State and intent are read against one ordered lifecycle
A Lifecycle Stage is one position on a single ordered ladder from first contact to advocacy, and the order is asserted as precedence rather than left to the sequence rows happen to appear in. Every Consumer State sits in exactly one stage, which gives a vocabulary of conditions an order without making it a machine. A Goal advances at most one stage; a Goal that advances none is a goal about the ability to measure rather than about moving anyone. The machine that carries a consumer between positions remains the Journey. It runs across a contiguous run of stages rather than standing in for the ladder: it may carry a person in either direction within that run, and it may not skip a rung.
What goes wrong without it
A lifecycle vocabulary with no order can only be listed. Nothing says whether one condition is nearer an outcome than another, so it cannot be walked, compared, or drawn in the sequence every reader already has in mind. Order left to the order of entry is worse than absent, because it looks authoritative, cannot be queried, and changes silently the moment an entry is inserted. Naming the ladder once also gives conditions and intentions a common frame: without it, what a consumer is and what the brand wants are two vocabularies that rhyme and never meet.
What proves it — 2
Each is a gate the build runs: a check inside a ring, a whole ring, or an eval beside them. A build stops at the first that refuses.
- registry integritylifecycle ladder
The lifecycle is a single unbroken chain with one first stage and one last, every consumer state is placed on it, and every stage is one some goal advances people toward, so an order a reader leans on cannot quietly become a fork, leave a condition unplaced, or hold a rung nothing pursues. - registry integrityjourney integrity
Every journey begins at one of its own positions and carries at least one legal move, its positions sit on a contiguous run of rungs, and every position either has a move out or realises a condition another journey leaves from, so no journey is a picture and no position is a dead end.
Derived from — 5
- W3CSKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference
- Basili, Caldiera and Rombach, University of MarylandThe Goal Question Metric Approach
- Lavidge and Steiner, Journal of Marketing 25(6), 1961A Model for Predictive Measurements of Advertising Effectiveness
- Lemon and Verhoef, Journal of Marketing 80(6), 2016Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey
- Court, Elzinga, Mulder and Vetvik, McKinsey Quarterly, 2009The consumer decision journey
Kinds it licenses
Relationships it licenses
precedes · sits in stage · advances stage · counts occupants of
Where this model stands
Six stages joined by an explicit precedence edge, so the ladder is walkable in both directions and a new stage cannot be added without saying where it goes.
Every Consumer State sits in exactly one stage. States within a stage are deliberately unordered; where a finer order is needed a Journey supplies it as a machine.
Every condition on the ladder is a position in at least one journey, and a journey's positions sit on a contiguous run of rungs, so no rung is a picture and no journey jumps the ladder.
The ladder's order is the hierarchy of effects read as conditions a person holds rather than attitudes inferred, and its later rungs form a loop rather than an exit: a kept relationship returns to evaluation, stays, or advocates, so Retention and Reactivation and Advocacy are journeys that return a person to a rung already held.
Every rung is pursued: each stage on the ladder is the one some goal exists to move people toward, and the one goal that names no rung, marketing efficiency, is a goal about what the effort costs rather than where a person stands. Answer visibility advances evaluation, not consideration, because the place a brand must be credibly present when a person is comparing is the answer experience they compare in.
What it does not claim
A rung is pursued by a goal, not by a campaign: which campaigns work a rung is read through the goals they support, and no relationship states it directly.
RUL-021