Customer journeys are collapsing into a single moment of evaluation. David Edelman recently described this shift as the convergence of behaviors that used to happen separately.<\/p>
As decisions compress, brands need to be clearer about what they are trying to solve for the customer. Many organizations are increasing activity instead, without sharpening the underlying strategy.<\/p>
The shift behind the compressed journey<\/h2>
Edelman\u2019s argument, outlined in his March 2026 Think with Google essay, is built around a shorthand developed by Boston Consulting Group and Google: streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping.<\/p>
His central insight is that generative AI has snapped these four behaviors together so tightly that the old model \u2014 awareness, then consideration, then purchase, each in its own tidy lane \u2014 no longer describes reality. Consumers bounce between platforms, multitask, and shift fluidly between entertainment and intent.<\/p>
The data point that stopped me cold: people are now asking AI-enabled search engines much longer, richer, more emotionally descriptive queries. Not keywords. Paragraphs. They share context, constraints, preferences, and urgency.\u00a0<\/p>
The AI then breaks those queries into multiple search streams and synthesizes results in real time. What once required dozens of browser tabs \u2014 hours of work \u2014 now takes seconds.<\/p>
Edelman draws two implications from this.\u00a0<\/p>
- The fundamental unit of competition has changed. Brands are now evaluated as solutions to specific situations, not as products within a category.<\/li>
- The familiar demand framework \u2014 create demand, capture demand, and convert demand \u2014 must be treated as simultaneous, not sequential. You can\u2019t do them in order anymore because the journey doesn\u2019t proceed in order.<\/li> <\/ul>
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<\/div> <\/p><\/div> <\/p> Enter Pogo \u2014 and Kelly\u2019s uncomfortable truth<\/h2>
Walt Kelly gave us Pogo, the philosophical possum of Okefenokee Swamp, whose most celebrated utterance was the 1970 Earth Day poster declaration: \u201cWe have met the enemy, and he is us.\u201d<\/p>
Kelly\u2019s most persistent target was not any external villain, but the human tendency to mistake activity for progress. His characters were always busy \u2014 scheming, planning, campaigning, reorganizing \u2014 and almost never clear on why.<\/p>
Another line often attributed to him captures it just as well: \u201cHaving lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.\u201d<\/p>
Read Edelman\u2019s argument through that lens, and the pattern becomes harder to ignore. He describes brands racing to keep up with compressed customer journeys \u2014 more content, more specificity, more \u201canswer audits,\u201d more presence across platforms and formats. The advice is sound.\u00a0<\/p>
But without clarity about what a brand is actually trying to solve for the customer, more content and more channels are just Pogo\u2019s swamp creatures running faster through the same mud.<\/p>
Dig deeper: Why clarity now decides who survives<\/em><\/strong><\/p>
The compression trap: When speed substitutes for clarity<\/h2>
Edelman is right that the journey is compressing. But compression can serve two different masters.\u00a0<\/p>
For brands with crystal-clear positioning \u2014 brands that genuinely know what problem they solve and for whom \u2014 compression is a gift. It helps a consumer build confidence faster.\u00a0<\/p>
Warby Parker, which Edelman cites approvingly, is a clean example: its home try-on program, transparent pricing, and frictionless returns all express a single, coherent answer to a specific question: \u201cCan I trust buying glasses without trying them in a store?\u201d Every element of that brand experience is aimed at one objective.<\/p>
For brands that lack that clarity \u2014 brands that have accumulated messaging layers over years of campaign-by-campaign marketing \u2014 compression is a disaster. The consumer\u2019s AI-enabled query now synthesizes everything a brand has ever said across every channel, every format, every platform.\u00a0<\/p>
If those signals are inconsistent, contradictory, or simply incoherent, the synthesized answer will be a muddle. The consumer will move on. In Pogo\u2019s swamp, the creature that runs fastest without knowing where it\u2019s going simply reaches the wrong destination sooner.<\/p>
Edelman gestures at this when he writes that brand should be understood as \u201cthe sum of signals that make a company recognizable as a solution.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>
He\u2019s right. But I\u2019d push harder: the compression of the customer journey isn\u2019t primarily a technological problem. It\u2019s an objectives problem.\u00a0<\/p>
Most brands can\u2019t clearly articulate, in a single sentence, what specific situation they are the best answer to. If you can\u2019t say it plainly, AI certainly can\u2019t infer it.<\/p>
Dig deeper: Why AI availability is the new battleground for brands<\/em><\/strong><\/p>
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One of Edelman\u2019s shrewder observations is that some of his clients have constructed a \u201cfalse trade-off between brand and performance.\u201d <\/p>
Marketing departments argue over budget allocations between brand-building and demand generation as though they are fundamentally separate activities. This is, as Kelly\u2019s characters would say, a very impressive argument that completely misses the point.<\/p>
