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A journey is a named path of states a person moves through in their relationship with the brand.

What you can do with a journey

• jobMap a lifecycle
  I need the lifecycle as a machine I can build in an automation tool, not as a funnel picture.
• tableLifecycle Map · Journeys

Its journeys— 4

• Retention & ReactivationA relationship-lifecycle path: established, at risk, likely to lapse, lapsed, and reactivated.
• AcquisitionThe path from no relationship to a first commitment: unknown, aware, interested, evaluating, intent, and converted.
• OnboardingThe path from a first commitment to a working relationship: committed, onboarding, and active.
• AdvocacyThe path from a kept relationship to one that brings others in: kept, and advocating.

Why it matters

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

• Scope activation and calculation explicitly in time and geographyTwo reports can describe the same activity and disagree entirely because one covers a different window, or a different market, than the other. Free-text dates and place names put that scope beyond the reach of any check, so the two compare cleanly and wrongly. Time and place are dimensions with a boundary and a basis, not labels on a record.
  Time Ontology in OWL · GeoSPARQL 1.1
• 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
• A move that cannot be counted is a pictureA journey that names its moves and cannot count them is a funnel with arrows: it can be drawn and not measured, which is the failure a state machine was adopted to end. Customer-migration models make the point exactly. A transition rate is the moves out of a condition over the people in it, and the people in it are the fact that put them there; so the events added to give every move a trigger are not extra instrumentation but the missing denominators of rates the model already carried and could not derive. A law that every move has a trigger, satisfied by facts nothing observes, would be the same picture with more arrows.
  Modeling customer relationships as Markov chains · Declaring the Grain · The Goal Question Metric Approach · Counting Your Customers the Easy Way: An Alternative to the Pareto/NBD Model