One of the most dangerous things a young B2B company can do is decide, in advance, what it means to the world.

There is a ritual in business schools and boardrooms that has survived decades of disruption, survived the internet, survived the age of data, and continues to be taught with the solemnity of scripture. It goes by three letters: STP. Segment. Target. Position. And it is, in its most critical dimension is a fiction.

Not entirely wrong. Not without utility. But built on a foundational error that leads smart companies to make predictable, costly, self-limiting mistakes, especially when they are young, under-resourced, and operating, partially blind, in markets that are not yet fully developed.

The error is this: the belief that positioning is something a company does to a market, rather than something a market does to a company.

You do not position your brand, products or services. Your customers do. The sooner leadership accepts this, the faster everything else falls into place.

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THE CATEGORY ERROR AT THE HEART OF MODERN MARKETING

Ask any CMO to walk you through their ‘go-to-market’ strategy and within minutes you will hear the word positioning. They will describe it as a deliberate act, a set of choices about how to occupy mental real estate in the minds of buyers. They will have a positioning statement, a competitive matrix, a perceptual map. They will have workshopped it, tested it, and embedded it in every slide deck.

What they will rarely acknowledge is that none of it is theirs to decide.

Brand, how a company is genuinely perceived, is a market phenomenon. It is the aggregate of every customer experience, every word-of-mouth conversation, every moment of delight or disappointment. It belongs to the people who experience it. The company does not own it. The company influences it, through consistency of message and quality of delivery, but it does not control it.

Positioning, in the classical sense, is an attempt to engineer perception from the inside out. It is supply-side thinking applied to a demand-side reality. And in a new or rapidly evolving B2B market, it is not just ineffective, it is actively dangerous.

THE ONLY THING YOU ACTUALLY CONTROL

Strip away the frameworks and the jargon, and a young B2B company has exactly one lever it fully controls: its message. What value it delivers. What problem it solves. What it makes possible for the people it serves. Stated clearly, consistently, and without artifice.

Message is not positioning. Message is an honest declaration of value. Positioning is the perception that emerges when that message meets the market. These are not the same thing, and confusing them is the root cause of most early-stage marketing failure.

Message is what you say. Positioning is what they hear, remember, and tell others. You own the first. The market owns the second.

The practical implication is significant. Rather than investing early energy in crafting and defending a positioning statement, a document that describes a market reality you do not yet fully understand, young companies should invest in message clarity and reach. Say what you do with precision and honesty. Say it to as many relevant people as possible. Then listen, with genuine attention, to how it lands.

The most valuable positioning research is free. It‘s the language your best customers use when they describe you to someone else.

WHY REACH IS NOT THE ENEMY OF FOCUS

The conventional wisdom on early-stage B2B is relentlessly narrow: find your niche, own your segment, resist the temptation to be everything to everyone. This advice is well-intentioned. It is also frequently misapplied.

The argument for focus rests on resource scarcity, you cannot afford to reach everyone, so concentrate where you will win. This is a financial argument dressed as a strategic one, and it carries a hidden cost that rarely appears in the model: premature narrowing kills discovery.

In a genuinely new market, you do not know who your customer is. You have a hypothesis. You have assumptions built from your own experience, your founding team’s background, your earliest conversations. But the market has not yet told you who will buy, who will champion you internally, who will refer you, who will define the category in your favour. That information only comes from exposure, from reach.

The companies that win category-creation moments are rarely the ones with the most precise initial targeting. They are the ones with the clearest message, the broadest early reach within their resource constraints, and the most acute listening and adaptive response. They let an unexpectedly wide range of buyers self-select into their orbit, and then, crucially, they pay attention to who actually converts, expands, and advocates.

Targeting, properly understood, is not a precondition for growth. It is a response to growth signals. You target not because you decided who your customer is, but because the market has begun to tell you.

A FRAMEWORK THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

What does this look like in practice for a young B2B company entering a new market? Three disciplines, in order of priority.

First: obsess over message, not positioning. What is the value you deliver, stated in language so clear that a buyer immediately recognises their own problem in it? Not a tagline. Not a category claim. A direct, honest, specific declaration of what you make possible. This is the only thing you fully own, and it deserves more attention than any other marketing investment.

Second: maximise reach within your resource reality. This is not a licence for unfocused spending. It is a mandate to think creatively about how to get your message in front of the widest relevant audience through connection, dialogue, community, partnerships, media, and events, before you narrow. Broad early reach is discovery infrastructure. It is how you find out who you actually are to the market.

Third: listen for positive customer signals, then amplify them. Your market will begin to tell you what it thinks of you. Certain buyers will convert faster. Certain industries will generate unprompted referrals. Certain problems will come up again and again in sales conversations. This is your positioning emerging. The job of leadership is not to impose a positioning framework on these signals, it’s to recognise them, amplify them, and let them sharpen the message further.

Your earliest customers are not just revenue. They are market intelligence of the highest order. They are telling you your positioning. Are you listening?

THE COURAGE TO NOT DECIDE TOO SOON

There is a reason the STP gospel endures: it feels like control. In the face of market uncertainty, traditional positioning offers the comfort of apparent clarity. We know who we are. We know who we serve. We know how we are different. It is a story leadership can tell itself and its investors with conviction.

But conviction built on unvalidated assumption is not strategy. It is theatre. And in the fastest-moving B2B markets, where categories are being created, where buyer behaviour is still forming, where the competitive landscape shifts quarterly, the companies performing that theatre are the ones getting outmanoeuvred by less conventional competitors who stayed curious longer.

The truly courageous strategic move for a young B2B company is not to plant its flag early and defend the ground. It is to stay in discovery mode long enough for the market to reveal the ground worth defending and then move with speed and precision.

That is not the absence of strategy. That is strategy at its most sophisticated.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Positioning is not a strategy. It is an outcome, one that the market assigns, not the company. The job of a young B2B company is to deliver exceptional, clearly articulated value to the widest relevant audience it can reach, and to listen with discipline as the market reveals who it truly serves. Brand is built in that space between message and reception. It cannot be engineered. It can only be earned.

About this piece

This article challenges the conventional application of segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) frameworks in early-stage B2B companies operating in emerging markets. It draws on the market-based brand theory of Byron Sharp, discovery-driven planning principles, and the practical realities of category creation. It promotes the creative and progressive customer centric thinking that underpins The Market Leaders Toolkit and it’s embedded methodology, AdaptomyDNA.

That moment is when a customer tries to change their email address.

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It sounds trivial. It is anything but. Because embedded in this seemingly simple transaction is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with how most organisations approach customer journey management and why the conflation of customer experience with customer journey is costing businesses competitive advantage, customer loyalty, and brand reputation every single day.

The Journey You Don’t See

Let’s start with what’s actually happening from the customer’s perspective, the journey you likely don’t understand because you’ve never mapped it.

Sarah is migrating her digital life from an old email address to a new one. Perhaps her previous provider is shutting down. Perhaps she’s consolidating multiple addresses. Perhaps she’s changed employers and needs to move personal accounts away from a corporate domain. Perhaps she’s escaping an abusive relationship and needs to sever digital connections. Perhaps she’s simply modernising her online presence and wants to retire an address she created when she was sixteen.

The specifics don’t matter. What matters is that Sarah has a goal: to systematically update her email address across dozens, perhaps hundreds, of services, accounts, and relationships she maintains. This isn’t a whim. It’s a project. It’s work. It requires planning, time, and mental bandwidth.

She’s created a list. She’s working through it methodically. Banking. Insurance. Utilities. Streaming services. Social platforms. Retail accounts. Professional networks. Health providers. Government services. Every service that knows her old address needs to know her new one.

This is her journey. You are one stop on that journey.

The question is: are you making her journey easier, or are you making it harder?

The Experience You’ve Optimised (That Isn’t the Journey)

Now let’s look at what most organisations have actually optimised: customer experience at the touchpoints they control.

Your account management interface is clean. Your settings page is well-designed. You’ve A/B tested the button placement. You’ve reduced clicks. You’ve achieved high satisfaction scores from users who successfully navigate your system.

Excellent work. Truly. Your UX team deserves recognition.

But here’s what you haven’t done: you haven’t made it easy to change an email address.

In fact, you’ve made it astonishingly difficult. And the reasons why reveal a cascade of failures in strategic thinking, systems design, and organisational priorities.

The architectural failure: Your system conflates user identity with email address. When your engineers built the platform, they made email the primary key. It’s not just a contact method, it’s the fundamental identifier around which everything else is structured. Changing it isn’t a profile update. It’s effectively a database migration requiring backend intervention.

The security theater failure: You’ve implemented “security measures” that create friction without actually improving security. Changing an email address requires:

• Logging in (using the old email address, naturally)

• Navigating through five layers of menus

• Finding the deliberately obscured “change email” option (buried because, let’s be honest, you don’t want people to do this easily, it complicates your data model)

• Receiving a verification email to the old address

• Clicking that link within 15 minutes (or starting over)

• Receiving another verification email to the new address

• Clicking that link

• Receiving a confirmation email to both addresses

• Possibly waiting 24-48 hours for the change to “take effect” across all systems

• Discovering that certain integrated services still show the old address and require separate updates

• Realising that your password recovery is still tied to the old address

• Finding out that marketing emails continue arriving at the old address because they’re managed by a different system

• Learning that your order history is now inaccessible because it’s still associated with the old email and the new email is treated as a “new account”

This isn’t security. This is systems failure masquerading as security.

The operations failure: Your customer service team can’t help. They don’t have permissions to modify email addresses. Or they do, but only after a 45-minute verification process involving security questions you answered five years ago and no longer remember. Or they can help, but it requires escalation to a specialist team that responds within 3-5 business days.

The communications failure: You haven’t explained any of this. The customer discovers these obstacles one failure at a time, each requiring a new support ticket, each demanding more of their time, each eroding their trust in your organization’s competence.

The Journey Friction You’ve Created (And Don’t Measure)

Let’s be precise about what you’ve done: you’ve inserted significant friction into a customer journey that has nothing to do with your product’s core value proposition.

Sarah isn’t trying to purchase anything. She isn’t evaluating competitors. She isn’t making a decision about whether to continue as your customer. She’s simply trying to maintain her relationship with you under changed circumstances.

And you’re making it difficult.

The friction manifests as:

Time cost: What should take 60 seconds takes 30 minutes. Multiply that by every service Sarah needs to update. You’ve just consumed hours of her life.

Cognitive load: Sarah must context-switch. She must interrupt her systematic project to deal with your unique, idiosyncratic process. She must remember your specific requirements. She must track whether your system has actually completed the change or whether she needs to follow up.

Anxiety: Sarah worries. Will important communications go to the old address? Will she miss account notifications? Will security alerts about “suspicious activity” (i.e., logging in from the new email) trigger account locks? Will her purchase history disappear? Will her subscription lapse?

Opportunity cost: Every minute Sarah spends wrestling with your system is a minute she’s not spending doing what she actually wants to do, which is probably using your service for its intended purpose.

This is value destruction. You are actively making your customer’s life worse. And unlike poor product quality or high prices, which customers might rationalise as necessary trade-offs, this friction is gratuitous. It serves no purpose except to accommodate your technical debt and organisational dysfunction.

When Friction Is Actually Justified

Now, let’s be fair. There are contexts where email address changes legitimately require verification, delay, and friction.

Financial services: If someone is changing the email address on their banking, investment, or credit card accounts, security measures are appropriate. These accounts hold or move money. Unauthorised changes could facilitate fraud. Multi-factor authentication, identity verification, and waiting periods are justified precautions.

Healthcare providers: Medical records are highly sensitive. NHS Apps usage requires verification. If someone changes the email address on their patient portal, confirming identity protects privacy.

Insurance providers: Similar concerns apply. Claims history, policy details, and payment information require protection.

Government services: Tax accounts, benefits systems, and official communications demand verification to prevent identity theft and ensure continuity of service.

In these contexts, customers understand friction. They expect it. They would be concerned if it were too easy.

But here’s the critical distinction: even in high-security contexts, friction can be intelligently designed. The best financial institutions make email changes secure without making them torturous. They understand the journey. They recognise that customers changing email addresses are often doing so because of life events, marriage, divorce, relocation, employment changes, that already involve stress. They design processes that are thorough without being punitive.

The worst organisations, including many that have no legitimate security justification, implement friction that’s worse than banks. A social media platform. A newsletter subscription. A loyalty program for a coffee chain. An airline or travel company. These services treat email address changes as if they’re protecting nuclear launch codes.

They’re not protecting security. They’re protecting their database schema.

What This Reveals About Your Priorities

The email address change problem is diagnostic. It reveals what your organisation actually prioritises versus what it claims to prioritise.

You prioritise acquisition over retention: Your onboarding flow is smooth because you’ve invested in conversion optimisation. But your account management is neglected because once someone is a customer, they’re taken for granted. You assume they’ll tolerate friction because switching costs keep them trapped.

You prioritise marketing over service: You can update email preferences for marketing communications instantly. You have sophisticated systems for managing unsubscribes, frequency capping, and preference centers. But changing the actual email address? That’s someone else’s problem. Because marketing owns the customer experience they care about, the experience of receiving promotions, not the customer journey of maintaining a relationship with your organisation.

You prioritise new features over foundational infrastructure: Your product team is shipping innovation. Your engineering team is building new capabilities. But the core account management infrastructure hasn’t been refactored in years. It works “well enough.” Customers can log in, after all. The fact that basic profile changes are nightmarish? That’s not sexy work. It doesn’t make the roadmap.

You prioritise systems convenience over customer convenience: Your architecture made sense when it was built. Email as primary key seemed reasonable. But as the system evolved, that decision created downstream constraints. Fixing it would require significant engineering investment. So you don’t. You force customers to accommodate your technical debt.

You prioritise measurement of what you control over understanding what customers experience: You measure customer satisfaction at touchpoints within your ecosystem. You track NPS. You monitor support ticket resolution times. But you don’t measure the journey friction you’ve created. You don’t quantify the time cost, the cognitive load, the anxiety, or the opportunity cost. Because those things happen outside your measurement systems, which means, organisationally, they don’t exist.

