Think of a bumblebee’s flight. It’s erratic, darting from flower to flower with no predictable path, yet it is incredibly effective. This is how modern consumers behave. They move between TikTok, Google, in-store visits, and WhatsApp groups in a non-linear dance. The old concept of a customer journey simply cannot capture this dynamic reality. Instead of trying to force this swarm into a straight line, leading brands are learning to thrive within it. They build their strategies around engaging with these fluid customer activities, meeting people in the moments that truly matter.
For decades, brands mapped the “customer journey” like a well-behaved road trip: a clear starting point, a few waypoints, and a logical path to purchase. But the reality in 2025 looks nothing like that tidy funnel. If today’s consumers are going anywhere, they’re not driving — they’re buzzing, hopping, swiping, streaming, buying, pausing, searching, and sharing — all at once. It’s time to retire the metaphor of the journey and embrace a more powerful one: the Flight of the Bumblebee. It’s unpredictable. It’s nonlinear. And it’s exactly how modern consumers behave. As Sadie Thoma from Google put it, consumers today don’t progress in steps — they scroll, stream, shop, and search in overlapping and messy patterns. Marketers who keep mapping a journey are trying to use a GPS in a world that now runs on radar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9UXKnNHr5Y This shift isn’t just semantics. It’s strategic. Brands that reframe their marketing around customer activities — not linear journeys — will unlock more value, capture more demand, and stay relevant in the AI-powered age. (For a deeper framework on moving from touchpoint optimization to ecosystem thinking, see our guide to customer experience strategy.)
The Illusion of the Journey
Customer journey mapping was built for a different era. It assumes a fixed path — awareness, consideration, decision — where brands intercept consumers with timely nudges. But digital has changed the rhythm. Social feeds, streaming content, peer reviews, DTC channels, in-store prompts, and algorithm-driven recommendations have fragmented attention and multiplied decision paths. At Vivaldi, we’ve long studied this evolution and described it as the “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Consumers dart between channels and moments. A product seen on TikTok can lead to a Google search, a Pinterest board, an in-store try-on, a YouTube review, and a WhatsApp group chat — all before a final purchase is made on Amazon. There is no single path — only a web of activities. The most successful brands no longer try to force consumers down a funnel. Instead, they embed themselves into the natural rhythm of the lives of consumers.
From Journey Thinking to Activity Thinking
The insight that marketers must adopt now is this: Activities are what people actually do. Journeys are what marketers wish people would do. AI finally gives us the ability to analyze real behavior — at scale, in real time, and with context. Our CEO, Dr. Erich Joachimsthaler long ago postulated in the book: Hidden in Plain Sight, published by the Harvard Business School Press that understanding the activities of the consumers that underlie a complex web of needs, need states and values is at the core of deeper and richer customer understanding. 
Journeys make marketing more efficient, understanding activities create genuine new consumer value
This view emphasizes a deeper and richer understanding of consumers, and not just more insights to define more the persuasion or influence needed to convert consumers along funnel stages or customer journeys. One of the approaches we usually use in our work has been pioneered by Nobel prize winning economist, Daniel Kahneman, known as the Day Reconstruction Method. In the recent LinkedIn conversation between Sadie Thoma of Google and Derek Rodenhausen of BCG, the two marketing leaders picked up on the enormous opportunity in shifting toward activity-based marketing. Derek described how BCG is building “influence maps,” not funnels — tools that measure which activities actually influence outcomes across platforms, not by traditional stages like “awareness” or “conversion.” We believe they are right, when it comes to activation and execution of your brand, innovation or marketing strategy, influence maps help to guide resource allocation of budget spending across media and platforms. As Sadie explained, Google organizes consumer behavior around four fluid, overlapping behaviors: streaming, scrolling, shopping, and searching. These are not siloed steps. They are ambient behaviors that define modern life. Consumers move fluidly between them — often within minutes, sometimes all at once. This is not a journey. It’s a cloud of action. The brands that thrive meet consumers in those actions, not before or after.
