Set Yourself Up for Success in 2025

Success in 2025 begins with mastering the customer journey. As consumers spend more time navigating the complex decision-making process, understanding the “messy middle” has become essential for brands seeking loyalty and growth.

Recent insights from Google’s report, Decoding Decisions: Marketing in the Messy Middle, reveal that this intricate space—where customers explore options, weigh choices, and ultimately decide—is the critical battleground for winning and retaining loyalty. By applying behavioral science principles and embracing a comprehensive marketing strategy, brands can turn complexity into opportunity.

Understanding the Messy Middle

Research from Google’s Alistair Rennie and Jonny Protheroe emphasizes that the path to purchase is far from linear. Instead, it revolves around two primary mental modes:

• Exploration: Consumers actively seek out information, discover new options, and expand their consideration set.
• Evaluation: Consumers compare choices, narrow down options, and assess potential purchases based on their preferences and needs.

Shoppers loop between these modes repeatedly, relying on online tools like search engines, YouTube, social media, and review platforms to guide their decisions. This dynamic environment, known as the messy middle, demands a strategic approach to engage and influence consumers effectively.

Decoding the Chaos of the Buyer’s Journey

The messy middle is where the majority of your potential buyer’s purchase journey unfolds. It’s messy because it’s not linear, straightforward, or easily trackable. Instead, it’s a dynamic, winding process of exploration and evaluation, filled with interactions, research, and biases that ultimately shape the purchase decision.

In short, the messy middle encompasses the majority of your potential buyers actively research, evaluate, and ultimately make their decisions—but it’s not as chaotic as it seems. While it may feel disheartening to have limited control over every interaction in this phase, brands have countless opportunities to position themselves for discovery and recognition.

We know that the more someone encounters a brand, the more likely they are to trust it. This phenomenon, tied to frequency bias, highlights the importance of consistent visibility throughout the buyer’s journey. In this phase, brands must focus on imprinting themselves into the consumer’s subconscious by building positive associations. These associations influence decisions made during the messy middle and improve the likelihood of conversion when the buyer is ready.

Frequency bias, also known as the “yellow car” illusion, describes how repeated exposure to a brand increases a consumer’s likelihood of noticing and engaging with it. For example, if someone interacts with your brand on LinkedIn or leaves a comment on your Facebook post, they’re more likely to notice your logo, ad, or name in other places. Without that initial engagement, your brand could fade into the background.

The key to leveraging frequency bias is consistency. Whether it’s through engaging social media posts, strategic ad placement, or high-quality email campaigns, every touchpoint reinforces your brand’s presence in the consumer’s mind, subtly guiding them through their journey in the messy middle.

How the Buyer’s Journey Has Transformed

The buyer’s journey is no longer linear. Marketers used to believe that the decision-making process followed a clean, predictable path—awareness, consideration, decision. However, today’s journey is far more complex. Consumers now navigate through “loop-dee-loops” of exploration and evaluation, making decisions throughout the process, not just at the moment of purchase.

Gone are the days of the Glengarry Glen Ross mindset of “Always Be Closing.” While marketing still plays a key role in enabling sales, narrowing focus to the final conversion is a missed opportunity. Buyers make decisions long before reaching the end of the journey. If your brand isn’t present and active during those earlier stages, you risk being invisible when it matters most.

According to Forrester, buyers now require 27 touchpoints before they convert—a significant increase from just a few years ago. Most of these touchpoints occur in the messy middle, which means brands must focus on being discoverable, memorable, and consistent across multiple platforms.

How to Thrive in the Messy Middle

With so many touchpoints required for conversion, how can brands engage meaningfully in the messy middle? It starts with putting your brand in front of the right audience—consistently and across various channels.

Here’s how you can position your brand for success:

• PPC Advertising: Use targeted pay-per-click ads to reach your audience, drive traffic, and increase visibility.
• PR & Media Coverage: Get your brand featured in relevant trade publications or press outlets to build credibility.
• Social Media Engagement: Foster a strong online presence to build community and trust through organic and paid content.
• SEO Optimization: Ensure your website and content rank high on search engines to meet buyers where they’re searching.
• Holistic Strategies: Combine these efforts to amplify your share of voice, increase audience reach, and build authority.
• Content Marketing: Create valuable, audience-specific content that informs, entertains, or solves problems at every stage. Use blogs, videos, and case studies to establish authority and build trust.