The Reputational and Brand Damage You’re Ignoring

Here’s what customers do when you make simple tasks difficult:

They complain publicly: Social media is full of threads documenting the absurdity of trying to change email addresses. “Just spent an hour trying to update my email on [Service]. Still not working. Anyone else have this problem?” These threads gain traction because the frustration is universal. Your brand becomes associated with incompetence.

They abandon: If changing an email address is too difficult, customers let the old address lapse. They miss communications. They lose access to accounts. Eventually, they stop being customers, not because they chose to leave, but because maintaining the relationship became too burdensome.

They tell stories: The email address change becomes a story customers tell about your brand. Not a story about your product quality. Not a story about your innovation. A story about how you wasted their time, disrespected their intelligence, and demonstrated that you don’t actually understand or care about their lives.

They question everything else: If you can’t get something this basic right, what else are you getting wrong? The email address change becomes a signal about your organizational competence. If your systems are this poorly designed for simple tasks, how can customers trust you with complex ones?

The damage compounds because this isn’t a high-stakes failure. It’s a low-stakes failure. And low-stakes failures are often more damaging to reputation than high-stakes ones, because they suggest indifference rather than difficulty. Customers understand that hard problems are hard. They don’t understand why easy problems are made hard.

Customer Journey Management: What You Should Be Doing Instead

Returning to the fundamental discipline: Customer Journey Management.

As defined in AdaptomyDNA’s Sense Cluster, the operational capability to detect, interpret, and act on external signals, Customer Journey Management is the discipline of understanding the options, choices, decisions, and routes that individuals, groups, businesses, or organisations take from the point they comprehend a need or desire for something to the point at which they and those around them experience, benefit from, or consume the final outcomes.

Notice what’s absent from that definition: you. Your product. Your touchpoints.

Customer Journey Management starts with customer reality, not your operational convenience.

If you were actually practicing Customer Journey Management, here’s what you would understand about the email address change:

The trigger context: Why are customers changing email addresses? What life events or circumstances drive this need? How does this fit into their broader digital life management? (Answer: it’s almost always part of a larger project, migration, consolidation, security upgrade, life transition.)

The journey scope: What are customers actually trying to accomplish? (Answer: systematically update their email address across all services and relationships, minimising disruption, avoiding missed communications, and maintaining continuity of service.)

The journey obstacles: What makes this difficult? (Answer: every service has different processes, different security requirements, different architectural constraints. Customers must context-switch repeatedly. They must track completion across dozens of services. They worry about missing steps.)

The opportunity for differentiation: Where could you add value that competitors don’t? (Answer: by making email address changes trivially easy, you become the service that respects customer time and understands their reality. You become the exception to the frustrating norm.)

The strategic importance: How does this moment in the journey affect customer loyalty, brand perception, and lifetime value? (Answer: significantly. This is a moment where you either demonstrate that you understand and value customers, or reveal that you don’t.)

The Principles for Getting This Right

If you’re serious about Customer Journey Management, not customer experience optimisation, not touchpoint measurement, but genuine understanding of customer journeys, here are the principles that would guide your approach to something as “simple” as email address changes:

1. Design for customer goals, not system constraints: Start with what customers are trying to do. Then ask: what would make this effortless for them? Only then consider your systems constraints, and treat those constraints as problems to solve, not requirements to impose on customers.

2. Make common tasks trivially easy: Email address changes are common. They’re predictable. They should be one-click easy (with appropriate verification for genuinely high-security contexts). If they’re not, you’ve failed at basic service design.

3. Eliminate architectural debt that creates customer friction: Yes, refactoring your database schema is expensive. But the alternative is forcing every customer who ever needs to change their email address to pay the cost of your technical debt. That’s not a trade-off. That’s a transfer of burden from your organisation to your customers. It’s bad strategy dressed up as pragmatism.

4. Provide transparent, helpful communication: If email address changes require verification, explain why. Set clear expectations about timing. Provide status updates. Anticipate questions. Make it feel like you’re helping customers accomplish something important, not grudgingly accommodating an inconvenient request.

5. Measure what matters to customers, not just what matters to you: Track time-to-completion for email address changes. Survey customers about the experience. Measure abandonment rates. Compare your process to competitors. Hold your teams accountable for journey friction, not just touchpoint satisfaction.

6. Recognise this as a strategic capability, not a technical detail: How you handle email address changes is a signal about your organizational maturity, your customer-centricity, and your ability to understand journeys versus experiences. Treat it accordingly.

The Operartional Question This Raises

The email address change problem is a symptom of a larger strategic dysfunction: most organisations don’t practice Customer Journey Management because they’ve never professionalized it as a discipline.

Customer Experience teams optimise touchpoints. Product teams optimise features. Marketing teams optimise campaigns. Operations teams optimise processes. But nobody owns the complete customer journey. Nobody is responsible for understanding what customers are trying to do across the full arc of their relationship with your organisation, and across the broader context of their lives.

This isn’t a competence problem. It’s a structural problem.

Customer Journey Management requires capabilities that most organisations lack:

Cross-functional sensing: You need mechanisms to detect what’s happening in customers’ lives, not just what’s happening in your systems. That requires listening beyond support tickets and satisfaction surveys. It requires ethnographic curiosity about customer reality.

Journey mapping that starts with customers, not touchpoints: Most journey maps begin with “customer becomes aware of our product” and end with “customer purchases” or “customer churns.” Real journey maps begin with “customer comprehends a need” and end with “customer achieves outcome”, and recognise that your product is one potential means to that end, not the journey itself.

Systems thinking about friction: You need to understand how your architectural decisions, your organisational silos, your operational processes, and your measurement systems create friction that customers experience but you don’t see.

Strategic prioritisation of journey over experience: You need leadership that understands the difference between optimising moments you control and facilitating outcomes customers seek, and invests accordingly.

Continuous sensing and adaptation: Customer journeys change. Technologies evolve. Expectations shift. Static journey maps are useless. You need “always on” sensing capabilities that detect changes in customer behaviour and needs.

This is the work of AdaptomyDNA’s Sense Cluster: building organisational capabilities to detect, interpret, and act on external signals, not just market signals, but human signals. Customer Journey Management and Market Management together form the foundation of strategic sensing.

Without these capabilities, you’re optimising in the dark. You’re improving experiences at touchpoints while remaining blind to the journeys those touchpoints interrupt.

The Hard Truth About What This Means

Let’s be direct about the implications:

If your organisation treats email address changes as a low-priority technical problem rather than a strategic customer journey moment, you have a discipline problem.

If your engineering teams build systems that prioritise architectural convenience over customer convenience, you have a leadership problem.

If your operations teams implement friction without measuring its impact on customer journeys, you have a measurement problem.

If your CX teams celebrate high satisfaction scores at touchpoints while customers are frustrated by journey friction, you have a strategic blindness problem.

And if your executive team doesn’t understand why any of this matters, if they see email address changes as a trivial support issue rather than a diagnostic signal about organisational maturity, you have a competitive vulnerability that will manifest in customer attrition, brand damage, and market share loss.

Because here’s what’s happening in the market: the businesses that win are the ones that understand customer journeys more deeply than competitors do. They’re not just serving customers better, they’re understanding customer reality more completely. They’re designing for customer goals, not system constraints. They’re making the difficult easy, not making the easy difficult.

Those businesses look at email address changes and see an opportunity to demonstrate competence, respect, and understanding. They make it trivially simple. They become the exception to the frustrating norm. They earn customer loyalty not through retention schemes or switching costs, but through genuine service that acknowledges customer humanity.

And then there’s everyone else: the businesses that force customers to accommodate technical debt, navigate Byzantine processes, and waste time on tasks that should be effortless. The businesses that confuse customer experience with customer journey. The businesses that optimize touchpoints while destroying value in the broader journey.

Which kind of business are you?

Diagnostic Questions for Your Leadership Team

If this article has provoked discomfort, good. That means you’re taking it seriously. Here are the questions you should be asking in your next leadership meeting:

About this specific journey:

• How long does it actually take our customers to change their email address, from initial attempt to confirmed completion across all our systems?

• What percentage of customers who attempt to change their email address complete the process successfully on the first try?

• What percentage abandon the attempt? What happens to those customers over the subsequent six months?

• How many support tickets do we receive related to email address changes? What’s the average resolution time?

• What does the process look like from the customer’s perspective? Has anyone on the leadership team actually tried to change their email address in our system recently?

About customer journey management:

• Do we understand the broader journey that email address changes are part of? Have we mapped why customers need to do this and what else they’re trying to accomplish?

• Where else in the customer journey are we creating friction because we’re prioritising our systems convenience over their goals?

• What’s the ratio of investment in acquisition and activation (new customer experiences) versus maintenance and service (existing customer journeys)?

• Who in our organisation owns complete customer journeys, not just experiences at touchpoints we control?

• How do we measure journey friction? Do we quantify time cost, cognitive load, and opportunity cost, or only satisfaction at our touchpoints?

About strategic priorities:

• If we were honest, would we say our organisation prioritises customer journey understanding or customer experience optimisation? What evidence supports that conclusion?

• What percentage of our CX and product roadmap is dedicated to reducing journey friction versus adding features or improving conversion?

• When was the last time we made a significant strategic decision based on customer journey insights rather than competitive feature comparison or market trend following?

• If a competitor made email address changes trivially easy and marketed that as evidence of superior customer understanding, how would we respond?

About organizational capability:

• Do we have the sensing networks, coalitions, and processes to practice Customer Journey Management as an “always on” discipline?

• Can we name three customer journeys we understand deeply, including the context, obstacles, and opportunities for creating differential advantage for customers?

• What technical debt or architectural decisions are we forcing customers to accommodate? What would it cost to fix those, and what’s the cost of not fixing them?

• How often do we really test our assumptions about customer journeys with a range of internal and external stakeholders?

• Do we have mechanisms to detect when customer journeys are changin, when new obstacles emerge, when expectations shift, when competitors create new alternatives?

• If Customer Journey Management is a strategic discipline that determines competitive advantage, are we treating it accordingly, or is it a marketing team project?

The Choice

The email address change isn’t really about email addresses. It’s about whether your organisation understands what customers are trying to do, and whether you’re helping them do it or making it harder.

It’s about whether you’ve professionalised Customer Journey Management as a strategic discipline or whether you’ve fragmented it across functional silos that optimise parts while missing the whole.

It’s about whether you measure success by customer journey outcomes or by touchpoint experiences.

It’s about whether you’re willing to invest in understanding customer reality, which requires humility, curiosity, and continuous sensing, or whether you’re content optimising your own operations while remaining blind to the friction you create.

The businesses that professionalise Customer Journey Management will possess a sensing capability that becomes increasingly valuable as markets accelerate and competitive intensity increases. They’ll understand what customers are trying to do before competitors recognise the need. They’ll identify opportunities to create differential advantage where others see routine transactions. They’ll earn loyalty through genuine service rather than retention schemes.

The businesses that continue to confuse customer experience with customer journey will remain reactive, optimising touchpoints while competitors reshape entire journeys.

The choice is yours. But the diagnostic test is simple: start with email address changes. If you can’t get that right, what else are you getting wrong?

Customer Journey Management is one of over 70 disciplines within AdaptomyDNA, the framework and methodology underpinning The Market Leaders Toolkit. Part of the Sense Cluster alongside Market Management, Customer Journey is the discipline of understanding what customers are trying to accomplish, not what they do with your product, but what they’re trying to achieve in their lives. For organisations ready to professionalise this discipline, comprehensive playbooks, tools, techniques, and strategic guidance are becoming available through The Market Leaders Toolkit on Substack.

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Most businesses confuse measuring customer satisfaction with understanding customer reality. It’s costing them their competitive edge.

This isn’t a minor gap in organisational capability. It’s a strategic blindness that explains why businesses lose competitive advantage despite operational excellence, why innovation fails despite customer feedback, and why market share erodes despite high satisfaction scores.

The uncomfortable truth is this: the businesses that win don’t just serve customers better. They understand customer reality more deeply. And that understanding, systematic, evidence-based, continuously refreshed, is a discipline, not an instinct.

The Great Conflation: CX, CDJ, and Customer Journeys Are Not the Same Thing

The confusion starts with language. Organisations use “customer journey,” “customer experience,” and “customer decision journey” interchangeably, as if they describe the same phenomenon. They don’t.

Customer Experience (CX) measures how customers feel about interactions with your brand. It tracks satisfaction at touchpoints you control, your website, your service desk, your product interface, your retail environment. CX is important. It tells you whether you’re delivering on your promises. But it only captures the moments when customers are engaging with you.

Customer Decision Journeys (CDJ) map how buyers move through evaluation and purchase processes. Popularised by McKinsey in 2009, CDJs focus on the consideration funnel, how prospects research options, evaluate alternatives, and make purchasing decisions. This is valuable for go-to-market strategy. But it’s fundamentally about your sales process, not their life.

Customer Journeys, properly understood, are something entirely different. They’re the complete arc of human experience from the moment someone comprehends a need or desire through to the outcomes they ultimately achieve or fail to achieve. Customer journeys include everything customers are trying to do, the context they’re operating in, the challenges they face, the constraints they navigate, the emotions that shape their choices, the people who influence their decisions, and the circumstances that determine success or failure.

Your business, if you’re relevant at all, occupies a small portion of that journey. You might be a critical enabler. You might be peripheral. You might be completely irrelevant to what they’re actually trying to accomplish.

The distinction matters because CX and CDJ are seller-centric by design. They start with your business and work outward. Real customer journey management starts with customer reality and works inward. It asks fundamentally different questions: What are people trying to do? Why now? What alternatives are they considering? What trade-offs are they making? Who else influences their choices? What happens after they engage with us, or if they never engage with us at all?

This epistemological shift, from “how do customers experience us?” to “what are customers experiencing?”, is the foundation of of offering differential advantage to customers and creating commercial advantage for the business.

Why Great Businesses Start Here (And Why They Forget)

Look at the origin stories of enduring businesses, and you’ll find a common thread: founders who understood customer reality with unusual clarity.