The Vivaldi View: AI That Creates Genuine Customer Value
In our 2024 global report AI: Unlocking Genuine Customer Value, we interviewed over 160 senior executives and found that while 75% have launched some form of AI adoption, only 10% see meaningful impact. Why? Because most AI strategies are trapped in productivity mode — internal use cases, cost cutting, and automation of back-office workflows. But AI’s real power is on the demand side — to help companies understand, participate in, and shape the activities of their customers. We introduced the idea of “customer activity systems” — a holistic view of how people live, work, and interact with products and services. It’s where AI can deliver exponential impact: by uncovering new behaviors, designing intelligent products and services, and personalizing the interaction field between brand and customer. When viewed from this broader activity perspective, brands aren’t merely means of making marketing efforts or conversions to purchase more efficient. When brands are built on a full understanding of the customer activity system, brands become multipliers and amplifiers of an entire business system, even an entire ecosystem. Then, brands grow in acompounding fashion, much like interest compound in a savings account. AI can — and should — become a value amplifier, not just an efficiency tool.
What the Best Companies Are Doing
Leading brands in 2025 are doing five things differently:
1. Map Customer Activity Fields, Not Linear Journeys
They use AI to understand how people behave — not where they are in a funnel, but what they are doing and why. These maps surface real opportunities to meet people in the context of action.
2. Build Intelligent Systems Around Key Customer Activities
They invest in AI systems that create value in moments — not just push messages. From smart product recommendations to real-time support, these systems learn and improve customer interactions over time.
3. Design Your Marketing Around Interaction
Marketing is no longer storytelling alone — it’s story-doing. These brands build marketing campaigns around core customer activities, using data and AI to ensure timing, relevance, and personalization.
4. Measure Participation, Not Just Performance
They measure engagement not just by clicks or views, but by participation in valuable activities — reviews written, communities joined, features used, shares made.
5. Redesign Your Business Around Customer Activities
Most importantly, they use AI not to make their current model more efficient, but to reimagine what their business could become by owning more of the customer’s life and activities. 
From Activities to Interactions: Building a World-Class Service Ecosystem
Understanding customer activities is only the first step. The real transformation happens when brands stop broadcasting messages and start building interaction fields. A world-class service ecosystem isn’t a department that handles complaints; it’s a dynamic, intelligent system designed to participate in, and add value to, the customer’s life. This means shifting from a reactive support model to a proactive engagement strategy. Instead of waiting for a customer to report a problem, you anticipate their needs within the flow of their activities. Service becomes less about solving problems and more about creating seamless, valuable experiences that are woven directly into the product, the marketing, and the brand itself. This is where the activity-centric model moves from theory to practice, turning every touchpoint into an opportunity to build trust and demonstrate value.
Defining the Core Principles of Activity-Centric Service
Before we can design the technology and systems, we have to ground our strategy in fundamental human principles. In an activity-centric world, service isn’t defined by scripts or resolution times. It’s defined by the quality of the interaction. The core tenets of great service—empathy, reliability, and professionalism—don’t disappear; they become even more critical. They are the bedrock upon which intelligent, scalable systems are built. These principles ensure that as we automate and personalize with AI, the human element remains at the center. They transform service from a transactional function into a relational one, building the kind of trust that turns customers into advocates.
Empathy and Active Listening
Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s feelings, and in a business context, it means truly grasping the customer’s goals and frustrations. Active listening is its functional counterpart—the practice of paying close attention to not just what is said, but what is meant. In an activity-based model, these skills are crucial data inputs. As SurveyMonkey highlights, clear and understanding support builds trust. When a customer interacts with your brand, they are offering insights into their world. Listening actively allows you to capture the context behind their activities, turning a simple query into a rich source of information that can inform product development, marketing, and future interactions, making the entire ecosystem smarter and more responsive.
