The Customer Journey Is Missing a Step: Why Connect Should Be Considered a Distinct Stage

Customer journey models such as Google's See-Think-Do-Care (STDC) and McKinsey's Consumer Decision Journey remain widely used in digital marketing. However, both models leave an important conceptual gap between consideration and purchase.

This white paper argues that many of the actions marketers work with today, including newsletter subscriptions, webinar registrations, content downloads and social media follows, are neither simple expressions of interest nor actual purchases. Instead, they represent a distinct relational shift in which a potential customer voluntarily gives a brand access to future communication.

To address this gap, the paper proposes Connect as an optional but strategically important stage between Think and Do. Connect describes the moment when an individual establishes a sustained point of contact with a brand without yet completing a transaction.

Drawing on conceptual analysis, an abductive research approach, and a netnographic study of marketing practitioners' discussions on Reddit, the paper demonstrates that practitioners are divided on how to classify these "soft conversions." This disagreement suggests a genuine conceptual blind spot rather than simple professional disagreement.

The paper introduces a revised customer journey model:

See → Think → Connect → Do → Care

and presents a complementary framework linking customer states to organisational marketing activities through the RACE model.

The contribution is not the identification of new behaviour, but the conceptual clarification of a phenomenon that has become increasingly important in modern digital marketing. By making Connect visible, organisations can improve measurement, sharpen performance analysis, strengthen lead nurturing efforts, and create a clearer distinction between awareness, relationship formation and purchase behaviour.