Amazon didn’t start with a superior shopping cart. Bezos understood that people wanted selection, convenience, and low prices without leaving home. Netflix didn’t start with better DVDs. Hastings understood that people hated late fees and wanted entertainment on their own terms. Salesforce didn’t start with better software. Benioff understood that IT leaders wanted to escape the burden of infrastructure while sales leaders wanted their teams selling, not configuring systems.

In each case, the founding insight wasn’t about the product. It was about what customers were trying to do, and the gap between their aspirations and the available alternatives.

But here’s what happens as businesses scale: the discipline of understanding customer journeys gets subsumed into functional, departmental thinking. Marketing takes ownership of “customer insights” but focuses on message testing and campaign performance. Product management conducts user research but optimises feature sets. Customer success measures satisfaction scores but concentrates on retention metrics. Sales tracks pipeline progression but focuses on conversion rates.

All of it useful. None of it the same as understanding customer journeys.

The result isn’t just organisational fragmentation it’s operational failure. Customer understanding becomes siloed, functional, and tactical. Nobody owns the complete picture of what customers are trying to do. The strategic sensing capability that made the business possible in the first place atrophies. The organisation becomes internally focused, optimising what it does rather than questioning whether it’s solving the right problems.

By the time leadership realises something’s wrong, market share declining, competitors gaining ground, customers defecting to alternatives that shouldn’t be better, the capability to understand customer reality has been lost. Teams can tell you about satisfaction scores, conversion rates, and feature requests. Nobody can tell you what customers are actually trying to achieve or whether the business is helping them achieve it better than alternatives.

The Strategic Imperative: Why Leadership Must Pay Attention Now

Customer journey management isn’t a marketing concern or a customer success initiative. It’s a strategic discipline that belongs at the leadership table alongside financial planning, business strategy, and organisational development.

Here’s why it matters now more than ever:

Markets are moving faster than organisations can sense. Customer needs evolve. Technologies create new possibilities. Competitors emerge from unexpected directions. The businesses that win are those that detect shifts in customer behaviour and adapt before competitors recognise the change. That requires “always on” customer journey sensing, not annual research studies.

Competitive advantage increasingly comes from better understanding, not better execution. In most markets, products are comparable. Service levels are similar. Pricing is competitive. The differentiator is depth of insight into what customers are trying to do. The businesses that understand customer reality more deeply can make better product decisions, craft more resonant value propositions, and identify opportunities competitors miss.

Organisational silos destroy strategic coherence. When different functions operate from different assumptions about what customers want, strategy fractures. Product builds features marketing can’t sell. Marketing makes promises operations can’t deliver. Customer success solves problems product should have prevented. Shared understanding of customer journeys creates organisational alignment around what matters: helping customers achieve outcomes.

Digital transformation requires understanding journeys, not just touchpoints. Most digital transformation efforts fail because they digitise existing touchpoints without understanding the broader journey. They make bad processes faster rather than solving customer problems. Understanding complete customer journeys reveals where digital capabilities can genuinely add value versus where they create friction.

Growth requires knowing where unmet needs exist. Adjacent market opportunities, new product innovations, strategic partnerships, all depend on understanding where customer needs remain unmet and where your capabilities could create unique value. That requires systematic exploration of customer journeys beyond your current product portfolio.

The implication for leadership is clear: customer journey management must be professionalised, resourced, and governed as a strategic discipline, not delegated as a tactical marketing activity.

The Capabilities, Skills, and Competencies Required

Effective customer journey management requires a distinctive combination of capabilities that few organisations have assembled deliberately.

Sensing and research capabilities: The ability to detect weak signals of changing customer behaviour, conduct ethnographic research, synthesise insights from multiple data sources, and distinguish genuine patterns from noise. This isn’t traditional market research. It’s continuous environmental scanning combined with deep qualitative exploration.

Analytical rigor: Customer journey work generates hypotheses that must be tested. Organisations need people who can design experiments, analyse complex data sets, identify causal relationships, and build evidence-based cases. The worst customer journey work is beautifully visualised but empirically hollow.

Systems thinking: Customer journeys are complex, nonlinear, and contextual. Understanding them requires seeing connections between touchpoints, recognising feedback loops, and mapping how different actors influence outcomes. Linear thinking produces oversimplified journey maps that miss critical dynamics.

Empathetic curiosity: The best customer journey practitioners combine analytical precision with human curiosity. They want to understand not just what customers do but why, the emotions, fears, aspirations, and constraints that shape behaviour. This requires psychological insight and genuine interest in human experience.

Visualisation and communication: Journey insights only create value if they inform decision-making across the organisation. That requires translating complex findings into clear, compelling visualisations that make customer reality tangible for stakeholders who weren’t part of the research.

Cross-functional collaboration: Customer journey work touches every function, product, marketing, sales, operations, customer success. The practitioners must be able to convene diverse stakeholders, facilitate productive dialogue, surface conflicting assumptions, and build shared understanding.

Strategic thinking: The purpose of customer journey management is differential advantage, not description. Practitioners must be able to connect journey insights to strategic questions: Where can we create unique value? What capabilities would we need? How would this change our competitive position?

Most organisations don’t have this combination of skills in one place. Customer journey management gets fragmented across market research (sensing), data analytics (analysis), UX design (visualisation), and strategy (application). The result is incomplete understanding and limited strategic impact.

Building customer journey management as a true discipline requires deliberate investment in these capabilities and organizational structures that allow them to work together.

The Benefits of Shared Insight and Understanding

When customer journey understanding becomes widespread and organisationally embedded, several powerful benefits emerge:

Strategic decisions improve because they’re grounded in customer reality, not internal assumptions. Product roadmaps reflect what customers are trying to do, not just what they’ve asked for. Go-to-market strategies address the actual decision-making context customers navigate. Operating models are designed around customer needs rather than internal convenience.

Cross-functional alignment increases because everyone operates from a shared understanding of customer reality. When product, marketing, sales, and operations all understand the same customer journeys, decisions become coherent. Teams can debate how best to serve customers without debating what customers want.

Innovation becomes more targeted and successful. Understanding complete customer journeys reveals where needs are unmet, where friction exists, where competitors are vulnerable, and where your capabilities could create unique value. Innovation efforts focus on problems worth solving rather than solutions searching for problems.

Value propositions become more resonant because they speak to what customers are actually trying to achieve. Marketing moves from generic benefit claims to specific, credible statements about how you help customers accomplish their goals better than alternatives.

Customer experience initiatives become strategic rather than tactical. Instead of optimising isolated touchpoints, organisations redesign experiences around complete journeys. Improvements address root causes rather than symptoms.

Competitive advantage becomes sustainable because it’s based on deeper understanding, not just better execution. Competitors can copy features, match pricing, and replicate service levels. They can’t easily replicate the operational capability to understand customer reality at depth.

Perhaps most importantly, shared customer journey understanding creates organisational humility. When everyone recognises that customers’ worlds don’t revolve around your company, that you’re one option among many, that customers are solving problems you may not fully understand the organisation becomes genuinely customer-centric rather than performatively so.

Customer Journey Within AdaptomyDNA: Inseparable from Market Management

Customer Journey is the second discipline from AdaptomyDNA’s Sense Cluster to be published, following Market Management. This sequencing is deliberate. Within The Market Leaders Toolkit, the comprehensive framework for adaptive business leadership built on AdaptomyDNA methodology, these two disciplines are inseparable.

Market Management answers the fundamental question: Where should we play? It’s the discipline of identifying attractive markets, assessing market dynamics, understanding competitive forces, and building the sensing networks that detect market shifts. Market Management tells you which markets are worth competing in.

Customer Journey answers the equally fundamental question: How do we win? It’s the discipline of understanding what customers in those markets are trying to do, where their needs are unmet, and where your capabilities could create differential advantage. Customer Journey tells you how to compete successfully within the markets you’ve chosen.

Together, Market Management and Customer Journey form the foundation of the Sense Cluster, the operational capability to detect, interpret, adapt and act on external signals. Everything else in strategy depends on getting these two disciplines right.

You can’t do effective customer journey work without knowing which markets you’re focused on and which customer segments matter most. That’s where Market Management provides the foundation. Conversely, you can’t make sound market selection decisions without understanding what customers in those markets are trying to achieve and whether you’re positioned to help them. That’s where Customer Journey provides the insight.

Within AdaptomyDNA’s structure of over 70 disciplines spanning Sense, Re-think, Propagate, Fulfil, and Renew, Market Management and Customer Journey sit at the beginning of the strategic journey. They’re not preliminary steps to be completed and forgotten. They’re “always on” sensing capabilities that continuously inform every other aspect of business strategy, from value proposition development to operating model design to commercial strategy to organisational renewal.

The implication is clear: organisations that professionalise both disciplines, that invest in the capabilities to understand markets and customer journeys with equal rigor, create strategic advantages that compound over time. Those that treat either as a one-time exercise or a tactical marketing activity remain perpetually reactive, optimising execution while missing strategic opportunities.

The Path Forward: From Tactical Activity to Strategic Discipline

The professionalisation of customer journey management requires several deliberate shifts:

From periodic projects to continuous sensing. Customer journeys change as markets evolve, technologies emerge, and competitors innovate. Organisations need mechanisms to detect these shifts in real-time, not discover them in annual research studies.

From single-function ownership to cross-functional discipline. Customer journey understanding can’t live exclusively in marketing or product or customer success. It requires multi-disciplinary coalitions that bring diverse perspectives and test assumptions rigorously.

From description to differential advantage. The purpose of customer journey work isn’t to document what customers do. It’s to identify where you can create unique value that competitors can’t or won’t match.

From satisfaction measurement to reality understanding. The goal isn’t to track how customers feel about you. It’s to understand what they’re trying to achieve and whether you’re genuinely helping them achieve it better than alternatives.

From beautiful visualisations to strategic impact. Journey maps are tools, not outputs. Success is measured by strategic decisions improved, innovations launched, market positions strengthened, not by the number of journey maps created.

Most fundamentally, customer journey management must move from the tactical periphery to the strategic core. It must become a discipline that leadership owns, resources, and governs, because understanding customer reality isn’t a nice-to-have marketing capability. It’s a strategic imperative that determines whether organisations identify opportunities before competitors, innovate successfully, and sustain competitive advantage in accelerating markets.

The businesses that professionalise customer journey management now, that build it as a true discipline with the capabilities, processes, and governance it deserves, will possess a sensing capability that becomes increasingly valuable as markets become more dynamic and competitive intensity increases.

Those that continue to confuse customer experience and satisfaction with customer understanding will find themselves perpetually reactive, optimising touchpoints while competitors reshape entire journeys.

The choice is clear. The question is whether leadership will recognise customer journey management for what it is: not a marketing initiative, but a strategic discipline that belongs at the table where the most important decisions get made.

Customer Journey Management is one of over 70 disciplines within AdaptomyDNA, the framework and methodology underpinning The Market Leaders Toolkit. Following the recent release of the complete Market Management discipline, including comprehensive playbooks, focused metrics and measures, tools and techniques, process models, roles and responsibilities, and progressive articles, the Customer Journey discipline will receive the same detailed treatment in the scheduled release of all AdaptomyDNA disciplines. For more information and to access discipline snapshots, visit The Market Leaders Toolkit.

Here’s a deeply uncomfortable truth: most businesses have inverted their understanding of customer journeys. They’ve confused the map for the territory, mistaken their own sales funnel for their customers’ lived reality, and called “customer experience” something that is, at best, a narrow subset of what customers are actually doing.

Attached to this article is a Customer Journey Snapshot, one of over 70 discipline snapshots, playbooks, metrics and tools defined in AdaptomyDNA.

Most Businesses Confuse Customer Experience with Customer Journeys And It’s Costing Them More than they think

This isn’t semantic pedantry. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding that costs businesses commecial advantage every single day.

You’ve seen this firsthand. The obsessive focus on “touchpoints” where customers interact with your brand. The relentless optimisation of “customer decision journeys” that track movement toward purchase. The measurement of “customer experience” that begins when someone enters your ecosystem and ends when they churn out of it.

All of it, every bit of it, is fatally seller-centric.

And that’s precisely the problem.

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The Discipline We Keep Misunderstanding

Customer journey management is the discipline of understanding the options, choices, decisions, and routes that individuals, groups, businesses, or organisations take from the point they comprehend a need or desire for something to the point at which they and those around them experience, benefit from, or consume the final outcomes.

Read that definition again. Notice what’s missing? You. Your brand. Your product. Your funnel.

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The single biggest deficiency in almost all market analysis and market management efforts:

Failure to distinguish market attractiveness from operational competence and market fitness

Most market analysis answers “Is this market attractive?”
Very few answer “Are we actually fit to win here, now, and over time?”

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Where should we compete, why there, and what will it take to win or exit?

Most organisations claim to do this. Very few do it well. Fewer still do it continuously.

The Market Management Discipline within AdaptomyDNA was designed precisely to address this gap. It is not a reporting function, not a one-off strategy exercise, and not a subset of marketing. It is a rigorous, always-on commercial discipline that turns markets into something that can be understood, assessed, managed, and a capability that can be deliberately shaped over time.

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The greatest advantage in markets is not superior insight, it is superior timing. Market management is how timing becomes a repeatable capability rather than a matter of luck.

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Too many consulting firms are offering 21st-century clients 20th-century solutions.

What passes for “strategy” is often little more than comparative performance analysis, process mapping, and tired maturity models.

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Consultancies continue to peddle linear step-by-step blueprints, clunky diagnostic tools, and rigid playbooks designed to enforce predictability in systems that are anything but predictable. They frame success as convergence on industry norms and “best practices,” rather than divergence into unique, competitive advantage.

Here’s the flaw: they are treating complexity as complication. And they are wrong.

A World That’s Moved On

Markets are not fixed systems to be optimised, they are living, breathing ecosystems shaped by culture, technology, emotion, and serendipity. Customers are not passive recipients of service, they are active participants with ever-evolving behaviours, preferences, and identities. Organisations are not machines, they are complex social systems where nuance, belief, narrative, and dialogue shape outcomes as much as process and structure.

And yet, many consultants still arrive armed with templates.

The legacy consultancy model prizes replicability, predictability, and structure. But today’s business challenges demand something else entirely: the capacity to navigate complexity, to embrace ambiguity, and to build adaptive, learning organisations. That doesn’t mean abandoning rigour, it means shifting the type of rigor applied. From process adherence to contextual interpretation. From rules-based execution to principles-based experimentation.