Kelly spent years satirizing exactly this kind of internal organizational warfare \u2014 committees forming to study committees, campaigns launched to counteract the confusion caused by previous campaigns.\u00a0<\/p>
Organizations are often earnest and busy, and just as often distracted by their own processes. The brand-versus-performance debate is the marketing equivalent of explaining why two teams can\u2019t collaborate because their mandates are structured differently.<\/p>
In a compressed journey, brand is performance. <\/p>
- The clarity of a brand\u2019s positioning determines whether it surfaces as the right answer to a specific query. <\/li>
- The quality of its content determines whether it captures demand at the moment of confidence. <\/li> <\/ul>
These are the same thing viewed from two angles.\u00a0<\/p>
The brands winning in Edelman\u2019s compressed journey world \u2014 Nike, Glossier, IKEA, Warby Parker \u2014 don\u2019t appear to be having this argument internally. They have simply decided what problem they solve and built everything around that answer.<\/p>
Dig deeper: Brand perception: How to measure and shape it<\/em><\/strong><\/p>
The \u2018answer audit\u2019 is only half of the solution<\/h2>
Edelman recommends something he calls a \u201crecurring answer audit\u201d: examine what a consumer would actually encounter across social discovery, video search, retail listings, and AI assistants for their most common customer scenarios. Gaps and inconsistencies, he says, quickly become visible.<\/p>
This is excellent advice. It\u2019s also, if I\u2019m being blunt in the spirit of Kelly, only half the medicine. An audit shows you where your signals are inconsistent. It doesn\u2019t tell you what they should be consistent about.\u00a0<\/p>
You can audit your way to a perfectly coherent set of messages that still fail to answer any real consumer question, because the messages were never designed around actual consumer situations in the first place.<\/p>
You need to audit your objectives. What, precisely, is your brand the solution to? Not the product category. Not the feature set. The actual situation. <\/p>
The specific tension in a person\u2019s life that this brand, and not a competitor, is best positioned to resolve. Until that question is answered with unambiguous clarity, the answer audit is tidying the swamp without draining it.<\/p>
Dig deeper: How to apply \u2018They Ask, You Answer\u2019 to SEO and AI visibility<\/em><\/strong><\/p>
What Edelman gets completely right<\/h2>
None of this is meant to diminish what Edelman has written. On the contrary, his framework for thinking about the compressed journey is the most coherent I\u2019ve seen in years.\u00a0<\/p>
Three of his observations deserve to be tattooed somewhere visible on the forearms, wrists, hands, necks, and behind the ears of every marketing professional.<\/p>
\u2018Streaming and scrolling create possibility. Searching structures choice. Shopping happens wherever confidence peaks.\u2019\u00a0<\/h3>
That\u2019s not just a description of a media landscape. It\u2019s a theory of consumer psychology. Confidence is the triggering condition for a purchase. If you\u2019re optimizing for impressions without asking whether those impressions build confidence, then you\u2019re very busy going nowhere.<\/p>
Brands must shift from \u2018product language\u2019 to \u2018solution language.\u2019\u00a0<\/h3>
This sounds simple and is, in practice, revolutionary. The default mode of most brand organizations is to lead with what they make.\u00a0<\/p>
Edelman says lead with the situation you resolve. That is a fundamental reorientation of how marketing is conceived and executed.<\/p>
\u2018Are you the customer\u2019s solution? Will they know it?\u2019\u00a0<\/h3>
Two questions. The first is a strategy question. The second is an execution question. Most marketing fails by answering the second question without having honestly answered the first.<\/p>
Dig deeper: The authority era: How AI is reshaping what ranks in search<\/em><\/strong><\/p>
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<\/div> <\/p><\/div> <\/p> We have met the enemy<\/h2>
Kelly\u2019s Pogo ran for 25 years, and the swamp never did drain. The characters were charming, the satire was sharp, and the folly continued because the creatures were incapable of distinguishing between effort and progress. Kelly found that funny. <\/p>
Marketing history, filled with elaborate, energetic, and expensive campaigns from brands that no longer exist, is less amusing.<\/p>
Edelman has given us a useful map of the compressed customer journey. It\u2019s fast, complex, AI-mediated, and it rewards clarity above all else. What he understates \u2014 though it runs beneath the surface of his argument \u2014 is that compression is also a reckoning. <\/p>
Brands built on accumulated momentum, legacy awareness, and category inertia will find that a faster journey exposes their vagueness more brutally than a slower one ever did.<\/p>
The compressed customer journey demands better thinking. And better thinking, as Pogo understood, begins with recognizing that the problem isn\u2019t out there in the swamp. It\u2019s in here \u2014 in the planning meeting, the brand brief, the objectives slide that everyone in the room suspects isn\u2019t quite right, but no one challenges.<\/p>
With apologies to Pogo, \u201cWe have met the enemy of the compressed customer journey. And it\u2019s our inability to clearly say what we are actually for.\u201d<\/p> <\/div>
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.<\/em> <\/p>
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