The Customer journey doesn’t start where you think it does
Most customer journey maps advertising agencies create begin at awareness. The first campaign. The first click. The first time someone sees your brand.
But by then, something already happened. Something upstream. Something untracked. That invisible spark that starts it all has a name: The Zero Moment of Truth. It’s still one of the most underused ideas in journey design. And one of the most important.
What is the Zero Moment of Truth?
The Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) was coined by Google to describe the space between stimulus and action. It’s the moment where a decision starts forming but long before someone’s ready to buy.
We tend to think ZMOT is when people Google a solution. But often, it’s even earlier than that. It’s when something breaks. When a team gets stuck. When someone sighs and says, “There has to be a better way.”
Maybe they search for the problem, not the product or service. Maybe they vent in a Slack channel. Maybe they just sit with the friction for a while. No brand interaction yet. No funnel.
But the decision process has already begun.
From journey stages to decision sparks
Customer journeys like to play it clean. Awareness → Consideration → Conversion. Or anything similar. But ZMOT is messy. Emotional. Context-driven. It’s not a set of phases people go through. It’s a spark. And most maps don’t include it.
That means they miss the moment when perceptions are still forming and when influence is still possible.
In our workshops, we go earlier.
We ask:
What tensions trigger the journey—before any touchpoint?
What do people feel, fear, or assume before they search?
How do they frame the problem, not just the solution?
Then we design for that. Because if you can show up at the right moment with relevance, not just reach you stop being an option, and start being the answer.
ZMOT isn’t a buzzword. It’s the edge.
We still believe in journey mapping. That’s why we offer a customer journey workshop that does exactly that. We want to map out how decisions actually get made. Not how or campaign or sales funnel is built.
That means zooming out. Going upstream. Getting curious about what happens before attention. Because if you can map the Zero Moment of Truth, you don’t just follow the journey, you shape it from the very start.
Want to rethink your customer journey from the decision outwards?
Let’s map the moments that matter.