Adaptability Is the New Alpha

A handful of forward-thinking firms and consultants are moving the dial, incorporating behavioural science, complexity theory, system dynamics, iterative and recursive design, and emergent strategy. These capabilities are not “nice to have”, they are core to unlocking growth and relevance in the current climate.

The traditional model’s reliance on structured transformation programs, maturity ladders, and cookie-cutter roadmaps cannot address today’s rate of change. Worse, they may hinder it.

The answer is not more data. It’s not a prettier dashboard. And it’s not slapping an AI tool on top of outdated methodologies. Throwing more information at a flawed lens doesn’t make it sharper, it just increases the noise.

This isn’t a digital problem. It’s a thinking problem.

The Real Question for Consultants and Their Clients

Are you building solutions that address today’s operating reality or are you solving the problems of the past more efficiently?

True impact today comes from enabling clients to sense, learn, adapt, and evolve in real-time. From helping them recognise weak signals, unlock internal potential, experiment with new models, and make sense of ambiguity. It requires letting go of the safety net of certainty, and embracing the messiness of emergence.

In complex systems, best practices often become blind spots.

Consultants need to move beyond case studies and best practices. They need to become co-creators of new practices. Less about diagnosis and delivery; more about dialogue and design. Less mechanistic, more human, less templated, more contextual.

The End of the Old Order

The consultancy industry faces a choice: evolve or become obsolete.

The future of advisory lies not in being the expert with the answers, but the partner who helps clients ask better questions. The role of the consultant must shift from purveyor of models, to enabler of new and distinct capability. From fixer, to sensemaker. From commander, to collaborator.

This is not a call for iteration. It’s a call for reinvention.

Because in a world defined by complexity, the playbook is not the solution, it’s the problem.

Footnote for Smaller Consultancies:

You can’t win an AI Arms Race Against the ‘Big Boys’

Beware the illusion that AI alone is your ticket to leveling the playing field. Yes, it can accelerate interviews, generate reports, capture data, even enhance diagnostics but if it’s all built on the same tired playbook the larger firms are already moving beyond, you’re not gaining ground, you’re just replicating irrelevance faster.

The real question is: how is your playbook different? How does it help clients uncover the unique, the emergent, and the new? How does it account for complexity, variability, and the unpredictable nature of modern markets and customers?

If you haven’t answered that, no AI investment will help you compete. Because the big consultancies aren’t just digitising their old playbooks they’re replacing them. And they started years ago.

Sleeping Giants? Think Again, What some of the larger firms are up to:

While traditional consulting approaches are rightly under scrutiny, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the major players. The top-tier consultancies are not standing still, they are changing, fast. While not all are radically reinventing their models from the ground up, it's clear that large-scale rewrites of their playbooks are already well underway.

These firms have the financial muscle, institutional knowledge, and operational capacity to move with force. They are reconfiguring how consultancy works, embedding AI, transforming delivery models, and expanding their focus from linear strategy to adaptive, tech-enabled execution. Far from being defunct, the consulting giants are evolving in real time, and doing so at scale. They are becoming more agile, more experimental, and more embedded in the fabric of transformation itself. Ignore them at your peril.

• McKinsey & Company: The consulting giant is significantly embedding AI and autonomous agents into its workforce (reportedly with tens of thousands of AI agents now working alongside human consultants), transforming how work gets done and shifting toward AI‑enabled, outcome‑focused client partnerships rather than classic slide‑deck deliverables. Business Insider

• Boston Consulting Group (BCG): Being recognised for supporting AI‑enabled change across strategy, technology, and ways of working, indicating a broader shift from isolated project outputs to deep transformation capabilities. Forbes

• Deloitte: Leadership within the firm has openly stated that consultants must adopt an “engineering first mindset” as AI reshapes roles and how value is delivered, a departure from conventional strategy advice toward integrated tech and transformation delivery. Business Insider Beyond AI tools, Deloitte is also evolving its playbooks in areas like M&A and post‑deal transformation, embedding digital, data, and technology execution into strategy from the outset rather than treating them as sequential phases. Deloitte

• Publicis Sapient: Explicitly talking about “redesigning its consulting playbook” to help clients future‑proof in an era of upheaval. ConsultancyUK

A footnote on The Market Leaders Toolkit and AdaptomyDNA:

The Market Leaders Toolkit and its underlying methodology and approach, AdaptomyDNA were designed from the ground up as an adaptive value management system. It includes over 70 disciplines and processes, plus a range of metrics, measures, tools and techniques assembled as a toolkit, not a template as collection of commercial disciplines, not linear processes, as a human, configuarable oeprating system for commercial and customer value management.

Most commercial and market management strategies fail for a simple reason: they’re built on surface-level market descriptions rather than economic reality. Personas, brand positioning, value propositions, and messaging frameworks are meaningless if they’re not grounded in how markets actually work, how money flows, how incentives shape behaviour, how constraints limit choice, and how competition evolves over time.

Economics is the discipline that explains why markets behave the way they do. Strategy that ignores economic conditions is guessing. Strategy informed by economics is probabilistic, directional, and defensible.

This article breaks down the essential macro- and microeconomic conditions that shape commercial and marketing strategy, and the capabilities required to use them properly. It’s a more detailed and specific follow-on article from the more general “Hidden Market Adavantage: Marketing and Economics” published in December 2025.

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Macro-Economic Conditions: The Environment You Don’t Control (But Must Exploit)

Macro-economics defines the outer boundaries of possibility. It doesn’t tell you exactly what to do but it determines what can work.

1. Growth, Stagnation, and Contraction

GDP growth rates, productivity trends, and sectoral expansion determine:

• Whether markets are expanding or zero-sum

• Whether customer acquisition is easier or harder

• Whether differentiation or cost efficiency matters more

In growth markets, demand forgives inefficiency. In stagnant markets, it doesn’t.

2. Inflation, Interest Rates, and Monetary Policy

These directly shape:

• Price sensitivity and purchasing deferral

• Financing costs for customers and competitors

• Appetite for innovation versus risk avoidance

High interest rates punish long sales cycles and speculative positioning. Inflation erodes brand loyalty faster than most marketers expect.

3. Employment, Wages, and Disposable Income

Aggregate demand is not abstract, it’s household cash flow.

• Wage growth drives premiumisation

• Job insecurity drives substitution and downgrade behaviour

• Uneven income distribution fragments markets even when averages look healthy

Smart strategists track who is gaining purchasing power, not just whether the economy is “up”.

4. Trade, Regulation, and Geopolitical Conditions

Market attractiveness is shaped by:

• Tariffs, trade barriers, and localisation requirements

• Regulatory cost structures and compliance burdens

• Currency volatility and capital controls

Ignoring these turns international expansion into a margin trap

Micro-Economic Conditions: Where Strategy Actually Competes

Microeconomics explains how value is created, captured, and defended inside markets.

1. Demand Elasticity and Willingness to Pay

Every strategy implicitly assumes something about price sensitivity.

• Elastic demand rewards differentiation and innovation

• Inelastic demand rewards scale, access, and reliability

Most marketing teams guess elasticity instead of testing and modelling it, then wonder why pricing breaks performance.

2. Cost Structures and Economies of Scale

Competitive advantage often comes from cost asymmetry, not just brand differential.

• Fixed vs variable cost ratios determine break-even logic

• Scale advantages lock out late entrants

• Experience curves silently reshape competition

If you don’t understand your cost curve relative to competitors, your positioning is fiction.

3. Market Structure and Competitive Intensity

Whether a market resembles monopoly, oligopoly, or fragmented competition changes everything:

• Messaging strategy

• Channel leverage

• Pricing freedom

• Speed of imitation

Strategy is not transferable across market structures. What works in fragmented markets fails in concentrated ones.

4. Substitutes, Complements, and Constraints

Customers don’t buy in isolation.

• Substitutes cap pricing power

• Complements increase switching costs

• Constraints (time, skills, infrastructure) limit adoption

The real competition is often outside your category definition.

Market Selection: Economics Before Marketing

Market selection is not a brand or marketing exercise. It’s an economic one.

Strategists must assess:

• Total addressable demand that can actually be monetised

• Profit pool distribution (who captures value, not who grows fastest)

• Structural advantages incumbents possess

• Entry costs versus sustainable upside

Many “attractive” markets are economically hostile. Many “boring” markets are quietly lucrative.

Market Dynamics: Why Static Analysis Fails

Markets move. Economic forces shift incentives over time.

• Cost declines commoditise differentiation

• New entrants reshape supply curves

• Technology alters marginal costs

• Regulation rewrites incentives overnight

Strategy must account for direction, not just position. Timing matters as much as choice.

Competing in Chosen Markets: Strategy as Applied Economics

Once a market is selected, economics shapes execution:

• Pricing strategy follows elasticity, not brand or marketing aspiration

• Channel strategy follows transaction costs, not preference

• Messaging follows risk perception, not features

• Growth strategy follows marginal returns, not ambition

Marketing that ignores economic incentives ends up over-communicating and under-performing.

Why Economic Theory Matters (Even If You’re Not an Economist)

Economic theory provides:

• Mental models for predicting behaviour under constraint

• Frameworks for trade-offs and opportunity cost

• Tools for understanding unintended consequences

• Discipline against narrative-led decision making

You don’t need equations. You need economic logic.

Core Competencies Required to Do This Well

To build economically grounded commercial and market strategy, teams need capabilities most organisations lack:

1. Economic Literacy

• Understanding incentives, elasticity, substitution, and scale

• Ability to interpret macro indicators beyond headlines

2. Market Modelling

• Scenario planning and sensitivity analysis

• Demand, cost, and profitability modelling

3. Contextual Market Analysis

• Linking economic conditions to buyer behaviour

• Understanding how timing, risk, and liquidity affect decisions

4. Strategic Translation

• Turning economic insight into pricing, positioning, and GTM decisions

• Aligning commercial execution with economic reality

5. Dynamic Reassessment

• Continuous monitoring of leading indicators

• Willingness to revise strategy as conditions shift

This is not academic work. It’s competitive work.

The Hard Truth

Most market strategy is overconfident storytelling built on underpowered analysis. Economics forces discipline. It exposes weak assumptions. It limits fantasy. And that’s exactly why it’s avoided.

But in complex, competitive, capital-constrained markets, economics isn’t optional. It’s the difference between growth that compounds and growth that collapses.

If strategy doesn’t start with economic conditions, it doesn’t start with reality.

The real impact of AI is not incremental efficiency. It is a structural shift in how commercial decisions are made.

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From Data to Foresight: Pattern and Probability at Scale

At the core of modern AI is advanced pattern analysis: systems trained to detect non-obvious relationships across vast, messy datasets. Unlike traditional analytics, which test hypotheses humans already suspect, AI surfaces patterns that no strategist would reasonably look for.

Layered on top is probability analysis. Instead of asking, “What happened?”, commercial teams now ask, “What is most likely to happen next and under what conditions?”
This shift enables:

• Forecasting demand under multiple pricing, promotional and macroeconomic scenarios

• Estimating churn risk by customer, channel and moment in the journey

• Anticipating competitive moves before they show up in market share reports

The strategic consequence is profound: planning becomes continuous and adaptive, not annual and reactive.

Propensity Modelling and the Science of Customer Choice

Propensity modelling has matured from simple “likelihood to buy” scores into rich simulations of customer decision-making. Modern models combine behavioural data, context (time, channel, device), historical choices and even inferred motivations to estimate:

• Likelihood to purchase now versus later

• Sensitivity to price, messaging and incentives

• Probability of switching brands or channels

• Response to alternative value propositions

This allows marketers and commercial leaders to move beyond segmentation toward individualised choice architectures where offers, pricing, content and timing are dynamically assembled for each customer.

In effect, AI models the market not as a static audience, but as millions of micro-economies making trade-offs in real time.

Synthetic Data: Solving the Strategy Blind Spots

One of the least understood, but most powerful developments is synthetic data. By generating statistically realistic data where real data is sparse, biased or unavailable, AI enables teams to explore:

• New markets before entering them

• Customer behaviours that have not yet occurred

• Extreme but plausible scenarios (price shocks, supply disruption, regulation)

For commercial strategy, this is transformational. It means organisations can test value propositions, pricing structures and go-to-market models in simulation before committing capital or brand equity in the real world.

LLMs in Campaigns, Content and Commercial Execution

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often dismissed as content generators. In reality, their strategic value lies in coordination and orchestration.

In campaign and content management, LLMs can:

• Translate strategy into thousands of on-brand content variants

• Adapt tone, framing and messaging by segment, channel and context

• Maintain narrative consistency across global markets

More importantly, LLMs close the loop between insight and execution. They ingest performance data, customer feedback and market signals, then refine campaigns continuously, turning marketing into a self-learning system rather than a sequence of launches.

Listening at Scale: Dialogue, Feedback and Support Intelligence

Customer conversations, calls, chats, emails, reviews, are one of the richest commercial data sources. Historically, they were analysed through sampling and anecdotes. AI changes that.

Modern dialogue analysis systems can:

• Detect emerging unmet needs before they appear in surveys

• Identify friction points driving cost-to-serve and churn

• Quantify emotional drivers behind satisfaction and dissatisfaction

• Link service interactions directly to revenue outcomes

Customer support shifts from a cost centre to a market intelligence engine, feeding strategy, product development and pricing decisions in near real time.

Market Profiling and Opportunity Identification

By integrating internal performance data with external signals, economic data, competitor moves, sentiment, behavioural trends, AI enables dynamic market profiling.

This allows organisations to:

• Identify underserved segments competitors overlook

• Spot inflection points where demand elasticity changes

• Quantify white-space opportunities with greater confidence

• Prioritise markets not just by size, but by winnability

Markets are no longer defined once and reviewed annually. They are continuously re-drawn.

Crafting, Qualifying and Quantifying Value Propositions

AI does not just test messaging, it dissects value itself.