Responsiveness and Reliability
In a world of constant activity, responsiveness is table stakes. Customers expect brands to be available and helpful across the channels they prefer, at the moment they need it. But responsiveness is more than just speed; it’s about reliability. As Salesforce notes, reliability is a key quality of great customer service. It means delivering on promises consistently, so customers trust that your brand is a dependable partner in their activities. Whether it’s providing an accurate shipping update or offering relevant advice, being a reliable presence within the customer’s flow builds confidence. This consistency ensures that your brand is seen not as an interruption, but as a valuable and integrated part of their daily life.
Professionalism and Reframing Ability
Professionalism ensures that every interaction, even a difficult one, is handled with respect and competence. It’s the foundation of a trustworthy brand presence. A critical component of this is what experts call reframing ability—the skill of turning a negative situation into a positive one. This doesn’t mean dismissing a customer’s concern. Instead, it involves acknowledging the issue while shifting the focus toward a constructive solution. This powerful skill can transform a moment of friction into an opportunity to demonstrate your brand’s commitment and strengthen the customer relationship. It shows you are not just a seller of products, but a partner in solving problems.
Strategic Service Design: Self-Service, AI, and Omnichannel Support
With the core principles established, the next step is to build the architecture that can deliver these experiences at scale. A modern service ecosystem is not built on human effort alone. It requires a strategic design that blends self-service options, AI-powered intelligence, and seamless omnichannel support. This isn’t about replacing people with technology; it’s about augmenting human capabilities to create a system that is simultaneously efficient, personal, and always available. The goal is to empower customers with control while using technology to make every interaction smarter and more contextually aware, no matter where it happens.
Empower Customers with Self-Service Options
Today’s customers are resourceful. For many simple issues, they prefer to find answers on their own rather than initiating a conversation. Empowering them with robust self-service options like detailed FAQs, knowledge bases, and tutorials is a critical part of a modern service strategy. As Salesforce points out, giving customers ways to solve problems themselves respects their time and intelligence. This approach does more than just reduce support tickets; it integrates your brand’s expertise directly into their problem-solving activities. When a customer can quickly find a solution on your website, you’ve not only resolved their issue but also reinforced your brand as a helpful and authoritative resource.
Use AI to Augment Human Capabilities
Artificial intelligence is the engine of the activity-centric service model. Its true power lies not in replacing human agents, but in augmenting their abilities to deliver exceptional value. At Vivaldi, we believe AI’s greatest impact is on the demand side—understanding customer behavior and personalizing interactions. As we stated in our research, AI can “uncover new behaviors, design intelligent products and services, and personalize the interaction field between brand and customer.” This means using AI to anticipate needs, provide agents with real-time context, and automate routine tasks so human teams can focus on complex, high-empathy interactions. It transforms the service function from a cost center into a value amplifier.
Provide Seamless Omnichannel Support
The “Flight of the Bumblebee” behavior means customers interact with brands across a dizzying array of channels—text, email, social media, chat, and phone. A seamless omnichannel support strategy is essential to meeting them where they are. This requires more than just being present on multiple platforms; it means ensuring the conversation can flow smoothly between them without forcing the customer to repeat themselves. As Salesforce advises, this continuity is key. A customer might start a query on a web chat, continue it via email, and finish it on a phone call. A truly integrated system maintains the context of that conversation, creating a single, unified experience that reflects the fluid reality of customer behavior.
Engaging Customers Within Their Activities
Building a great service infrastructure is foundational, but the ultimate goal is to move beyond reactive support and proactively engage customers within their natural activities. This is where a brand transcends its commercial role and becomes a genuine part of the customer’s world. It involves creating value outside of the direct point of sale through helpful content, rewarding participation, and authentic communication. By embedding your brand in the things your customers are already doing, you build relationships that are deeper, more resilient, and far more meaningful than any single transaction.
Create Interactive and Helpful Content
Content is no longer just a marketing tool; it is a form of service. To engage customers within their activities, you must create content that helps them achieve their goals. This means shifting from brand-centric messaging to customer-centric utility. As VWO suggests, focus on what your customers need, what they are interested in, and what they hope for. Whether it’s a tutorial that helps them master a new skill, a calculator that simplifies a complex decision, or a community forum where they can connect with peers, helpful content positions your brand as an indispensable resource. It’s an investment in the customer’s success, which in turn fosters deep and lasting loyalty.
