Customers in Motion

What Customers in Motion means

Customers in Motion is the claim that a customer's condition changes independently of brand action, continuously, and that marketing is therefore always operating on a moving target rather than a stationary one.

Three things about a customer move whether or not anyone markets to them. Readiness: whether the problem is urgent enough to act on this month. Trust: whether they believe you, which compounds or decays but never sits still. Consideration: how seriously they are weighing you against the alternatives, including the alternative of doing nothing, which is usually the strongest competitor in the room.

None of those three is set by a campaign. A budget freeze, a colleague's recommendation, a bad experience with someone else, a promotion, a diagnosis, a competitor's advertisement: any of these moves a customer several positions without a single marketing action from you. By the time a message arrives, the person it was written for has already changed.

Why the funnel gets this wrong

The funnel is not a bad diagram. It is an accurate description of something else.

A funnel describes the company's process: how leads are handled internally, which stage a deal sits in, what happens next inside the organisation. As a model of internal work it is useful and there is no reason to abandon it. The error is a category error, and it happens when the funnel is used as a model of the customer, at which point it starts making three claims that are simply not true of people.

It claims customers enter at the top. They do not: many arrive already convinced, from a recommendation, and skip most of it. It claims motion is forward and sequential. It is not: people move closer, stall, reconsider, drift, and return, often several times. It claims the company controls the pace. It does not, and this is the assumption that does the most damage, because it turns every slow quarter into a question about which lever to pull rather than a question about what changed for the customer.

The Marketing Helix keeps the shape that matches the behaviour: motion that returns to the same territory at a different level, because a customer who comes back is not the same customer who left.

The four motions, and what each one asks of you

Entering. Someone becomes aware that a problem exists, usually because of something in their life rather than something in your marketing. The job here is to be findable and legible at the moment of a question you did not schedule.

Closing. Consideration deepens. Trust is the constraint, not information. More material rarely helps at this point, and evidence usually does.

Drifting. Attention moves elsewhere for reasons that are frequently unrelated to you. This is the motion most companies handle worst, because drift is silent and looks identical to disinterest. It is usually neither.

Returning. The customer comes back, changed, having learned things in the interval. This is where a helix differs from a funnel most sharply. A returning customer is not re-entering at the top. Treating them as a new lead is one of the most reliable ways to lose them.

What follows if you accept it

Alignment is temporary, not permanent. A message can stop working without ever becoming wrong. It was aligned to a condition, the condition moved, and the message stayed where it was. This is the single most useful consequence of the model, because it reframes declining performance as a question about drift rather than an accusation about quality.

Plan for a range of conditions, not a moment. If you cannot know where a given customer is, the strongest position is to be adequate across the range rather than optimised for one point in it. Campaigns tuned to a single assumed moment are fragile in exactly the way motion predicts.

Observe before deciding. Describe what the customer is doing before deciding what the company should do about it. Most marketing arguments are really disagreements about an unstated assumption about the customer's current condition, and they get shorter when the assumption is made explicit.

Trust is the load-bearing variable. Of the three things that move, trust is the one that most affects the other two, and it is the slowest to build and the fastest to lose. That asymmetry is why the framework treats trust as a condition to be maintained rather than an outcome to be produced.

What it does not mean

It does not mean customers are unpredictable. Individual motion is unpredictable. Patterns across many customers are not, and they are measurable. Motion is an argument for measuring the pattern, not an excuse for abandoning the attempt.

It does not mean planning is pointless. It means planning around a single predicted moment is fragile. Planning for a range is more work and holds up considerably better.

It does not mean the funnel should be thrown away. Keep it for what it describes accurately, which is your own process. Stop asking it to describe a person.

The objection worth taking seriously

The fair criticism: "customers are in motion" is close to unfalsifiable. Any result can be explained after the fact by saying the customer moved, which makes it a comfortable excuse rather than a model, and a framework that can never be wrong is not telling you anything.

That risk is real and it is the correct thing to hold this to. The discipline that answers it is that motion has to be stated in advance and then checked. If the claim is that a segment's readiness has fallen, that produces a prediction: engagement should soften before revenue does, and it should soften across the segment rather than in one channel. If revenue drops and every leading indicator held steady, the honest conclusion is that the offer or the execution was the problem and motion was not the explanation.

Used that way it is a model. Used as a retrospective explanation for whatever happened, it is an alibi, and it deserves the criticism.

Where this sits in the framework

Customers in Motion is the observation. The Marketing Helix is the model built on it, the principles state it formally alongside what follows from it, and the forces describe what actually does the moving. Adaptive Brand Management is what the model implies about how a brand has to be run once you accept that alignment is temporary.

The forces are worth naming here, because "what does the moving" is the question a reader asks next and the answer is short. Trust decides whether a signal is admitted into consideration at all, and it decays without reinforcement rather than holding once earned. Relevance decides whether an admitted signal matches what the person is actually doing, which is a property of their situation and not of the message. Timing decides whether the match happens while it can still change anything. All three have to hold at once, they hold for different lengths of time, and that is the whole reason alignment is temporary rather than achieved.