By analysing customer choices, objections, switching behaviour and price sensitivity, AI helps organisations:

• Identify which elements of value actually drive decisions

• Quantify trade-offs customers are willing to make

• Tailor value propositions by segment, industry or use case

The result is a move away from generic positioning toward economically explicit value propositions where benefits are expressed in measurable outcomes, not vague promises.

Dynamic Pricing and the End of Static Price Lists

Pricing is where AI’s strategic impact becomes unavoidable.

AI-driven pricing systems combine demand forecasting, elasticity modelling, competitive intelligence and customer propensity to enable:

• Dynamic pricing by segment, channel or moment

• Scenario-based pricing policies that adapt to market conditions

• Governance frameworks that balance margin, volume and fairness

Crucially, leading organisations separate pricing strategy (the rules, guardrails and objectives) from pricing execution (the real-time adjustments AI makes within those boundaries). This preserves trust and compliance while unlocking speed and precision.

What Comes Next: New Forms of AI and Their Commercial Impact

Several emerging forms of AI will further reshape commercial strategy:

• Causal AI: Moving beyond correlation to understand why customers behave as they do, critical for pricing, regulation and long-term strategy.

• Agentic AI: Autonomous systems that can plan, negotiate and execute multi-step commercial tasks, from campaign optimisation to supplier pricing discussions.

• Multimodal AI: Integrating text, voice, image and behavioural signals into unified customer understanding.

• Decision Intelligence Platforms: Systems designed not to automate tasks, but to improve the quality, consistency and speed of executive decisions.

Together, these point toward a future where AI is not a tool within commercial functions but the operating logic that connects strategy, marketing and operations into a single adaptive system.

The Strategic Imperative

The organisations that win with AI will not be those that deploy the most models or generate the most content. They will be the ones that re-architect how commercial decisions are made, embedding intelligence into value definition, pricing logic, customer engagement and market selection.

AI is no longer about doing what you already do, faster. It is about discovering what you should be doing differently before your competitors realise the game has changed.

The Limits of Scale and the Strategic Case for Specialisation

For all their fluency, large language models (LLMs) have hard commercial limits that are now becoming visible in real deployments. Trained on broad, largely public corpora, they are fundamentally generalists: excellent at synthesis and expression, but weak at deep domain precision, causal understanding and commercially sensitive nuance.

They hallucinate, struggle with edge cases, and critically for strategy, cannot know what they have not been explicitly grounded in. This has driven the emergence of smaller, specialised language and information models, purpose-built around specific industries, value chains or decision domains. These models, often trained or fine-tuned on proprietary data, internal performance history and hard-earned institutional insight, deliver disproportionate value precisely because they reflect how a business actually works, not how the internet describes it.

Techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) anchor model outputs in authoritative, current internal sources, pricing rules, contracts, customer histories, product constraints, turning language models from eloquent guessers into defensible decision-support systems. Strategically, this marks a shift from AI as a rented commodity to AI as embedded intellectual property: the competitive advantage lies not in the model’s size, but in the uniqueness, quality and commercial relevance of the insight it is allowed to access.

AdaptomyDNA: The Missing Operating System for AI-Led Commercial Intelligence

The real leverage of AI lies not just in volume, quality and maturity of data, but in the quality of the instructions it is given and this is where AdaptomyDNA creates decisive advantage.

AdaptomyDNA provides a rigorous process architecture for AI scripting, embedding intelligence within how commercial strategy, innovation and operations are meant to work, not merely what data they can access. With more than 70 tightly defined processes spanning market insight, value creation, pricing, growth and execution, the framework gives AI systems something most organisations lack: a coherent operating logic for customer and commercial value management.

In practice, this means AI is guided by intent, governance and economic discipline, proving that success does not come from spectacular volumes of data alone, nor even proprietary insight, but from clear, repeatable and strategically sound instructions that tell AI what good decision-making actually looks like.

The attached document provides detailed, end-to-end insight into the Market Management discipline processes, setting out how markets are sensed, mapped, analysed, briefed, governed, and continuously improved in practice. For consultants, it offers a concrete, reusable process foundation that can be tailored, deployed, and integrated quickly without starting from first principles. For practitioners, it provides clarity on roles, flows, outputs, and decision points making Market Management actionable rather than abstract. In both cases, the value lies in its level of operational detail: sufficient structure to drive consistency and rigour, yet deliberately open to adaptation so it can be owned, evolved, and embedded within any organisation.

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Nothing matters more in business than knowing your markets and the markets of your customers. Yet most organisations still treat markets as something to observe rather than manage. Market Management exists to correct that failure.

This snapshot provides limited insight into The Market Management Discipline within AdaptomyDNA. There’s a much more detailed set of posts and documents exploring The Market Management Discipline and over 70 other disciplines, clusters, processes, metrics, measures, tools and techniques in AdaptomyDNA, the underlying methodology and approach embedded in The Market Leaders Toolkit.

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What Market Management really is

Market Management is the discipline of deciding where to play. It identifies, qualifies, and prioritises the markets a business chooses to compete in, based on their current and potential value, commercial viability, and strategic fit. It goes far beyond market sizing or segmentation and focuses instead on market fitness, the organisation’s ability to compete effectively and sustainably in chosen markets

It assesses market dynamics, demand, trends, competitive intensity, external influences, and early disruption signals. Crucially, it is designed to identify new and emergent markets early, before they are obvious or crowded.

Origins and positioning

Although markets have been central to business since antiquity, Market Management has historically been absorbed into marketing or treated as a precursor to GTM planning. That’s a mistake. In AdaptomyDNA, Market Management is positioned firmly as a business strategy discipline, not a marketing one

Its foundations draw from strategy consulting, horizon scanning, market definition, segmentation, competitive analysis, and diversification theory. Its professionalisation accelerated through the work of major consultancies and strategy thinkers from the 1960s onward but it is still rarely developed as a discrete, repeatable capability inside organisations.

Why the discipline matters

Market Management underpins almost every major strategic decision a business makes. It is a pre-requisite for:

• Business and corporate strategy

• Go-to-market and commercial strategy

• Marketing and sales strategy

• Operating model and capability design

Without disciplined Market Management, organisations default to inertia: they drift into markets, over-commit to familiar ones, and miss emerging opportunities altogether.

Objectives of Market Management

The discipline is designed to deliver four core outcomes:

1. Always-on market sensing
   Build sensing networks that continuously detect existing, new, and emergent market signals, trends, and disruptions.

2. Explicit ‘where to play’ decisions
   Research, analyse, test, qualify, and quantify markets and segments to assess attractiveness and market fitness, not just size.

3. Shared market understanding
   Regular, tailored market briefings that create dialogue, alignment, and informed decision-making across stakeholders.

4. Portfolio-level adaptability
   Manage markets as a portfolio, knowing where to double down, where to pivot, where to enter, and where to exit based on performance and viability

The Market Management process

Market Management is not a one-off exercise. It is an “always on”, orchestrated process designed for responsiveness and adaptation.

Process elements:

1. Sense and explore market signals and trends

2. Map markets and define boundaries

3. Analyse and test market maps and assumptions

4. Develop clear market briefings

5. Approve and distribute briefings to stakeholders

6. Continuously improve Market Management capability

The process is deliberately designed to allow new information to be integrated at any point, reflecting real-world uncertainty and change.

Practical guidance: what experienced teams do differently

The Snapshot highlights several non-negotiable principles:

• It’s not just about sizing and segmentation
  Market size alone does not determine attractiveness. Commercial viability and the ability to win do.

• Sensing networks beat static research
  Traditional research is episodic. Sensing networks operate in real time and surface weak signals early.

• Assumptions must be tested constantly
  Market maps and briefings should be challenged by diverse internal and external stakeholders.

• Market size isn’t everything
  Value comes from the right combination of markets, not the biggest ones.

• Market strategy comes before GTM
  Too many organisations rush to execution without choosing their markets deliberately.

• Market fitness beats market fit
  Fit is static. Fitness reflects whether the business is structurally capable of competing and creating value over time

Implementing Market Management

Effective Market Management is built through a multi-disciplinary coalition of leaders, practitioners, and trusted external stakeholders with deep market insight. Success depends on clear, regular market briefings that inform decision-making across the organisation.

Key implementation actions include:

• Building internal and external sensing networks

• Ensuring all key stakeholders are regularly and fully briefed

• Communicating market attractiveness and viability clearly

• Managing markets as a portfolio

• Measuring and sharing market performance insights consistently

Bottom line

Market Management is not optional analysis. It is strategic infrastructure. Organisations that fail to manage their markets deliberately don’t make choices, they inherit them. And inherited markets rarely maximise value.

Market Snapshot V1

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In truth, any supposed divide between ‘Brand Management’ and ‘Growth Management’ is little more than a rebranding exercise, a linguistic sleight of hand, functional redefinition, that does nothing to resolve the deeper, structural dysfunctions at the heart of modern enterprise: a chronic lack of definition, discipline, and integration in commercial strategy, innovation, and operations.

Let’s be clear. Marketing and sales have long suffered from siloed implementation, misaligned incentives, and blurred boundaries. What we are witnessing now is not their evolution, but their obfuscation. Replacing these functional titles with ‘Brand’ and ‘Growth’ creates the illusion of focus, but not the substance of coherence.

Worse still, this trend has materialised in the very companies most responsible for the mess, large, process-heavy organisations that institutionalised the fallacy of functional departmentalism. These are the same firms that turned operations into an org chart exercise rather than a value delivery mechanism. And now, in a bid to appear nimble and relevant, they’re trotting out “Brand and Growth” as if it were a strategic revelation, not a semantic distraction.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: there are no less than 70 distinct disciplines that sit across commercial strategy, innovation, and operations. Most organisations can’t articulate half of them, let alone execute them in concert. The issue is not what we call the departments, it’s that the underlying disciplines remain undefined, unassigned, and poorly understood.

This isn’t about achieving mythical “alignment” to the newly anointed gods of Brand and Growth. Alignment, in itself, is a static concept often used to paper over the cracks of poor design and even poorer execution. What matters is adaptability: the ability of an organisation to dynamically configure its capabilities to create and deliver commercial and customer value in real time, across changing conditions. True commercial effectiveness doesn’t come from aligning to abstract ideals, but from embedding a system that constantly interprets market signals, innovates propositions, and operationalises them through integrated disciplines, not functional and departments.

This isn’t a structural problem. It’s a systems integration problem. Commercial performance is not achieved through titles or functions, it is earned through the integrated design and execution of value: from insight to proposition, from product to experience, from price to channel. It demands continuous orchestration, not boardroom pantomime.

Brand building and growth are not opposing forces or sequential stages, they are intertwined elements of the same value engine. Brand building creates the long-term conditions for relevance, trust, and demand; growth fulfils that potential by converting it into measurable outcomes. One without the other is inert. Brand is not a backdrop to growth, and growth is not a departure from brand, it is the activation of brand. They operate concurrently across both short and long-term horizons, and their power lies in their integration, not their separation. To functionalise them, to assign them to distinct departments or divergent mandates, is to misunderstand their shared purpose and risk severing the very feedback loop that drives sustained commercial performance.

The necessary shift isn’t about choosing between different skillsets for brand building versus growth, as if one team dreams and the other delivers. That’s a false premise. The real requirement is the integration of disciplines and processes that collectively drive value creation and capture. This isn’t a debate about functional performance it’s about operational excellence, systemic flow, and measurable outcomes. When organisations anchor themselves in function-based ownership, regardless of whether it’s called marketing and sales or brand and growth, they inevitably fall back into fragmented execution and value leakage.

What’s needed are multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary teams capable of spanning the full commercial spectrum: strategy, innovation, and operations. These teams must be designed not around hierarchy or functional turf, but around the continuous delivery of customer and commercial value. Without this integration, no amount of functional rebranding will move the needle, it will simply perpetuate the same siloed thinking under new labels. In truth, this is not a naming problem. It’s a systems design challenge, and until organisations confront that, they’ll keep mistaking cosmetic change for capability transformation.

What’s required is not another naming convention to appease internal politics or sell a new narrative to shareholders. What’s required is a wholesale reset of how commercial capability is designed, integrated, and deployed, a shift from functional silos to value management systems, from job titles to disciplines, from performance theatre to performance architecture.

Growth and brand have always mattered. But if you need a new department name to remember that, then the problem isn’t your structure, it’s your leadership and your strategy.

Footnote:

For smaller companies without the scale to build fully integrated teams across commercial strategy, innovation, and operations, the answer isn’t to default to hiring a “brand person” or a “growth lead.” What’s needed is a strategic coordinator, someone who understands the full commercial system and can orchestrate both internal capabilities and external partners to assemble a complete value-creating team. This isn’t about in-house headcount, it’s about managing the right blend of expertise, wherever it sits, to ensure the business can define strategy, innovate effectively, and execute with precision. The goal remains the same: the continuous delivery of customer and commercial value, not functional representation, but system-wide impact.

Too often, organisations jump prematurely to go-to-market or product decisions without a rigorous, shared understanding of where to play, why, and under what conditions. This playbook exists to correct that imbalance.

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If you want real insight, that’s insight that competitors can’t copy, automate, or reverse-engineer, you don’t start with the customer. You start with context, the discipline that brings together market and behavioural dynamics, situational analysis and your propositions to guide insight and understanding.

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Personas Feel Useful. Context Understanding Actually Is.

Personas and ICPs are static abstractions. They describe who someone is supposed to be. Context explains what is happening around them and that’s what drives behaviour.

People don’t buy because they are a “Head of Ops at a Series B SaaS company.” They buy because:

• Something broke

• Something changed

• Something became risky

• Something suddenly mattered more than it did yesterday

• Or because waiting now costs more than acting

These are contextual forces. Personas don’t capture them. ICPs flatten them. Positioning often ignores them entirely.

Context Is the Primary Source of Unique Insight

Deep contextual understanding is where non-obvious insight comes from.

Why? Because context reveals:

• Constraints (time, budget cycles, approvals, switching costs)

• Pressures (regulatory shifts, internal politics, market volatility)

• Trade-offs (speed vs certainty, price vs risk, now vs later)

• Triggers (events that turn passive interest into active intent)

Two buyers with identical titles, company sizes, and industries can behave in completely opposite ways because their context is different.

That difference is where differential advantage lives.