Use Gamification to Drive Participation
Gamification uses game-like mechanics—such as points, badges, and leaderboards—to make interactions more engaging and rewarding. It’s a powerful way to encourage participation in your brand’s ecosystem. By turning desired behaviors into fun challenges, you can motivate customers to write reviews, complete their profiles, or explore new features. As research shows, using fun games and activities can significantly increase involvement. This approach transforms passive consumption into active participation, making customers feel more invested in the brand’s community and success. It’s not about manipulation; it’s about making engagement a genuinely enjoyable and rewarding activity.
Humanize Brand Communications
In an increasingly automated world, a human touch stands out. Customers crave authentic, personal interactions, not robotic scripts. Humanizing your brand’s communications is essential for building real connections. This means adopting a tone of voice that is genuine, relatable, and empathetic. As VWO recommends, talk to customers in a way that feels personal and real. Share behind-the-scenes stories, feature real customer experiences, and empower your service team to communicate with their own personality. This authenticity builds trust and makes your brand feel less like a faceless corporation and more like a group of people who genuinely care about their customers.
Make Loyal Customers Feel Valued
Your most loyal customers are your greatest asset, and they should be treated as such. Making them feel valued goes beyond transactional rewards; it’s about recognition and appreciation. This means creating exclusive experiences, offering early access to new products, or simply reaching out with a personal thank you. As experts advise, taking special care of your brand advocates makes them feel appreciated and strengthens their emotional connection to your brand. When you invest in your most passionate customers, you are not just retaining them; you are empowering them to become your most effective marketers, sharing their positive experiences throughout their networks and creating a virtuous cycle of growth.
The Strategic Case for Customer Activities
A journey mindset narrows your field of vision. An activity mindset opens it. If you build a journey map, you’re probably looking at the world through a sales or marketing lens. But if you map out customer activities — like how people learn a new skill, commute to work, plan a vacation, manage their health — you discover far more opportunities to engage, co-create, and solve real problems. Amazon doesn’t just map buying journeys. It maps life activities. Shopping, watching, reading, listening, eating, hosting, gaming — they aim to serve all of it. Same with Apple. Same with Google. These companies don’t just reduce friction. They reshape activity systems, embedding their brand into the rhythm of everyday life.
The Role of the Modern CMO
As Sadie Thoma said, the modern CMO is becoming the Chief Change Management Officer. To succeed, they need to guide their teams beyond traditional planning — and toward a more dynamic, responsive, activity-based operating model. Derek Rodenhausen echoed this: “You can’t just buy an AI tool and expect transformation. You have to think about your operating model.” That means:
- Cross-functional teams centered around customer activities
- Agile content production and personalization
- Real-time media planning driven by influence, not impressions
- Continuous learning through AI-driven insights
- Organizational alignment on demand-side growth
It’s a leadership challenge as much as a marketing one.
Enabling the Organization for an Activity-Based Model
Shifting from a journey map to an activity field isn’t just a marketing exercise; it’s an organizational transformation. An activity-based model requires a fundamental change in how teams are structured, trained, and empowered to create value. You can’t meet customers in their moments if your internal operating model is still stuck in linear, siloed stages. This is where strategy meets culture. The goal is to build an organization that is as fluid, responsive, and interconnected as the customers it serves. It demands a new set of frameworks for service, new approaches to skill development, and a deep-seated commitment to internal alignment. At Vivaldi, our work in organizational enablement focuses on precisely this: rewiring the corporate DNA to support a brand and business strategy centered on customer activities, ensuring the entire system is built for demand-side growth.
