Ever bought on impulse?
We all have. And it’s often an item we didn’t know existed 5 minutes before.
And that is no accident. Marketers played on our emotions to get us to buy the thing.
At B2B Forum 2024, Paul Ince explained this impulse through the lens of a Journey Web.
Watch a clip from Paul’s session or read the transcript below.
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Google’s “messy middle.”
Anyone heard of this? Yeah, read up on this.
The idea’s that you’ve got your trigger and you’ve got your purchase at the end…
And somewhere in the middle something happens whereby customers go on this loop of exploration and evaluation.
Why?
Because there’s so much information available on the internet that they can’t possibly consume it all.
What they’re looking for is to make these cognitive shortcuts to get to the answer quicker.
And people will take the shortest route. I know I want to take the shortest route possible, having all the information that I can to make the right decision.
If anyone’s ever been in one of my sessions at previous years here…
Last year I talked about this thing called the Hankins Hexagon. Look it up. It’s by this British marketer called James Hankins
And what he says is that there are six stages to a customer journey, and that customers can take any path they like depending on what their need is.
Now, I like this. It resonates with me and certainly the research that we’ve done sort of backs this up.
Where I differ from Hankins Hexagon is that I think that the stages in a journey could be four, could be eight, could be seven, because your business is unique and your customer’s journey is unique.
So we’re going to take a look at this in more detail and I’m going to introduce you to a concept that we call Journey Web.
(But just a reminder, before we get into anything too complicated, I do want to remind you that some decisions are straightforward. If I’m hungry and I’m in CVS, I’m getting a Snickers and a big long receipt, it seems. Don’t really understand that, but there we go. I can’t even use the vouchers. I’m only here for three days, but it’s a quick decision that I need to make.)
Some decisions are straightforward, but it’s rare. A bit like a British person with straight teeth, okay, that is me on my own.
Okay, so we are going to talk about the complex stuff today. Alright?
So I’m going to introduce you to this concept, which we call a Journey Web…
It’s a journey web. And this is basically what a journey web looks like. Looks nice and simple.
So the idea of it being called a web is because it looks like a web, and I’m going to take you through some component parts with the aim of giving you something to think about, to see whether this is a way of mapping out that chaotic journey, so that you can decide what sort of marketing you can do for your customer to get ’em to the point of purchase.
But these are the core components:
There is usually a trigger.
There are multiple stages.
Content that you would create to help move them along that journey.
Some of that marketing will involve lead generation activities.
And there is something to measure for each of those.
So these are the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 basic parts to it.
We’ll start with trigger. There’s always a trigger for something. Perhaps a customer has a problem that you are able to solve and understanding what the problem is, what the challenges that they have clearly is fundamental to helping you develop the products or services that fit their needs.
Now, I’m sure that you understand what your customers’ challenges are, that’s why you do the thing that you do, or there’s been some research done in your business before now to decide what it is to supply.
But sometimes our customer doesn’t know that they need what it is that we’re selling because we’re going to create the trigger.
My local coffee shop back home knows that I like a particular product that they make. It’s called a Raspberry Mallow Slice. They don’t make it every day when they make it, they take a picture on Instagram on their stories, and they tag me in because they know I’m a sucker and I will go down and buy it. It’s sort of become, I dunno, it’s kind of like positive trolling. That’s the only way I can describe it.
But they have created the trigger where I go, “ooh, I’ve got a need now. I want it.”
So I’m sure there are businesses here today where you are having to create the desire. We’ve all been victims of that. We’ve seen something online…
Does anyone do TikTok Shop here? Yeah. Is everything that you’ve purchased something that you wanted? Not until you saw it. Yeah. I bought two seven pound lamps. When I say pounds, I mean sterling. They don’t work. But I bought them.
So they created the desire.
And that word is really quite important because desire is an emotion.
Now, I like thinking about emotion. It works in marketing.
Everyone know this person here? Yeah, Nancy Harhut. Absolutely amazing.
Now, if you read her book Using Behavioral Science in Marketing, what she talks about is here.
“People decide based on emotional reasons. Even really smart people. Even in B2B.”
And I was in Jay Acunzo’s session earlier where he was talking about emotion.
We all respond to emotion.
It’s not always logical. It’s sometimes that gut instinct.
So I’ve got a little resource here, which if you’re struggling to understand where we can slot emotion into our marketing to help our customer move along the journey to the purchase point, these human system emotion wheels are a great resource to look at.
Because what they’ll do is they’ll give you some keywords that you can use either in audio or in video.
You can speak these words or you can include them in the copy on your blog post or in your social media to trigger that emotion. We are looking to get them involved as early as possible.
Published September 18, 2025
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