Context Shapes Attitudes and behaviours, Not the Other Way Around

Marketing often assumes attitudes and behaviours are fixed traits:

“This persona is risk averse.”
“That ICP values innovation.”

That’s lazy thinking.

Attitudes are conditional. Context determines perception, and perception determines behaviour.

• Price sensitivity increases under budget pressure, even for “premium buyers”

• Risk tolerance drops when accountability rises

• Brand loyalty collapses when timing or cost becomes critical

• Innovation appetite spikes when the status quo fails

Context doesn’t just influence decisions; it reframes how buyers see the same option.

Timing Is Not a Detail. It’s the Decision.

Personas don’t tell you when someone is ready. Context does.

Context explains:

• Why interest exists but buying doesn’t

• Why deals stall without objections

• Why demand appears “out of nowhere”

• Why latent needs stay dormant for months or years

Markets don’t move smoothly. They move when conditions change.

Understanding temporal context, urgency, delay tolerance, decision windows, sequencing, this is what separates marketing that sounds good from marketing that converts.

Context Explains Consideration, Not Just Choice

Personas focus on preferences. Positioning focuses on differentiation. Context explains what even gets considered, what’s valuable, when it’s valuable and the differential advantage that customers want to capture.

Alternatives don’t compete equally at all times. In some contexts:

• “Do nothing” is the strongest competitor

• Manual work beats software

• Cheap beats good

• Fast beats perfect

• Familiar beats better

Without context, you assume you’re competing on features, brand or proposition. With context, you understand you’re competing against inertia, fear, internal friction, timing and situational advantage

That changes everything from messaging to pricing to GTM strategy.

There Is No Positioning Without Context

Positioning without context is just a claim.

Context provides what positioning alone never can:

• Time: when your value actually matters

• Willingness: when buyers are open to engagement

• Readiness: when trade-offs shift in your favour

• Meaning: why your differentiation is relevant now

Positioning defines what you are, how you want to be perceived. Context defines when those matter.

Without context, positioning floats. With context, it lands.

Context Is Dynamic, and That’s the Point

Personas don’t change. Context does. Constantly.

Markets evolve. Conditions shift. Signals emerge before demand shows up. If your marketing system isn’t designed to sense and interpret context, it will always be late.

This requires new competencies:

• Contextual market analysis (not just segmentation)

• Event-driven demand thinking

• Understanding buying conditions, not buyer labels

• Reading leading indicators, not lagging personas

• Designing marketing around situations, not stereotypes

This is harder work. It’s also work competitors avoid, which is exactly why it creates advantage.

Some Simple Truths

• Personas and ICP’s are comfortable, reasuring. Contextual understanding is uncomfortably difficult.

• Personas and ICP’s over simplify. Context explains market and behavioural dynamics.

• Personas and ICP’s give the appearance of alignment. Context aligns resource and decision-making.

• Positoning based on personas and ICP’s is static anc cluncky. Context is nuanced and reflects critical changes in potential buying situations

If you want marketing that merely looks strategic, stick with personas, ICP’s and positioning packs. If you want marketing that actually works, start with context.

Why, because people don’t buy because of who they are. They buy because of where they are, what’s happening, and what it now costs them to act or not to act.

Context is one of over 70 disciplines defined within AdaptomyDNA, the methodology and approach that underpins The Market Leaders Toolkit. You can learn more and keep up to date with developments in the methods and approaches here by subscibing to The Market Leaders Toolkit.

Marketers talk endlessly about “insights,” “demand,” and “value”, but too often leave out the discipline built to explain those forces in the first place: economics. That’s a mistake. Economics isn’t an abstract academic exercise; it’s the operating system underneath every market, every buyer decision, every competitive move, and every growth strategy.

If marketing is about influencing markets, then economics is about understanding how markets fundamentally work. Skip the economics, and you’re effectively flying blind.

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Why Economics Sits at the Heart of Marketing

1. It explains the forces shaping demand

All marketing begins with demand: who wants what, at what price, and under what conditions? Economics gives marketers the frameworks to model:

• Elasticity – How sensitive customers are to changes in price, product features, or availability.

• Substitution effects – What buyers choose when they can’t get you.

• Utility – Why people value certain attributes above others.

Understanding demand isn’t guesswork; it’s economics.

2. It grounds customer insight in real behavioural science

Long before “behavioural marketing,” economists were studying rational choice, bounded rationality, heuristics, and game theory. Economics does the heavy lifting of explaining why humans act the way they do in markets:

• Why groups follow trends

• Why segments differ and group similarities in willingness to pay

• Why incentives outperform messaging

• Why competitive decisions cascade and shape the market

Marketers who rely solely on personas but ignore incentives, collective behaviours and economic circumstance misunderstand what truly drives action.

3. It provides the analytical tools to assess markets and opportunities

Economics is the framework behind core strategic questions:

• How big is the market, really?

• How fast is it growing?

• What frictions constrain adoption?

• What signals indicate latent demand or oversaturation?

• What would shift customer or competitor behaviour at scale?

Market sizing, forecasting, TAM/SAM/SOM, trend analysis, barriers to entry analysis, oportunity costing, these aren’t marketing inventions; they’re economic methods adapted for marketing.

Economics, Competition, and Group Behaviour

Competition isn’t just “what your rivals do”, it’s the interaction of incentives, constraints, and strategic choices across an entire system. Economic theories such as game theory, industrial organisation, network effects, and diffusion models help marketers anticipate:

• How competitors will respond to pricing or product changes

• When markets will tip toward a dominant player

• How groups adopt innovations (or resist them)

• Why some categories fragment while others consolidate

The smartest marketing strategies are often just well-applied microeconomics.

Economics as a Foundation for Market Entry & GTM Strategy

Entering a market requires more than a GTM plan, it requires a market thesis. Economics informs:

• Entry timing (first mover vs. fast follower)

• Pricing strategy (penetration vs. skimming)

• Distribution design (which channels lower friction and cost)

• Positioning (where the most underserved utility exists)

• Competitive barriers (structural advantages, switching costs, substitute threats)

Economics tells you not just how to go to market but where, when, and why.

Using Economics to Spot Trends and Lead Indicators

Marketers obsess over data, but most watch lagging indicators (sales, traffic, conversions) rather than leading economic signals:

• Shifts in consumer confidence

• Input cost inflation

• Employment patterns

• Currency movements

• Market concentration

• Cross-category substitution patterns

Economic indicators often reveal demand shifts months before they materialise in performance dashboards.

Why Economics Is Essential in International Marketing

Experienced marketers know global expansion requires more than translation and distribution and economics helps plug some of the gaps exposing:

• Relative purchasing power

• Cultural elasticity in pricing

• Market structure differences

• Regulatory conditions

• Currency risk

• Comparative competitiveness

• Local production vs. import dynamics

If you rely solely on customer research without macroeconomic context, you’ll misread signals and misjudge opportunity. Comparative market analysis is, fundamentally, an economic exercise.

So Why Don’t Marketers Use Economics More?

Despite its value, economics is still underused in marketing. Why?

1. Lack of awareness

Most marketers never receive formal economic training beyond a single undergraduate module. They default to psychology, branding, comms, and analytics, not market mechanics.

2. Perceived complexity

Economics carries an undeserved reputation for being overly theoretical or mathematical. In reality, most marketing-relevant economics is practical and intuitive once explained.

3. Time pressure and specialisation

Teams are siloed. Economists model markets. Marketers build campaigns. Strategy teams analyse competitors. Few organisations connect the dots.

4. Overreliance on dashboards

Digital marketing created an illusion that performance metrics are enough. But metrics show what happened, not why it happened or what will happen next.

5. Short-termism

Economic insight compounds over time, exactly what quarterly-driven marketing cultures tend to ignore.

A Challenge to Marketers: Why Aren’t You Using Economics Yet?

If economics explains markets, behaviour, growth, competition, and opportunity…
why isn’t it embedded in every marketing function?

Is it:

• A lack of education or training?

• A cultural gap between marketing and strategy teams?

• A perception that economics is “someone else’s job”?

• Or simply not knowing where to start?

Whatever the reason, the future of high-impact marketing belongs to those who understand the full system, the value management system, not just the branding, campaigns and promotions layer.

The Bottom Line

Marketing without economics is like navigation without a map. You can move, and you might even get somewhere but you won’t know if it was the right place, or whether you could have reached it faster.

Economics doesn’t replace creativity, brand building, or storytelling.
It accelerates them.
It sharpens them.
It grounds them in reality.

As markets become more complex, competitive, and interconnected, the marketers who win will be the ones who treat economics not as an elective, but as a core discipline.

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Metrics vs. Measures: Clarity Before Complexity

Let’s start with the fundamentals: measures are raw quantitative observations (e.g., units sold, hours worked, leads generated). Metrics give those numbers context: ratios, comparisons, and trends that make the data useful for decision-making (e.g., sales per rep, cost per lead, customer churn rate).

Understanding this distinction is critical. An overemphasis on individual data points can lead to local optimisation at the expense of system-wide impact. Equally, aggregating too quickly or without critical examination risks obscuring the nuance that reveals operational blind spots.

The Powe and Pitfall of Dashboards and Scorecards

Dashboards and scorecards are the lenses through which businesses observe their performance reality. Done right, they integrate strategy with execution, connect silos, and surface emerging trends. Done wrong, they become static artefacts, designed for yesterday’s questions, misaligned with today’s goals.

The key is adaptability. Scorecards must be configurable to reflect both strategic intent (long-term positioning, market growth, customer transformation) and tactical imperatives (sales push, product rollout, risk containment). What matters on the front line this quarter or for this strategy, may not be what defines success for the board.

Example:

• A SaaS scale-up in hypergrowth mode should prioritise free cash flow, monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth, churn rates, and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

• That same business, 12 months later, may need to pivot focus to gross margin, customer lifetime value (CLV), and customer satisfaction scores as it seeks profitable scale.

Interconnected Insight: Metrics in Combination

The real intelligence lies not in isolated metrics but in how they interrelate. Rising CSAT score might be hollow if churn is also rising, perhaps because high-value users are leaving while low-value users give great feedback. Revenue growth might mask margin erosion or poor-quality customer or contract growth. Operational efficiency gains may come at the expense of employee burnout or brand perception.

Dashboards must be designed to surface these tensions, not hide them. This requires a balance between focus (what are the critical metrics that really matter this quarter, for this strategy, for these tactics?) and breadth (what might we be missing, what are our assumptions, how can we adapt to changing circumstance?).

Reconfiguring for Relevance: Dynamic by Design

Market dynamics, customer expectations, and internal strategy are constantly evolving. So too must the metrics that track them. Static scorecards are a liability. Quarterly or even monthly reviews should challenge whether the right data is being surfaced, whether definitions remain consistent and meaningful, and whether new signals need to be brought in.

Emerging business models (e.g., product-led growth, platform plays, circular economy initiatives) demand new metrics: engagement depth, ecosystem value, carbon intensity per unit of revenue. Leaders must have the courage to sunset outdated measures and experiment with new and novel ones.

Lead and lag

Lead and lag indicators are essential tools for understanding business performance, not just where you are, but where you're headed. Lag indicators measure outcomes after the fact, (revenue, profit, churn), useful for confirming whether objectives were achieved. But by the time they show movement, it's often too late to course-correct. In contrast, lead indicators act as early warning signals, (sentiment index, customer engagement, lead accumulation, forward order book, website traffic, demo bookings, proposal to close ratio),offering semi-predictive insight into future results. The art lies in identifying which lead indicators are truly predictive for your business and aligning them with the right lag outcomes. Without this balance, businesses either fly blind into the future or obsess over results they can no longer influence.

What Should Always Be on the Radar?

There are, of course, foundational metrics and measures that should always be on the strategic radar, some of them include:

• Market size, Market Share and Penetration

• Marketing Investment (excluding sales discounts, price promotions and the cost of distribution), Marketing Expenditure and Costs, R&D Investment

• Cash flow and liquidity, arguably the most important financial metrics of all

• Revenue (total, recurring, per customer segment, product and service)

• Profit margin (gross, contribution, operating)

• Relative Price

• Perceived product and service quality

• Brand recognition and Degree of familiarity

• Growth rate (YoY, QoQ, CAGR)

• Cost to acquire and serve (Reach, Conversion, CAC, customer support cost per ticket)

• Customer satisfaction & loyalty (CSAT, Relative end-user satisfaction, retention, open claims and complaints per customer, LTV)

• Churn (Customer and revenue)

• Revenue, margin and cost per customer

• Recency and frequency of purchase per product, service and customer

• Average Deal Size, Order volume, Cost per order, Win-Loss Ratio

• Employee engagement & productivity, (R&D, Marketing, Sales, Operations)

• Innovation throughput (new product launches, R&D yield)

• Sales effectiveness (conversion rate, win rate, sales cycle time)

• Operational efficiency (cycle times, utilisation rates)

• Risk exposure (regulatory, financial, reputational)

These core indicators provide some insight for meaningful performance dialogue, but they are only the beginning. Depending on the context, nuanced metrics, like EVA, Campaign Cash Flow, Time-to-Value, First Contact Resolution, Relative Sentiment, Innovation Productivity (Ideation, prototype..), New Product Revenue (Last 3 years), Relative Channel Revenue and Costs, Sales Cycle Length, can reveal competitive insights. So too can more advanced Predictive, Prescriptive, Causal, Augmented, Embedded, Behavioural, Commercial Analytics, and, Real Time Business Intelligence, which can be used to great effect to backup and inform any scorecard or dashboard.

Metrics and Measures that Power Customer and Commercial Value Management

A well-designed Customer and Commercial Value Management (CCVM) system hinges on a clear, disciplined understanding of what value means to the customer and to the business. The goal is to surface the metrics that reveal where mutual value is created, eroded, or left unrealised. At the heart of this system are a combination of customer-centric and commercial metrics that, together, form a feedback loop between value delivered and value captured.

