The buying journey is not a line
Almost every map of the buying journey draws it as a sequence: awareness, then consideration, then decision. The sequence is real in retrospect and misleading in advance, because the customer is not walking through your diagram. They are moving in and out of it, on their own schedule, carrying everything they learned last time.
A stage model describes where a customer has been, not where they are going.
Stage models earn their popularity honestly. Look backwards at a completed purchase and the stages are visible: the person did not know, then they knew, then they compared, then they bought. Every one of those transitions happened. The trouble starts when the retrospective map is used as a forecast, because it quietly assumes three things that are rarely true.
It assumes the customer journey moves in one direction. It does not. People re-enter consideration after deciding, leave without buying and return eleven months later, and arrive already knowing more about the category than the brand assumes anyone knows.
It assumes each stage is a place the customer occupies. In practice a person can be ready to buy one part of the problem and barely aware of another, on the same afternoon, in the same conversation.
And it assumes stage is the useful thing to know. It usually is not. Two customers at the same nominal stage of the buying journey can be in completely different conditions: one trusts you and is not ready, the other is ready and does not trust you. The stage label hides the difference. The three forces do not.
Two pictures of the same purchase
Above, the tidy sequence a stage model draws. Below, the path the same customer actually took: doubling back, pausing, re-entering. Both describe one purchase. Only one of them was available before it happened.
Ask what is true of the customer right now, not how far along they are.
The Marketing Helix replaces the question "what stage is this customer in" with three questions that can be answered at any point in the customer journey and that change independently of one another:
Do they trust us? Trust accumulates slowly, survives long gaps, and is the only one of the three that carries over from the last cycle. It is why a customer who has bought before starts a new buying journey somewhere quite different from a stranger.
Are we relevant to the problem they have? Relevance is about the fit between what we are saying and what they are actually trying to solve. It moves as their problem moves, which is often.
Are they in a position to act? Timing is the customer's readiness, not our schedule. It has causes we do not control: a budget, a deadline, a life event, a competitor letting them down.
None of the three tells you where somebody is on a line. Together they tell you what would have to change for a purchase decision to become possible, which is the more useful thing to know and the thing a stage label cannot give you.
Three habits that follow.
Stop treating a return visit as a step backwards. In a stage model, a customer who was comparing and is now reading introductory material has regressed. In the Helix they have not: their problem changed, or somebody else joined the decision making, and relevance moved with it. This is normal customer behavior and it is not a failure of nurture.
Stop optimising the moment of purchase and neglecting the accumulation. Most of what decides a purchase decision was built long before the decision started, and most of it is trust. A brand that only shows up at the end is competing on the one force it has had the least time to build.
Stop assuming silence means loss. A customer out of contact is not necessarily out of the buying journey. Frequently they are waiting for a condition that has nothing to do with you to resolve, and the brand that stayed credible and stopped pestering is the one still present when it does.