The classic idea of a customer journey, a straight line from awareness to action, has fallen apart. In today’s digital world, people don’t move neatly from one stage to the next. They jump around, pause, pick things back up and often make decisions in the moment.

This has come through strongly in our work with the Gambling Commission over the past few years. While exploring how gambling works in today’s online world, we used a framework called the Path-to-Play to understand how people get involved. But even this model, like many others, doesn’t fully reflect how complex and messy real, human behaviour has become.

Why it’s time to rethink the customer journey

We’ve found that decisions, especially in gambling, rarely happen in isolation. People are constantly influenced by a stream of messages from friends, influencers, online communities and direct marketing. Promotional offers are everywhere, and they often trigger fast, emotionally driven responses.

But this isn’t just a gambling issue. The same patterns are playing out in gaming, finance and beyond.

In gaming, TikTok has become one of the fastest-growing platforms for discovery, turning what was once a structured journey into something far more chaotic but no less effective. Players often act on instinct, aesthetics or peer recommendations, rather than following a carefully planned path set by brands.

In finance, we’re seeing similar behaviour. The rise of trading apps has shown that people can jump in to trade stocks and shares after seeing a tweet, a TikTok or getting a tip from a friend. Social signals now drive decisions more than structured advice or formal education.

Digital behaviour today is unpredictable. It doesn’t follow a clear path, and most traditional models can’t keep up.

From step-by-step to real life

In this context, better time can be spent looking at how people respond to signals and emotional, social, and digital cues that influence them in real time. Using smarter tools like real-time data and behavioural tracking help us better understand how habits shift and form and ultimately keep up.

What we’re seeing applies across the board. Whether you’re a bank, a retailer, a tech platform or a utility provider, you’re likely facing the same challenge: people behaving in unpredictable ways, and your existing journey maps not quite keeping pace.

The solution

Stop designing for the journey you want people to take and start designing for the journey people are on. At Yonder, we believe the future of customer insight lies in treating behaviour as a living system, something shaped by how people live, not just how they interact with brands. That means taking a more connected, long-term view: using always-on data, drawing from social intelligence, and moving beyond one-off research moments and applying what we know from behavioural science to design research that captures real-world context more effectively from the outset.

In short, if the journey no longer looks like a straight line, our thinking shouldn’t be either.