On the customer value side, key measures include Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), Product or Servicev Adoption Rate, and Time-to-Benefit (TTB) or Time-to-Value (TTV), all of which signal how quickly, easily, and meaningfuly customers are achieving their desired outcomes. These are complemented by engagement metrics (logins, usage frequency, feature utilisation) and Customer Health Scores, (support activity, financial behaviour, sentiment) that combine qualitative and quantitative indicators of account vitality. On the commercial side, essential measures include Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer Cash Flow, Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Gross Margin per Customer, and Cost-to-Serve, each one representing a dimension of how value is monetised, sustained, or diluted over time. Critically, CCVM systems must be able to segment and cross-reference these metrics, so that high-value, low-cost-to-serve customers are identified, value-destroying segments are addressed, and pricing or service strategies can be aligned accordingly.

The true power of a CCVM framework like AdatomyDNA, from a metrics and measures poiunt of view, lies in its ability to connect operational, financial, and experiential data, to tell the story not just of what customers are doing, but why it matters commercially. This requires dynamic dashboards, adaptive analytics, and regular follow-up analysis to track compound effects. In today’s market, where customer expectations evolve fast and profitability pressures are high, CCVM isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a strategic control system. Businesses that can measure and manage value in both directions are the ones that scale sustainably, price intelligently, and retain competitively.

Make Metrics Matter

To drive meaningful performance, organisations must:

1. Clarify what each metric really means, not just how it’s calculated, but what story it tells, when to use it and when not to use it.

2. Design dashboards and scorecards to reflect strategic and tactical needs: flexible, not fixed, focused on driving customer and commercial value.

3. Continuously audit, adapt and evolve: the metrics, the measures, and the behaviours they drive.

4. Encourage data fluency at every level: leaders must be interpreters and storytellers with data, not just consumers of charts.

5. Ensure accountability and context: every metric should have an owner and a purpose and a clear association with specific strategies, tactics, disciplines or processes.

Data With Direction

In a world where data is abundant, but insight is scarce, the value of measurement lies not in the volume, but in the vision it enables. Metrics should provoke thought, galvanise teams, and point to better outcomes. Let your dashboards evolve, your measures adapt, and your organisation stay alert, not just to where it is, but where it’s going.

The Strategic Skill Behind the Metrics That Matter

Configuring and aligning dashboards and scorecards with business strategy is not a clerical task, it’s a strategic competence that blends analytical rigour, commercial insight, and data fluency. At its core, this is both an art and a science. It demands a nuanced understanding of primary and secondary strategic objectives, the ability to translate those into measurable outcomes, and the skill to configure analytics in a way that both informs and challenges decision-making. The best dashboards are not static, they are dynamic decision-support systems, capable of adapting on the fly to campaign shifts, market turbulence, or evolving business hypotheses. Doing this well is a mark of organisational maturity and leadership credibility.

The real risk lies in oversimplification and misinterpretation. Many organisations fall into the trap of building performance dashboards based on layman's assumptions, linear thinking, snapshot metrics, or misunderstanding statistical signals. Take, for instance, the misreading of randomness as a trend, or the fallacy of assuming a correlation implies causation. Without the analytical literacy to understand probability, noise, variance, and outliers, teams can draw dangerously confident conclusions from misleading patterns. The ability to distinguish between signal and noise, say, a temporary spike in churn due to billing issues vs. a long-term dissatisfaction trend, requires expertise, not instinct.

This is why scorecard design should be seen as a core business capability. Leaders must be able to build, adjust, and interpret dashboards in real time, adding or removing metrics, experimenting with new analytical techniques (like moving averages, cohort analysis, or leading indicator models), and following up with deep-dive analytics to test causality and compound effects.

Crucially, dashboards must not only reflect what has happened but act as sensors, tools to detect subtle shifts in customer behaviour, sentiment, market dynamics, or operational friction. These dashboards are not just reporting tools; they are exploratory instruments, designed to spark questions, drive curiosity, and anticipate change. Building and maintaining this capability requires a deliberate investment in both people and process, analysts, strategists, and domain experts working together to ensure that what we see on the screen actually reflects what is happening in the business. Without that, decisions are made in a fog of false certainty.

For all the noise about data, digital, and “customer-centricity,” marketing remains one of the least methodologically mature functions in the modern enterprise. It lacks the unifying logic of an operating system, and it shows in misfiring campaigns, tactical myopia, performance theatre, and a persistent inability to prove, let alone maximise, commercial impact.

The harsh truth? Marketing doesn’t have a method problem; it has a methodology vacuum.

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Despite decades of books, frameworks, tools, and technologies, there is no accepted standard for how marketing should function as a commercial discipline. Not as a department, not as a function. Not as a collection of channels. But as a dynamic system for creating, managing, and extracting customer and commercial value. And that absence is costing businesses real money, real credibility, and real opportunity.

The Mirage of Method

Ask a marketer how their function works, and you’ll often get a string of tactics: “We do content marketing. We’ve got an ABM strategy. We’re ramping up paid media.” Probe further, and you'll hear about segmentation, personas, IDC’s, positioning, funnels, campaign calendars, KPIs. But dig beneath the surface, and you’ll find something alarming: a lack of underlying structure. No operating system. No end-to-end logic.

Compare this to finance or supply chain, domains underpinned by rigorous frameworks, clear processes, and continuous improvement cycles. In marketing, by contrast, structure is often mistaken for bureaucracy, and frameworks are seen as antithetical to creativity.

That mindset is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.

Creativity Is Not the Enemy of Process, It’s the Output of It

Let’s dispel a myth: process does not kill creativity. In fact, process makes creativity possible at scale. A rigorous methodology can liberate teams from tactical firefighting, free up bandwidth for strategic thinking, and expose what works so it can be amplified.

Yet marketing continues to conflate spontaneity with innovation. As a result, we get randomness disguised as agility, and activity mistaken for impact. Under pressure from boards and CFOs, marketers scramble to prove performance using metrics that often measure correlation, not causation, all while operating without a clear theory of value creation.

The Real Issue: Marketing Is Trapped in Functional Thinking

Here lies the root of the problem. Marketing is still seen, and sees itself, as a function, not part of a commercial and customer value management system.

This legacy view reduces marketing to communications, campaigns, and collateral. It separates it from product, sales, customer success, and commercial strategy. And it leaves marketing fighting for scraps at the strategic table, even as customer value becomes the currency of competitive advantage.

But imagine a different paradigm, one where marketing is reimagined as the orchestrator of customer and commercial value. Not in a silo, but as the connective tissue across the enterprise. In this model, marketing is less about departments and more about dynamic capability, a configuration of disciplines, processes, and data flows designed to understand, shape, and monetise demand.

A New Operating System for Marketing

What marketing needs now is not another campaign framework or Martech stack. It needs a coherent commercial operating system, one that integrates strategy, planning, execution, measurement, and optimisation into a unified model.

Such a system must:

• Anchor marketing in business value, not just brand visibility.

• Integrate disciplines across silos, from insight to innovation to revenue realisation.

• Balance adaptability with discipline, enabling agility without chaos.

• Support strategic choices, not just tactical actions.

• Create space for creativity, by eliminating operational waste and confusion.

Frameworks like AdaptomyDNA (Sense, Re-think, Propagate, Fulfil, Renew), point in this direction, modular, scalable systems that bring method to the madness, by building marketing capability as a system of systems through over 70 integrated disciplines. Not a process for its own sake, but a means to drive coherence, performance, and credibility. A way to understand and build differential advantage through a customer and commercial value management system.

Frameworks like AdaptomyDNA bring essential structure to the chaos of modern marketing by systematically organising tools, techniques, tactical approaches, metrics, and measures within a coherent set of disciplines. AdaptomyDNA assigns planning and execution approaches like SOSTAC, OGSM, RACE, or JTBD to the appropriate context, sequencing and applying them where they can genuinely drive strategic and commercial value. It’s the same with other analysis tools, techniques and approaches like Stacey Framework, Cynefin, BCG Matrix, The 4 P’s and COM-B. This ensures that executional approaches are not used in isolation but as part of an integrated system that supports traceable outcomes.

Similarly, performance metrics, including structured models like Gartner’s hierarchy, Free Cash Flow, Time to Benefit, Time to Market, EVA and Churn gain real meaning only when anchored to defined processes, aligned disciplines, and specific value management objectives. In this way, AdaptomyDNA transforms fragmented marketing practice into an orchestrated commercial capability and value management system. It facilitates development of adaptive multi-metric and measurement dashboards aligned with value management outcomes, not myopic departmental or functional performance metrics and measures that have little or no association with delivery of commercial and customer value.

Find out more about AdaptomyDNA and The Market Leaders Toolkit, which includes AdaptomyDNA and download the Introductory Workbook here:

Breaking the Straightjacket Before It's Too Late

Marketing is under siege. Budget pressures are tightening. Accountability demands are escalating. AI is commoditising execution. Without a clear, credible, and commercial framework for action, marketing risks becoming irrelevant, a cost centre, not a growth engine.

The way out is not more tools, more tactics, or more trend-chasing. It is a reconstitution of marketing as a strategic capability built on method, orchestrated across disciplines, and anchored in customer and commercial outcomes.

It’s time to stop asking whether marketing is “creative enough” and start asking whether it’s coherent enough to compete.

Because in the end, without method, marketing can’t scale. It can’t lead. And it certainly can’t deliver what the business and the customer actually need.

A Call to Action

Business leaders: demand more from your marketing teams than PowerPoint, personas and random collection of half-baked approaches, tools, techniques, and isolated technology. Insist on integrated frameworks, disciplined execution, and commercial acumen. Ask marketing to ‘step up’ and orchestrate customer and commercial value, not simply market research and campaigns.

CMOs: abandon departmental functionalism and rewire marketing around customer and commercial value creation and delivery, not campaign throughput but how to orchestrate strategic and tactical value through a value management system. Adopt, adapt, or develop a methodology that elevates marketing to its rightful strategic role.

Marketers: this is your moment to lead, but only if you’re willing to break the tactical addiction and embrace a broader commercial mandate. Develop intimate understanding of customer and commercial value creation and delivery, value management systems and the tools, technologies and approaches that support them.

The age of marketing as departmental functionalism is over. It’s time to get strategic, it’s time to expand, to orchestrate, it’s time to get methodological.

COM-B stands for Capability, Opportunity, Motivation, and Behaviour. It's a framework used in the strategic and innovation management fields to understand and facilitate change in behaviours. The model posits that for a behaviour (B) to occur, an individual must have the capability (C) to engage in the behaviour, the opportunity (O) to perform it, and the motivation (M) to initiate and sustain it.

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Background and History of COM-B

Developed by psychologists Susan Michie, Maartje M van Stralen, and Robert West, the COM-B system is rooted in the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) framework. It was introduced as a comprehensive model to decipher the intricacies of behaviour change and to guide the development of interventions aimed at enhancing or modifying human behaviour for better outcomes in health, organizational change, and beyond.

Core Components of COM-B

1. Capability: This refers to an individual's psychological and physical capacity to engage in the activity concerned. It encompasses having the necessary knowledge and skills.

2. Opportunity: This pertains to all the factors that lie outside the individual that make the behaviour possible or prompt it. It can be social or environmental.

3. Motivation: This includes all those brain processes that energise and direct behaviour, not just goals and conscious decision-making. It encompasses habitual processes, emotional responses, and analytical thinking.

Implementation Steps of COM-B

1. Identifying the Desired Behaviour Change: Clearly define what behaviour needs to change.

2. Assessing the COM-B Components: Evaluate the current state of the target group's capabilities, opportunities, and motivations related to the desired behaviour.

3. Selecting Appropriate Interventions: Based on the assessment, choose interventions that can effectively address the deficits or enhance the strengths in each COM-B component.

4. Implementing the Interventions: Carry out the selected interventions.

5. Evaluating and Adapting: Monitor the effectiveness of the interventions and make necessary adjustments.

What COM-B is Used For

The COM-B system is used to understand behaviour in a detailed manner and to design behavioural interventions in health promotion, organisational development, public policy, and beyond. It serves as a foundation for developing targeted strategies to facilitate positive change.

Challenges of Using COM-B

• Complexity: Understanding and modifying human behaviour is complex; it requires thorough analysis and tailored interventions.

• Resource Intensive: Developing and implementing effective interventions may require significant time and resources.

• Measurement: Accurately measuring changes in capability, opportunity, and motivation can be challenging.

Advantages and Disadvantages of COM-B

Advantages:

• Provides a comprehensive understanding of behaviour.

• Can guide the development of more effective interventions.

• Is adaptable to different contexts and behaviours.

Disadvantages:

• Its complexity can make it difficult to apply in practice.

• May require substantial resources to implement effectively.

Business Risks and Opportunities of Using COM-B

Risks:

• Misapplication of the model could lead to ineffective or counterproductive interventions.

• Significant investment with no guaranteed return if behaviour change interventions do not work as expected.

Opportunities:

• Can lead to more effective and efficient strategies for change management.

• Offers a structured approach to understanding and influencing customer behaviour, employee performance, and organizational culture.

Business and Commercial Benefits of COM-B

Applying the COM-B model can lead to improved health outcomes, enhanced organisational performance, increased employee engagement, and better customer satisfaction. By understanding and effectively addressing the factors that influence behaviour, businesses can achieve strategic goals, foster innovation, and maintain a competitive edge.

Conclusion

The COM-B framework offers a structured, comprehensive approach to understanding and facilitating behaviour change. While it presents challenges, including its complexity and the resources required for implementation, the advantages and potential benefits it offers can be substantial. By effectively applying this model, organisations can unlock new opportunities for growth and development, making it a valuable tool in the arsenal of strategic and innovation management.

Summary of The Behavioural Change Wheel (BCW)

The Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) framework is a comprehensive model designed to guide the development and implementation of interventions aimed at changing behaviour. It integrates theories of behaviour change into a coherent structure, offering a systematic way to understand the drivers of behaviour and how to influence them. The BCW was developed through an expert consensus by synthesizing 19 frameworks of behaviour change identified in the literature. The core of this model is the COM-B system, which asserts that for a behaviour (B) to occur, an individual must have the capability (C), the opportunity (O), and the motivation (M) to engage in it.

Core of the BCW: COM-B System

• Capability: Refers to an individual's physical and psychological capacity to engage in the behaviour.

• Opportunity: Encompasses all the external factors that make the behaviour possible or prompt it.

