Consumer States

A consumer state is a state a consumer can be in with respect to the brand, independent of any single journey.

What you can do with a consumer state

• tableLifecycle Map · Journeys
• tableLifecycle Map · Segments

Its consumer states— 13

• AwareThe person has encountered the brand but has not acted.
• UnknownA person in the addressable market with no relationship on record.
• InterestedThe person has volunteered information or asked to hear more.
• EvaluatingThe person is comparing options and narrowing them.
• IntentThe person has taken an action that commits them toward a specific product or service.
• CommittedThe person has booked or purchased and is completing what precedes fulfilment.
• OnboardingThe person is being brought into an ongoing relationship after the first commitment.
• Account HolderThe person has activated an authenticated account and acts through it.
• At RiskEngagement has measurably dropped.
• Likely to LapseA model scores the person as likely to stop, before any window has elapsed.
• LapsedNo qualifying activity in a defined lookback window.
• ReactivatedA lapsed person returns.
• AdvocateThe person refers, reviews or otherwise brings others in.

Why it matters

What goes wrong without it, as the commitments that license this kind say it, each standing on its sources.

• Keep audience eligibility, preference and permission basis distinctThese answer three different questions — can this person be reached, how do they want to be reached, and are we permitted to reach them — and collapsing them is how an organisation comes to treat membership of a segment as a consent. Eligibility is an addressing fact, preference is a stated choice, and a permission basis is a condition with a purpose and a jurisdiction. Only the last has anything to say about whether an activation is allowed.
  Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Article 6 · Audience Taxonomy · Global Privacy Protocol · Data Privacy Vocabulary · Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Article 7: Conditions for consent · Consent Receipt Specification 1.1 · Transparency and Consent Framework v2.2 · RFC 8058: Signaling One-Click Functionality for List Email Headers
• A journey is a state machine, not a funnel pictureA funnel diagram names stages and says nothing about how anyone moves between them, so it cannot be validated, queried or executed. A state machine names the legal moves and what triggers each, which is the difference between a journey a system can run and a journey a deck can show.
  State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction · Declaring the Grain · Statecharts: a visual formalism for complex systems
• State and intent are read against one ordered lifecycleA 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.
  SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference · The Goal Question Metric Approach · A Model for Predictive Measurements of Advertising Effectiveness · Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey · The consumer decision journey
• A declared path must be walkableEvery other check asks whether a relationship is well formed: typed, bounded, licensed, inverted. None asks whether anything travels it. So the model could pass every check with a verb declared for thirty-eight kinds and asserted by none, and say nothing - which is what happened. A reader meeting that has no way to tell a deliberate absence from an oversight, and neither does the author six months on. The distinction is schema completeness against population completeness: the first was already enforced here and the second had no instrument at all. It matters most where a claim is a chain rather than a link. Performance asserted from delivery alone, with no step that reaches a person, is the specific failure measurement standards exist to prevent, and it is invisible to a check that only reads one edge at a time.
  Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) · Outcomes and Data Quality Standards