Sign in with Google David C. Edelman is a digital transformation pioneer, executive advisor, and Harvard Business School professor with over 30 years of experience driving growth at the intersection of technology and consumer experience.
Streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping. That shorthand for the elements of today’s customer-decision journey was introduced by BCG and Google a year ago. A lot has happened since. Quickly and dramatically, those behaviors are now connecting much more tightly, and that compression is forcing a reconsideration of many marketers’ strategies.
It has been clear for some time that consumers no longer proceed neatly from awareness to consideration to purchase. They bounce between platforms. They multitask. They shift between entertainment and intent.
What is new is the role generative AI is playing in accelerating those movements. Consumers can now act spontaneously, yet also research deeply and feel confident in their decisions. They make decisions on considered purchases faster (a dishwasher), but then also add more research and consideration, without losing speed, for what had been lower risk purchases (dishwashing detergent).
Brands are being evaluated as solutions to a person’s specific situation, not simply as products within a category.
Early data from AI-enabled search experiences shows that people are now asking much longer, more descriptive queries than they did in the past. They are no longer just typing keywords. They share context, constraints, preferences, urgency, and sometimes even emotion. They iterate and refine their conversation. Then, AI-powered search systems like LLMs increasingly break their queries into multiple search streams and synthesize the results in real time. Research that once required dozens of tabs comes together in seconds.
Similar dynamics are emerging across the broader commerce ecosystem. Consumers are using conversational assistants, retailer tools, video platforms, and social discovery in combination, often within a single session, to find exactly what they want and need. The result is not only a faster consumer journey but a different one.
This shift does not simply change your media planning. It changes the fundamental unit of competition. Increasingly, brands are being evaluated as solutions to a person’s specific situation, not simply as products within a category.
The journey is compressing, and solution is the organizing principle
A familiar pattern is now playing out across categories. A consumer encounters something while scrolling, perhaps a product demonstration in an unfamiliar category. They immediately shift into exploration mode, asking for the best options under a certain price that ship quickly and meet specific personal criteria. A short review or unboxing video provides reassurance. The purchase then happens right within the platform without breaking the flow.
The same compression shows up in larger decisions as well, from home improvement and travel to health, wellness, and financial services. Wherever uncertainty is high, people now expect to move from inspiration to confidence quickly.
Instead of leading with SKUs or features, lead with the job to be done and the outcome people care about.
Different parts of the ecosystem play different roles in this process. Social platforms have become discovery engines, especially for younger audiences. Video has become a critical confidence layer, allowing people to see how something works in real life. Retail environments and marketplaces increasingly support comparison and decision-making, not just transactions. Put simply, streaming and scrolling create possibility. Searching structures choice, in many forms. Shopping happens wherever confidence peaks.
Rethinking how to create, capture, and convert demand
As the traditional funnel has lost relevance, many marketing teams have shifted to a simpler set of goals: create demand, capture demand, convert demand. The mistake is treating these as sequential stages. In a compressed customer-decision journey, they need to show up continuously across all four behaviors, and they need to be anchored in solution language, not product language.
Create demand: Make the problem, and the solution, vivid
Demand today is often created in moments that do not look like traditional marketing. A creator’s “day in the life.” A short demo. A podcast mention. A live stream. A community discussion. The common thread is not the channel. It is the framing of a situation and a better way forward. Glossier created demand by reframing beauty as “real skin in real life.” User-generated content, routines, and before/after storytelling made the brand feel like a solution to insecurity and overcomplication, not just another cosmetics line.
For marketers, this requires a shift in emphasis. Instead of leading with SKUs or features, lead with the job to be done and the outcome people care about. Show how life improves, how complexity is reduced, or how confidence is gained. Design creative that demonstrates progress, not just promise.
Consumers now describe what they need in much more detail. That puts pressure on brands to provide comprehensible solutions.
Successful brands have done this by building ecosystems around ongoing improvement rather than one-time purchase. Nike’s training and run apps are a well-known example. Products are embedded within coaching, community, and self-development, turning footwear into part of a broader fitness solution and identity.
Capture demand: Win the moment someone describes their context
Capturing demand used to mean showing up on the right keywords. Increasingly, it means being the best answer when someone explains their situation.
Consumers now describe what they need in much more detail. That puts pressure on brands to provide comprehensible solutions. Content needs to be useful, specific, and credible. Comparisons, FAQs, “best for” guides, troubleshooting, setup videos, and transparent policies all play a role.
Depth matters, especially in complex categories. Product and service data need to go beyond basic specifications to include real-world performance, compatibility, trade-offs, sustainability claims, and outcomes. If buyers can ask more detailed questions, brands need to provide trustworthy answers. Ikea’s planning tools, room visualizers, and detailed product data allow customers to ask very specific questions about space, budget, and lifestyle. Ikea captures demand by helping people solve, “Will this actually work in my home?”
It also means treating video platforms, marketplaces, forums, and communities as part of the search landscape. People “search” wherever they expect to learn. Winning capture requires showing up consistently across those environments with information that actually helps. “Wirecutter,” in The New York Times, excels at contextual capture: “best for small apartments,” “best if you have pets,” “best on a budget.” Its structured comparisons and trade-offs make it highly legible to both humans and algorithms.
Many teams are adopting a recurring “answer audit” as a practical discipline. For their most common customer scenarios, they examine what someone would encounter across social discovery, video search, retail listings, and AI assistants. Gaps and inconsistencies quickly become visible.
Convert demand: Remove friction where confidence peaks
Conversion is no longer an end-of-journey event. It happens whenever confidence is high enough, which may be much earlier than marketers expect.
Friction remains the enemy. High abandonment rates are well documented, and they persist largely because basic barriers remain: unclear pricing, complicated checkout, hidden fees, confusing returns, or too many steps.
A more useful way to think about brand is as the sum of signals that make a company recognizable as a solution.
The work here is often unglamorous but critical. Warby Parker’s home try-on programs, transparent pricing, and simple returns remove key barriers to buying glasses online. Confidence is built before purchase, not after. Reduce steps. Clarify terms. Make shipping and returns obvious. Bring commerce closer to the content that builds confidence. Offer low-risk first steps through trials, samples, or guarantees. Brands that treat conversion as a design problem see meaningful gains.
Brand matters, but not as a line item
As consumer journeys compress, some clients of mine have framed a false trade-off between brand and performance. A more useful way to think about brand is as the sum of signals that make a company recognizable as a solution: product quality; customer experience; creator and customer advocacy; community reputation; and the clarity and usefulness of content. It all feeds how both people and machines interpret a brand.
In a world where consumers ask richer questions and get synthesized guidance instantly, the winners will not be the loudest brands. They will be the ones that are easiest to recognize as the right solution in context.
That is the real update to the customer-decision journey. It has not just become messier. It has become faster, more compressed, and more demanding of clarity. Are you the customer’s solution? Will they know it?