Establishing Frameworks and Standards for Excellence
Excellence in an activity-based model isn’t about rigidly following a script; it’s about consistently delivering value within a flexible framework. This requires clear standards that empower employees rather than restrict them. Instead of designing processes around internal handoffs, leading companies design them around customer activities. The framework becomes a set of guiding principles that allow teams to make smart, autonomous decisions in real-time. This structure ensures that every interaction, whether human-led or AI-driven, reinforces the brand’s promise and contributes to a seamless customer experience across the entire activity system. It’s the difference between a rigid assembly line and a coordinated, improvisational jazz ensemble.
Co-Creating Service Standards with Employees
Top-down service mandates rarely work because they ignore the people on the front lines who understand the customer’s world most intimately. The most successful brands co-create their service standards with employees, tapping into their daily insights. When you empower your teams to help define what great service looks like, you’re not just writing a manual; you’re building a shared culture of ownership. This approach ensures that standards are grounded in reality and reflect the “natural rhythm of the lives of consumers.” It transforms employees from rule-followers into brand ambassadors who are invested in delivering an exceptional experience because they helped build the definition of one.
Defining a Clear Service Framework
A journey mindset creates rigid, process-oriented service protocols. An activity mindset, however, fosters a flexible service framework built on principles. This framework doesn’t dictate every step but provides clear guidelines for how to act in any given customer context. It prioritizes outcomes—like solving a problem or enabling a customer’s goal—over process compliance. By defining a clear set of principles for engagement, you equip your teams to handle the unpredictable nature of customer behavior. This allows them to move beyond a narrow sales or marketing lens and focus on creating genuine value within the customer’s broader life activities.
Improving Internal Customer Service
Exceptional external customer experiences are impossible without exceptional internal support systems. When your marketing, sales, product, and support teams operate in silos, the customer feels the friction. Improving internal customer service—how teams request information, collaborate on projects, and support each other’s functions—is critical. When brands are built on a deep understanding of the customer activity system, they become “multipliers and amplifiers” for the business. This amplification only happens when internal operations are just as seamless and integrated as the external experience you aim to provide. Every internal interaction should be designed to make it easier for front-line teams to serve the end customer.
Developing Skills Through Immersive Training
An activity-based model requires a new skill set, one that prioritizes empathy, adaptability, and contextual problem-solving over rote memorization. Training must evolve from classroom lectures to immersive, real-world simulations that prepare employees for the dynamic nature of modern customer interactions. The focus shifts from teaching what to do, to teaching how to think. This means investing in programs that build emotional intelligence and strategic thinking, enabling your teams to understand the “why” behind a customer’s activity, not just the “what” of their immediate request. It’s about preparing people to be valuable partners to customers, augmented by technology.
Activities Focused on Attitude and Empathy
True customer-centricity begins with empathy. Training programs must go beyond product knowledge and process drills to cultivate a genuine understanding of the customer’s world. This requires a “deeper and richer understanding of consumers,” focusing on their motivations, frustrations, and goals. Activities like customer interviews, persona-building workshops, and empathy mapping exercises help employees step into the customer’s shoes. When your team understands the context of a customer’s life, they can provide solutions that aren’t just correct, but are also genuinely helpful and emotionally resonant, building a much stronger brand connection.
Role-Playing and Games for Skill-Building
To prepare teams for a dynamic environment, training must be equally dynamic. Role-playing scenarios and gamified learning are powerful tools for building practical skills in a low-risk setting. These exercises can simulate complex customer interactions, forcing employees to think on their feet and apply service principles in real-time. This is especially crucial as companies invest in AI systems that “create value in moments.” Training should prepare employees to work alongside these AI tools, using them to enhance, not replace, human connection. By practicing these moments, teams build the muscle memory needed to perform under pressure and turn any interaction into a value-creating opportunity.
Measuring What Matters: From Funnel Metrics to Activity Scores
If you change the model, you must change the measurement. Relying on traditional funnel metrics like conversion rates and lead velocity in an activity-based world is like trying to measure the temperature with a ruler. It’s the wrong tool for the job. The focus must shift from tracking a linear progression to evaluating the quality and depth of customer participation across their entire activity system. This means moving beyond performance metrics that measure persuasion to participation metrics that measure engagement. The new question isn’t “Did they buy?” but rather, “How deeply are they engaging with our brand within the activities that matter to them?”
