Brands have never had more data at their fingertips than right now. More tools, more signals, more insight into who their customers are and what they're doing and that's the good news.
Here's the not so great flip side: we have more information than we've ever had, yet somehow we're more confused and operating on more guesswork than ever. Customer journey data is everywhere, but it's no longer transparent or linear. No longer a clean story you can follow from A to B.
Cue our friend, the messy middle.
We used to map customer journeys like this:
Awareness → Consideration → Purchase
Neat. Logical. Completely outdated!
Here's what a real customer journey might look like today: someone sees your Instagram ad, then a friend mentions your brand in conversation, then a Google Ad appears while they're searching for something else, then they stumble across a thread about you on a subreddit, go quiet for two weeks, see a post on Instagram again, watch a review on TikTok and then, finally, they make a decision.
You can accurately track maybe two of those touchpoints. Data privacy laws have made the messy middle messier and more ambiguous than ever.
"The path to purchase isn't a funnel anymore. It's a pinball machine."
The new journey starts with a trigger, something that creates a need or a want. From there, consumers don't move forward in a straight line. They move diagonally, sideways, backwards, and in loops. Think of the knight in chess: it doesn't go in a straight line, it jumps. They explore, evaluate, re-explore, re-evaluate, get distracted, come back, and explore again and sometimes dozens of times before committing.
This doesn't kill the concept of the funnel. It just redefines what it means. The stages of awareness, consideration and purchase still exist as communication needs they just don't happen in sequence anymore. Your messages need to work at every stage, at any time, in any order.
If the journey is non-linear, your brand presence needs to be non-linear too. Brand exposure and customer experience need to be consistent across the entire journey not just at the entry point or the moment of purchase.
Think of your messaging components as a mosaic. Each piece needs to work on its own - a standalone ad, an organic post, a product review - but they also need to form something coherent when seen together. A customer might only ever see three tiles of that mosaic before they decide. Those three tiles need to tell a consistent story.
This is where tools like dynamic ads or Performance Max campaigns become genuinely powerful. They allow multiple creative and message variations within a single campaign, letting the algorithm match the most relevant message to the right user signal at the right moment. You're not trying to control every touchpoint you're just giving the system enough good material to work with and trusting it to find the fit.
Most marketers are optimising for a single part of the messy middle. For one channel, therefore one signal and one outcome. When results don't stack up, they pull that one lever harder.
Full stack thinking changes this. It means understanding how each mode of distribution plays a role in the broader journey and making sure those roles are connected, not siloed.
A rough framework to work from could be:
- Paid Media: Your broadest reach tool. Most likely to introduce someone to you and pull them into the exploration phase.
- SEO / GEO: Where you earn trust during the evaluation phase. When someone is actively researching, this is where you need to show up.
- Content: Deepens engagement and builds bias toward your brand. Great content at the right moment can materially reduce your cost per acquisition by warming the audience before paid kicks in.
- Email: Reserved for people who've already raised their hand. They're warm, now you can communicate directly with relevant, timely information that nudges them toward a decision.
The problem is that in most organisations, these four areas operate in silos. Paid doesn't know what SEO is targeting. Content doesn't know what email is saying. Everyone is optimising their own corner and hoping it adds up to something and it rarely does. Connecting strategy across these channels isn't a nice-to-have, it's where the real performance gains live.
Understanding the messy middle reframes how you think about all of your marketing activity. It shifts the question from 'which channel is performing?' to 'where is my customer in their journey, and am I showing up in a way that's useful to them right now?'
Not everything in the messy middle is in your control and that's okay - I mean, it has to be. The brands that win aren't the ones trying to own every touchpoint. They're the ones who are clear about what they can influence, consistent in how they show up, and strategic about connecting the pieces.
It's not about owning the journey. It's about being present for it.
The mosaic, the knight, the pinball machine; whatever analogy works for you, the principle is the same. Stop thinking in straight lines and start thinking in systems.
That's where the full stack marketer lives.