• Motivation: Includes the processes that direct behaviour, including habits, emotional responses, and decision-making processes.

Layers of the BCW:

1. COM-B System (as described above) sits at the centre.

2. Intervention Functions: Surrounding the COM-B are nine intervention functions intended to address deficits or strengths in capability, opportunity, or motivation. These include education, persuasion, incentivisation, coercion, training, restriction, environmental restructuring, modelling, and enablement.

3. Policy Categories: The outer layer consists of seven policy categories that can support the intervention functions. These categories are communication/marketing, guidelines, fiscal measures, regulation, legislation, environmental/social planning, and service provision.

Steps for Using the BCW:

1. Define the Problem in Behavioural Terms: Clearly specify the behaviour that needs to change.

2. Select the Target Behaviour: Identify and prioritize the behaviour(s) for change based on criteria such as impact, changeability, and spillover effects.

3. Specify the Target Behaviour: Understand the behaviour in detail, including who needs to perform it, what needs to change, when, where, and how often the behaviour occurs.

4. Identify What Needs to Change: Use the COM-B system to diagnose what needs to change in terms of capability, opportunity, and motivation.

5. Identify Intervention Functions: Choose the appropriate intervention functions to address the identified needs.

6. Identify Policy Categories: Select relevant policy categories that can support the chosen intervention functions.

7. Design the Intervention: Develop detailed plans for the intervention, considering how it will be implemented and evaluated.

Application and Impact

The BCW framework has been applied across a wide range of contexts, including public health, organisational change, environmental sustainability, and safety. Its structured approach allows for targeted interventions that are more likely to be effective in changing behaviour. By addressing the underlying components of behaviour (capability, opportunity, motivation), the BCW facilitates the design of comprehensive strategies that can lead to sustained behavioural change.

The Behaviour Change Wheel is a powerful tool for understanding and influencing behaviour in various settings. It offers a systematic approach to diagnosing behavioural issues and designing interventions to address them, making it an invaluable tool both tactically and strategically.

Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) is a valuation method used to estimate the value of an investment based on its expected future cash flows. This technique is widely utilised in finance, particularly for the valuation of businesses, investments, and projects. The essence of DCF lies in the principle that the value of an asset is fundamentally the present value of all future cash flows it is expected to generate.

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Background and History of DCF

The DCF method has roots that trace back to the early 20th century, evolving from the concept of the time value of money, which posits that a unit of currency today is worth more than a unit of currency in the future due to its potential earning capacity. This concept underpins the DCF analysis, providing a framework for assessing the value of an asset by considering the future cash flows it will generate and discounting them back to their present value. The origins of DCF is largely attributed to the work of Irving Fisher, (1930) and John Burr Williams (1938).

Core Components of DCF

The DCF analysis primarily involves three key components:

1. Forecasted Cash Flows: An estimate of the cash an investment will generate over a certain period. This includes both inflows and outflows, reflecting the net cash expected to be received.

2. Discount Rate: A rate of return used to convert future cash flows into their present value. This rate typically reflects the risk-free rate plus a premium for the risk associated with the investment.

3. Terminal Value: An estimate of an investment's value at the end of the forecast period. This accounts for the majority of an asset's value in many cases and is calculated using either a perpetuity growth model or an exit multiple.

Calculating DCF

To calculate DCF, follow these steps:

1. Forecast the investment’s cash flows for a specific period.

2. Choose an appropriate discount rate to reflect the investment's risk and the time value of money.

3. Calculate the present value of each forecasted cash flow using the discount rate.

4. Estimate the terminal value of the investment at the end of the forecast period and discount it back to its present value.

5. Sum the present values of all forecasted cash flows and the terminal value to get the total DCF valuation.

Formula:

Discountade Cash Flow (DCF) = CF1/(1+r) for P1 + CF2/(1+r) for P2 + CFn/(1+r) for Pn

Where CF=Cash Flow, P=Period, r=Interest Rate and n=time in years before future cash flows happen

When to Use DCF

DCF is particularly useful in situations where:

• Valuing businesses, projects, or any investments generating cash flows.

• Making capital budgeting decisions.

• Evaluating mergers and acquisitions.

• Comparing investment opportunities.

Interpreting DCF Results

The DCF valuation provides an intrinsic value of an investment, reflecting its worth based on the cash it's expected to generate. If the DCF value is higher than the current cost of the investment, it may be undervalued and a good investment opportunity. Conversely, if it's lower, the investment might be overvalued.

Challenges of Using DCF

The main challenges include:

• Sensitivity to assumptions: Small changes in input assumptions (cash flow projections, discount rate) can significantly alter the valuation.

• Forecasting errors: Predicting future cash flows with accuracy is inherently difficult.

• Terminal value assumptions can disproportionately affect the valuation.

Advantages and Disadvantages of DCF

Advantages:

• Grounded in the fundamental principle of the time value of money.

• Provides a detailed, intrinsic valuation.

• Flexible in accommodating different types of cash flow scenarios.

Disadvantages:

• Highly sensitive to assumptions.

• Requires extensive data and forecasting, which can be subject to significant uncertainty.

• May not adequately capture intangible value or market sentiment.

Business Risks and Opportunities of Using DCF

Risks include reliance on inaccurate forecasts, which can lead to poor investment decisions. However, DCF also presents opportunities for investors to identify undervalued assets or make more informed strategic decisions by understanding the intrinsic value of their investments.

Commercial Benefits of DCF

DCF analysis helps businesses and investors make informed decisions, enhance strategic planning, and identify value creation opportunities. It promotes a disciplined approach to investment and valuation, focusing on underlying value rather than market sentiment.

Conclusion

DCF is a powerful valuation tool that offers a detailed and fundamental analysis of an investment's worth. While it comes with its set of challenges and sensitivities, its benefits in strategic financial planning and decision-making are undeniable. By carefully applying the DCF method and critically evaluating its assumptions and results, businesses and investors can significantly enhance their strategic decisions and investment outcomes.

The McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey (CDJ) is a refined approach that extends beyond traditional sales funnels, providing a comprehensive framework to understand and influence customer interactions from initial consideration to post-purchase behaviour.

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This approach is designed to cater to the complexities of modern consumer behaviour, which involves multiple touchpoints and channels. It suggests a more iterative, non-linear consumer journey. However, it is still a limited view of the complete customer journey largely focused on interactions between the business and its prospects or customers through the consumer pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase buying cycle. It’s an elaboration of customer experience not their complete journey as a prospect, customer or consumer.

Background and History of McKinsey Consumer Decision Journeys

Developed by McKinsey & Company, the CDJ model emerged from the recognition that the consumer decision process is a circular journey with key stages. This approach was developed as an evolution of the linear purchase funnel in response to changes in consumer behaviour driven by digital technology, acknowledging that customer engagement extends beyond the start of the purchase cycle and end long after any purchase has been completed.

Core Components of McKinsey Customer Decision Journeys

1. Consider: The phase where consumers consider an initial set of brands, based on brand perception and exposure to recent touchpoints.

2. Evaluate: Consumers actively evaluate their initial consideration set by seeking information and insights.

3. Buy: The actual purchase decision.

4. Enjoy, Advocate, and Bond: After purchase, consumers form an impression that influences their bond with the brand, potentially leading to repeat purchases and advocacy. Of course, thinking around the degree to which consumers bond with a brand, their propensity to buy again and advocacy have all recently been challenged with empirical evidence. So, this element of the model should be considered carefully.

Implementation Steps of McKinsey Consumer Decision Journeys

1. Identify Touchpoints: Recognising all potential customer interactions or touchpoints with the brand throughout the journey.

2. Evaluate the Impact: Assessing the influence of each touchpoint in terms of consumer decision and experience.

3. Allocate Resources: Prioritising investments in touchpoints that offer the most influence over consumer behaviour and decisions.

4. Create a Feedback Loop: Using insights from consumer interactions to refine and optimise the journey.

Usage of McKinsey Consumer Decision Journeys

The McKinsey CDJ is utilised to enhance customer engagement strategies, optimise marketing expenditure, and improve overall customer satisfaction by delivering more personalised and relevant experiences across the journey. They are also used to inform proposition, offer, product and service design.

Challenges of Using McKinsey Consumer Decision Journeys

• Pre-disposition if not considered: Consumer context prior to the start of the journey needs to be clear

• There are exits to consider: Exists from the journey are not given consideration they may need

• Loyalty and re-purchase are not guaranteed: CDJ’s don’t fully consider latest thinking around loyalty and retention

• Complexity in Integration: Requires integration across various business functions.

• Data Management: Challenges in capturing and analysing data from multiple touchpoints effectively.

• Adaptation to Change: Continuously evolving consumer behaviours can make the journey mapping quickly outdated.

Advantages and Disadvantages of McKinsey Consumer Decision Journeys

Advantages:

• Can provide more insight into the customer experience.

• Provides a better, non-linear perspective of the consumer journey than traditional ‘funnel’.

• Focuses on long-term customer engagement and loyalty (although this can be challenged).

• Can help optimise marketing spend by targeting influential touchpoints.

Disadvantages:

• Can be resource-heavy in terms of time and investment.

• Can lead to assumptions about re-purchase, loyalty and advocacy

• Requires high levels of cross-functional collaboration.

• Can detract attention from the big picture, the complete prospect, customer and consumer journey.

• Risk of data privacy issues with extensive customer tracking.

Business Risks and Opportunities of Using McKinsey Consumer Decision Journeys

Risks:

• High upfront costs with uncertain immediate returns.

• Can be misleading with regard to re-purchase, loyalty and advocacy

• Can become quickly dated and needs constant curation to remain useful in decision-making.

Opportunities:

• Increased customer loyalty and lifetime value, (can be disputed).

• Develop better competitor insight

• Improved customer insights leading to better product and service offerings.

• Enhance customers’ experience

Business and Commercial Benefits of McKinsey Consumer Decision Journeys

Companies implementing the CDJ can expect enhanced customer insight, greater marketing effectiveness, and stronger customer relationships, which can translate into increased sales and sustainable growth. They can also expect to improve propositions, offers, product and services and systematically build differential advantage.

Alternative Tools and Techniques to McKinsey Consumer Decision Journeys

• Customer journey management: Broader than customer experience management and CDJ’s that encompasses multiple experiences and CDJ’s and reflects the true customer journey.

• Customer Experience Mapping: Broader than CDJs, encompassing all interactions.

• Service Blueprinting: Detailed operational planning tool focused on service delivery.

• Use cases: although not primarily designed to model consumer journeys the technique can be adapted to provide more insight into specific ‘use’ for specific consumers.

Re-thinking Consumer Decision Journeys

The original artcicle by McKinsey makes some great points and is well worth reading. If nothing else it highlights the futility of traditional 'funnel thinking' with regard to consumer journeys.

However, there are just a few reasons to re-think the McKinsey model for strategy and marketing decision-makers:

1. Triggers can be positive and negative; they can lead to consideration or an early exit from the journey.

2. There are exits to consider. Journeys are not always completed. Consideration of exists is a critical process in the journey. Understanding the reasons exit decisions are made can be as, and sometimes more informative than continued progress through the rest of the journey.

3. Loyalty or re-purchase is not guaranteed. As the original article says there are different kinds of loyalty, passive and active loyalists and opportunities to interrupt the 'loyalty loop'. It important to emphasise this and consider recent evidence that would suggests 'loyalty' isn't what we all used to think it was and consumers are a lot more promiscuous that we assumed.

Conclusion

The McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey offers a dynamic and detailed framework for understanding and influencing modern consumer behaviour. While challenging to implement, the strategic insights and potential for personalised customer engagement it provides can significantly benefit businesses seeking to optimise their customer interactions.

Recommended Reading and References

• McKinsey & Company publications and whitepapers on customer decision journeys, (see below)

• "Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business" by Harley Manning, Kerry Bodine, and Josh Bernoff.

• Academic research on multi-channel marketing and consumer behaviour.

Final Thoughts

An essential aspect to consider about the McKinsey CDJ is its dynamic nature; it requires ongoing adjustments and refinements as market conditions and consumer behaviours evolve. Keeping the model responsive to these changes is crucial for maintaining its effectiveness.

The McKinsey Article:

Synopsis

Jørgen Vetvik, published in the McKinsey Quarterly in 2009, provides a comprehensive update on the traditional marketing funnel model, introducing the concept of the "consumer decision journey" (CDJ). This revised framework addresses the complexities of modern consumer behaviour influenced by an increase in product choices and digital channels.

The authors assert that the traditional funnel, which views the consumer's process as a linear path culminating in a purchase, is outdated. Instead, they propose the CDJ, which is more cyclic and involves four key phases: initial consideration, active evaluation, closure, and post-purchase experience. These stages represent potential battlegrounds where marketers can influence the consumer's decision.

In the initial consideration phase, consumers form an early set of brands from which they might purchase based on their brand perception and exposures to marketing touchpoints. During the active evaluation phase, this set might expand as consumers actively seek information and compare options, contrary to the traditional funnel that suggests a narrowing of choices.

The closure phase occurs when consumers make their purchase decision, and the post-purchase phase influences their future brand loyalty and purchasing behaviour. The authors highlight the shift from one-way communication (from marketers to consumers) to a two-way conversation, necessitating marketers to adopt new strategies for engaging consumers throughout their decision journey.

Additionally, the research identifies two types of brand loyalty: active and passive. Active loyalists not only repeat purchase but also advocate for the brand, whereas passive loyalists remain with a brand due to inertia and are susceptible to switching if a better offer presents itself. The authors suggest this distinction is crucial for developing effective loyalty programs and managing customer relationships.

The paper also discusses the necessity for marketers to align their strategies and investments with the most influential touchpoints along the CDJ. Emphasising consumer-driven marketing, the authors argue for the importance of leveraging digital tools and platforms to engage consumers during the active evaluation phase, where peer reviews and word-of-mouth have significant impacts.

In conclusion, the authors of the paper advocate for a holistic approach to understanding and engaging with consumers throughout their decision journey. By prioritising spending on impactful touchpoints and tailoring messages to meet consumers' needs at each stage, marketers can more effectively influence consumer decisions in a complex, multi-channel marketplace.