Dare I take on the might of McKinsey? Well yes I think I will.

McKinsey are a brilliant company with brilliant people, I expect they give brilliant advice and they produce brilliant things.

One of the brilliant things they produced was ‘The McKinsey Journey”

It looks like this

Clients loved it. ‘We want to use the McKinsey journey in all our planning’ they said.

It was galling to the many of us in agencies who had been talking about the consumer journey for ages, and were largely ignored, until the might of McKinsey came along and made it the new hot thing.

But I have an issue.

McKinsey are famously left brained, logical, rational thinkers.

The McKinsey journey is a left brained, logical, rational decision-making process.

It also suggests one size fits all for decisions.

But people are illogical and emotional. Most decision are made sub-consciously and driven by emotion not reason.

And we make decisions about different things in very different ways.

The decisions I took about the car I drive, the insurance I took out, the CD I play in it (yes I confess, I still buy the odd CD) and the coffee I drink in it were all different.

I’m a big fan of the consumer journey. I think it’s the best way to plan marketing activities in the new era of media in which we find ourselves.

However, the decisions we take are emotional, subconscious and they vary enormously, depending upon what we’re buying.

Any good consumer journey will be mapping out the emotional path as well as the logical one.

And, any good communications plan will be seeking to move people’s emotions just as much as it follows them logically, step by step through their decision making process.

After all, we are emotional creatures so let’s keep emotion at the heart of our thinking.