Gathering Direct Feedback
In an activity-based model, direct feedback becomes your most valuable source of insight. It’s the qualitative layer that gives meaning to your quantitative data. Instead of just tracking clicks, you should actively solicit feedback on the experiences surrounding key activities. Leading companies “measure engagement not just by clicks or views, but by participation in valuable activities — reviews written, communities joined, features used, shares made.” Creating simple, accessible channels for feedback within these activities—like a one-question poll after using a new feature or a prompt to share their thoughts in a community forum—provides a real-time pulse on customer sentiment and surfaces opportunities for improvement.
Using Key Metrics to Track Experience
While direct feedback is crucial, you still need quantitative metrics to track experience at scale. However, the KPIs you prioritize must change. Instead of focusing solely on transactional outcomes, the new metrics should measure the quality and ease of engagement across different activities. This is where AI can become a true “value amplifier, not just an efficiency tool,” by helping you analyze complex interaction data to understand what’s really driving satisfaction and loyalty. By tracking metrics that reflect the customer’s experience within their activities, you get a much clearer picture of brand health and long-term growth potential.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
How easy are you to do business with? Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the amount of effort a customer has to exert to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, or a task completed. In an activity-based model, minimizing effort is paramount. A low CES indicates that your brand is seamlessly integrated into a customer’s life, not creating friction. These scores “surface real opportunities to meet people in the context of action” by highlighting points of friction within specific activities. A high effort score for a particular task is a red flag that you are disrupting, rather than enabling, your customer’s flow.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) remains a vital metric, but its application changes in an activity-based model. Instead of being a single, post-purchase survey, CSAT should be deployed as a micro-metric to gauge satisfaction at key interaction points within an activity. For example, you might measure CSAT after a customer uses your online configurator tool, interacts with a chatbot, or reads a piece of instructional content. This provides granular, real-time feedback on the specific moments that make up the overall experience, allowing you to pinpoint exactly where you are creating or destroying value.
Reframing Vivaldi’s Holistic Brand Model
At Vivaldi, we’ve always emphasized a holistic growth model — connecting brand, business, and customer in a system of mutual value creation. With AI, this model gains new power. By rethinking strategy around activities, you can design products that solve real needs, services that adapt to behavior, and brand systems that are relevant in every micro-moment. It’s not about interrupting the journey — it’s about enabling the activity. That’s what we mean when we say: AI should unlock genuine customer value.
So What Should You Do?
If you’re a business leader, here’s the takeaway:
- Stop mapping journeys. Start understanding activities.
- Use AI not just to predict behavior — but to participate in it.
- Build systems that enhance customer actions, not just track them.
- Reimagine your business not as a process, but as a platform for value creation.
Don’t Follow the Path. Create in the Swarm.
In 2025, there is no map. No linear process. No perfect funnel. There’s only movement — buzzing, darting, fragmenting, and converging. The brands that will win are those that understand the swarm. That know when to act. That show up in moments that matter. That use AI not to push harder but to embed deeper. It’s not about the journey. It’s about the activity. And that’s where the future begins.
Key Takeaways
- Replace Linear Journey Maps with Customer Activity Fields: Modern consumer behavior is a complex web of interactions, not a predictable path. Winning brands use AI to understand this “swarm” and embed themselves in the moments that matter, rather than trying to control a funnel.
- Deploy AI to Amplify Value, Not Just Automate Tasks: The greatest opportunity for AI is not in cutting costs but in understanding customer activities to design intelligent products and personalized interactions. This shifts AI from an efficiency tool to a core driver of demand-side growth.
- Measure Participation, Not Just Performance: Success in an activity-based model is defined by engagement depth, not just conversion rates. Track metrics like customer effort, community involvement, and feature adoption to gauge how deeply your brand is integrated into your customers’ lives.