experiences: optimizing immediate micro-adjustments; supporting broader macro-adjustments; and leveraging triggers and signals to spur movement.
Optimizing micro and macro customer journeys in retail
For retailers and CPG companies, these themes manifest as concrete operational challenges: managing multiple fulfilment channels (store pickup, mail, DTC returns), empowering pharmacists with AI and analytics to deliver in‑store counseling, aligning contracts that affect shelf economics, and handling opaque PBM practices that complicate employer benefits and pricing at point of sale
Tension is building as GLP-1 usage climbs
Sometimes, forward progress is an iterative journey, and micro-adjustments are those frequent and helpful back-and-forth steps customers take to make progress. IKEA recognizes that these types of movements characterize the process of buying furniture for your home: The couch impacts the rug, the rug impacts the table, the table impacts the chairs, but then the chairs impact the couch you originally chose — and so on.
IKEA’s Kreativ Home Design augmented reality tool lets customers visualize furniture in their room and shop directly from the view, surfacing fit and budget implications in real time. This reduces indecision and supports immediate micro adjustments.
Consumer Marketplace
Digital Engagement Alters Consumer Behaviors
Read More
Macro adjustments — job switches, career pivots, or other major changes in a customer’s life — are infrequent but critical. LinkedIn supports these moments through subtle prompts that suggest users upgrade to Premium and tailored LinkedIn Learning paths that recommend courses aligned to users’ goals. By building these multistep journeys, LinkedIn helps users move forward after major transitions.
Consumer Marketplace
Digital Engagement Alters Consumer Behaviors
One-half of shoppers have used AI tools for at least one food-related need, ranging from recipes to nutrition advice
Digital engagement is driving both in-store shopping and e-commerce.
Omni-penetration across the store — represented by shoppers buying both in-store and online — now stands at more than 90%, according to the 2025 report, “Digital Engagement Transforms Grocery Shopping,” by FMI and NIQ.
Significant differences exist in how purchases are made across various departments, presenting ample opportunities to drive further penetration.
The smartphone’s role in shopping is evolving and influencing decision-making more than ever. Shoppers are turning to AI for a range of tasks, from menu and meal planning (35%) to diet and nutrition advice (27%) and party inspiration (23%).
Meanwhile, social commerce is disrupting traditional retail patterns. Fifty-five percent of respondents to NIQ’s 2024 Consumer Outlook survey now make direct purchases from social media or live-stream platforms for grocery and household items.
From a generational perspective, Gen Z has become the purest omni-shopping cohort. As the most connected, influential and largest generation to date, Gen Z begins its shopping journeys online and is heavily influenced by social media. Meanwhile, millennials index highest for online purchasing.
The food industry is taking proactive approaches to stay on top of digital engagement trends.
- Leveraging digital communications: The most widely used digital communications strategies by retailers include social media, email, digital circulars and apps. More suppliers than retailers are making use of retail media networks and social shopping. Sixty-three percent of retailers say that new ways of marketing/communicating with consumers were positive for their businesses in 2024.
- Technology supports personalization: Most retailers (83%) continue to use technology to personalize or customize the marketing or shopping experience, both online and in-store. This focus is strong among retailers of all sizes.
- Fulfillment strategies continue to adapt: Fulfillment of online orders takes place in a number of different ways. Most retailers offer pick-up at the store, either curbside (78%) or inside (45%), which is considered the simplest to orchestrate. Many retailers offer delivery to the shopper’s home. Most (76%) also offer delivery by third-party or on-demand delivery services.
- Evolving payment strategies enhance experiences: Retailers are improving experiences through scan-and-go technology (nearly half of food retailer respondents to FMI’s “The Food Retailing Industry Speaks” report now offer this) and mobile payments.
Turning signals and mid-funnel moments into costumer movement
Movement is often triggered by signal events. Intuit Credit Karma uses linked financial data to detect material changes in users’ profiles and then issues targeted, actionable recommendations. For example, suggesting a higher limit card or a consolidation option when a credit score shifts. By surfacing opportunities at the right moments, the platform converts insight into immediate, purchase-oriented action.
The mid-funnel — the messy middle of consideration and evaluation — is where nonlinear behavior concentrates. In this space, content, shareability, and interactivity must mirror how people actually engage; interactive, conversational experiences convert interest into action and drive downstream loyalty.
Brands like IKEA and LinkedIn, which incorporate mid-funnel engagement, ensure that each touchpoint guides customers seamlessly toward advocacy and loyalty. By focusing on these pivotal moments, brands foster consideration, engagement, and long-term relationships.
Five best practices to transform your customer journey maps
Consider the following best practices to augment the impact of journey maps in your business:
Create different vantage points to understand your customers
To gain a richer understanding of your customers, map their journey from different altitudes that provide an overview of potential micro and macro adjustments, in addition to the triggers that may initiate new journeys.
Focus on the jobs to be done
Needs and emotional states are key facets of any journey map. But the revelatory insights that drive customer action are ultimately founded upon the jobs to be done — the underlying problems or opportunities that a customer is trying to solve.
Accelerate progress during key "moments of truth"
Uncover opportunities for signature experiences that are game-changing and differentiating, but importantly exceed customer expectations during key "moments of truth" that have the power to make or break the experience.
Make it more than just marketing
Successful journey maps are developed, owned, and managed by cross-functional teams, breaking down siloes to create a singular view of how to engage customers within the experience.
Illuminate the mid-funnel
Journey maps must become living, cross-functional models that capture signals, enable customer progress, and translate conversations into purchasable outcomes.
A version of this article was originally published on Lippincott.com