Create valuable, audience-specific content that informs, entertains, or solves problems at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Use blogs, videos, whitepapers, and case studies to establish authority and build trust.

By employing a multi-channel strategy, marketers can ensure their message reaches potential buyers throughout their journey. This increases the likelihood that your brand will be top of mind when the buyer makes their final decision.

Cognitive Biases at Play

The messy middle is governed by cognitive biases that shape consumer behavior. These biases can significantly influence purchasing decisions:

• Category heuristics: Simplify decisions with clear and concise product specifications.
• Power of now: Emphasize immediacy, as waiting diminishes a product’s appeal.
• Social proof: Build trust through reviews, recommendations, and user-generated content.
• Scarcity bias: Drive urgency by highlighting limited stock or availability.
• Authority bias: Leverage endorsements from experts or credible sources.
• Power of free: Use complimentary offers to motivate and delight customers.

Google’s simulated shopping experiment of over 310,000 purchase scenarios shows that intelligently and ethically applying these principles can sway consumer decisions.

Strategies for Success in the Messy Middle

Whether you’re an established brand or a challenger, navigating the messy middle requires actionable strategies:

• Ensure Brand Presence: Stay visible during the exploration phase to secure a place in consumers’ consideration sets.
• Apply Behavioral Science: Use cognitive biases responsibly to craft compelling messaging during the evaluation phase.
• Accelerate Decisions: Minimize consumer exposure to competitors by facilitating faster, informed decision-making.
• Foster Collaboration: Build cross-functional teams to break down traditional silos between branding and performance marketing.

The goal is not to rush consumers out of the decision loop but to empower them with the clarity and confidence needed to choose your brand.

The Challenge of Measuring Success in the Messy Middle

The messy middle presents a unique challenge: much of the engagement, exploration, and decision-making occurs in untrackable spaces, also known as dark social. This includes private conversations, group chats, or offline interactions, which are often invisible to marketers.

While digital metrics like clicks and open rates can offer some insight, they can’t capture the full picture of how consumers interact with your brand in dark social. But this isn’t a new challenge. Before the internet, marketers couldn’t track how potential customers engaged with print ads, radio spots, or TV commercials. Conversations around the office watercooler or at the family dinner table were just as invisible as today’s dark social interactions.

The difference now is that marketers have more channels and opportunities to engage meaningfully. The key is to focus on creating valuable, consistent touchpoints rather than obsessing over every metric. Meaningful engagement drives frequency bias, builds trust, and keeps your brand top-of-mind throughout the messy middle.

TruBrand’s 360° Approach to Success

Influencing the messy middle requires a holistic strategy that aligns seamlessly with your consumers’ behaviors. TruBrand Marketing’s 360° approach leverages behavioral science principles across a range of digital marketing services to guide customers effectively:

• PPC / Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Ensure your brand stays top-of-mind with data-driven strategies that leverage cognitive biases like social proof and authority bias.
• Content Marketing: Create high-quality content to build confidence, simplify decisions, and inspire action using principles like category heuristics and the power of free.
• Social Media Management: Amplify social proof by fostering trust through user-generated content, reviews, and community engagement.
• Website Messaging and SEO Optimization: Streamline your website’s user experience with clear, concise product details and scarcity signals that keep consumers engaged.
• Email Marketing: Personalize communication to tap into the power of now, driving timely decisions and reinforcing loyalty through curated content and exclusive offers.

Winning in the Messy Middle

To win in the messy middle, brands must embrace the complexity of the buyer’s journey. It’s not about controlling every interaction—it’s about showing up consistently and meaningfully. By investing in a multi-faceted marketing strategy, you can position your brand as the solution consumers turn to, even in the most chaotic parts of their journey.

Remember: The journey doesn’t end at conversion. Every interaction is an opportunity to build trust, foster loyalty, and create advocates for your brand

Your Success in 2025

As consumers increasingly rely on digital platforms for exploration and evaluation, the messy middle will remain central to the customer journey. TruBrand Marketing understands this dynamic space and partners with brands to decode complex consumer behavior, turning insights into results.

Make 2025 the year your brand excels in the messy middle. Contact TruBrand Marketing today and discover how our 360° approach can transform your success.

For a deeper dive into the messy middle and actionable insights, download the full report, Decoding Decisions: Marketing in the Messy Middle, available now.