I keep running into the same thing in journey studies, so it’s worth saying plainly. Customer journey research depends almost entirely on what people can remember and are willing to tell you, and that’s the quiet flaw running through most of it. Ask a consumer how they ended up choosing a product and you’ll get a clean account built around the touchpoints they can name: the ad they saw, the site they visited, the email that arrived at the right moment. Everything they can’t easily recall, or never consciously registered, gets left out.

The account skews, and it skews the same way every time, especially in today’s messy, nonlinear journeys. People over-credit the channels they can name and under-report the ones they can’t. The paid ad, the brand site, and the well-timed email get full marks because they’re easy to define and attribute. The group chat where a friend settled the decision, the algorithmic feed that did the early persuading, the creator whose offhand line planted the idea weeks before, the thirty seconds of comparison in the aisle, all of it gets compressed or dropped, because none of it arrives with a label.

Here’s the part that should bother you. The bias doesn’t stay in the research. It travels into the budget. When a journey map over-credits the legible channels, the brand puts more money behind the touchpoints that were easiest to measure and starves the ones that were actually doing the persuading. You optimize the parts of the journey you can see and quietly neglect the parts that decide it. Over a few planning cycles that compounds into real misallocation, and it stays invisible the whole time because the research keeps confirming the channels you already fund.