Journey mapping is a smart investment for any organization serious about understanding its customers. But when you do it can be just as important as how. Q3 – often called the "pre-planning" season – is the perfect window for journey mapping because it gives teams enough lead time to gather insights and translate them into a clear strategic direction for annual planning in Q4.

Understanding the Pre-Planning Runway

Pre-planning season is a transitional period, typically mid-to-late summer through early fall. It's when business leaders begin gathering the research, feedback, and performance data needed to inform year-ahead decisions. But too often, consumer insights are siloed away or shared too late – missing their chance to influence the direction of the company.

This is where journey mapping becomes a powerful bridge between research and strategy development. Rather than waiting until planning has begun, journey mapping gives insight teams a proactive way to package and present findings in a clear, actionable format that's easy for stakeholders to engage with.

Why It Matters Before the Planning Starts

• There's still time to influence direction: In Q3, the planning process is still forming. Mapping customer journeys now gives you time to act on the most strategic insights.
• Journey maps clarify needs and opportunities: By visualizing research through the lens of the customer, gaps, barriers, and inefficiencies become easier to solve.
• Teams align before decisions are locked in: Journey maps create a shared language across functions, from insights to operations to the C-suite, helping everyone prioritize what's most impactful.

Using On Demand Talent to Move with Speed

It’s common for internal teams to be stretched thin during this stage – insights staff may still be wrapping up quarterly monitoring or reacting to in-market shifts. That’s where SIVO’s On Demand Talent can make a big difference.

Our seasoned insights professionals can step in quickly to lead or support journey mapping initiatives. Whether you need someone to conduct stakeholder interviews, synthesize consumer research, or design the journey mapping workshops themselves, our experts hit the ground running – no lengthy onboarding required. This means your business won’t miss the narrow window for putting insights into next year’s strategic roadmap.

Simply put, journey mapping during pre-planning season isn’t just forward-thinking – it’s essential to turning research into relevance.

Gathering customer insights is only half the battle. The real impact comes when those insights lead to meaningful, informed business decisions. Journey mapping is one of the most effective tools for bridging the gap between market research findings and strategic planning.

What Is Customer Journey Mapping in Insights?

Customer journey mapping is the process of visualizing a customer’s experience with your brand across touchpoints and over time. Starting with awareness and moving through consideration, purchase, and post-purchase stages, journey maps capture what people think, feel, and do at each stage.

Instead of viewing insights through individual survey results or focus group themes, journey mapping lays out the bigger picture. This makes it easier to identify friction points, missed opportunities, and moments that matter most to your audience.

Benefits of Journey Mapping in Market Research

• Simplifies complex data: Most decision-makers aren’t combing through raw transcripts or crosstabs. Journey maps translate research findings into highly visual, digestible formats.
• Makes consumer behavior actionable: Mapping out actions and emotions across the journey helps teams identify where experience improvements, messaging updates, or even new products are needed.
• Fuels insight-driven strategy: When decisions are based on consumer pain points and highlights, businesses avoid guesswork and build plans rooted in real needs.

Using Journey Maps to Connect Research and Strategy

Strategic planning relies on clear, focused inputs. Journey maps distill the noise of market research into key opportunity areas that cross-functional teams can rally around. For example, a fictional consumer electronics brand might uncover a major drop-off between support inquiries and resolution success. That journey insight could spark a broader strategy shift toward post-purchase experience – improving brand loyalty and reducing churn.

By integrating journey mapping into early-stage strategic conversations, businesses are better equipped to:

Make smarter investments:

Instead of spreading budgets across untested ideas, strategy teams can direct resources toward moments that matter most to consumers based on the full journey picture.

Align teams cross-functionally:

Journey maps help marketing, product, customer service, and sales all see how their work connects to the end-to-end experience, improving collaboration and decisions.

Create measurable goals:

With clearly defined customer expectations and drop-off points, strategy teams can set KPIs aligned with true impact areas, not just internal assumptions.

Bringing in On Demand Expertise

Sometimes the missing link isn't the insights – it's the capacity to unlock them. Many organizations have the research in hand but can’t spare the time or talent to translate it into a clear strategic plan. SIVO’s On Demand Talent gives you fast access to experienced experts who specialize in connecting the dots between data and decisions.

Our insight professionals work seamlessly with internal teams or on standalone projects, helping organizations large and small tap into the full power of journey maps. Whether you’re new to journey mapping or need help scaling your approach, having flexible, seasoned professionals at your side can be the difference between research that informs and research that transforms.

Even the most compelling consumer research can fall short of influencing strategy when key roadblocks get in the way. Businesses often invest significant time and resources into gathering customer insights—yet when it's time for decision-making, those findings get lost in the shuffle or are never operationalized. Understanding why this happens is the first step to changing it.

Key reasons research fails to inform strategy

There are several common challenges that create disconnects between market research and strategic planning:

• Lack of context: Insights are often presented without a clear connection to business objectives, making it difficult for teams to know how to apply them.
• Delivery gaps: Research findings are sometimes handed off as static reports rather than usable, visual tools that inspire cross-functional action—like journey maps.
• Timing issues: Insights land after planning is already underway, limiting their ability to shape strategic decisions.
• Resource constraints: Smaller teams or overburdened internal researchers may not have bandwidth to turn findings into strategic recommendations.

Why visual tools like journey mapping matter

Many of these roadblocks come down to communication and clarity. Traditional consumer research reports, while rich in data, can fail to tell a compelling story that bridges the gap between understanding and action. Journey mapping changes that by visualizing consumer behavior across key touchpoints, making it easier for all stakeholders—marketing, product, leadership—to connect the dots and make decisions faster.

For example, a fictional CPG company might conduct research that uncovers friction in the in-store shopping experience for a top product line. If those insights are shared only in a long-form report, the team might overlook them during strategic discussions. But when brought to life in a consumer journey map, that friction becomes more concrete, allowing leaders to prioritize shelf redesigns during annual planning.

Ultimately, the solution isn't just better research—it's better connection. Journey mapping helps create that bridge, replacing static data with dynamic, role-relevant insight formats that resonate with teams across the organization.

Creating impactful journey maps requires more than just data—it takes storytelling, cross-functional experience, and a deep understanding of both consumer behavior and strategic planning. That’s where On Demand Talent from SIVO makes a difference.

Why integrated expertise matters

On Demand Talent are experienced insights professionals who bring hands-on knowledge from various industries and business challenges. Unlike general consultants or freelancers, these professionals don't need to be onboarded from scratch. They quickly integrate into existing teams and begin translating consumer research into usable, strategic outputs—like journey mapping tools that inform real decisions.

During pre-planning season, when internal teams are stretched thin or focused on multiple priorities, having access to a seasoned journey mapping expert can be the catalyst for ensuring research doesn’t fall by the wayside.

How On Demand Talent supports strategic goals

• Faster activation of insights: With a ready-to-go expert, there's no lag time between getting the data and building the journey maps that make it actionable.
• SKILL-MATCHED SUPPORT: Whether the need is human-centered design, segmentation insights, or behavioral analysis, you get paired with someone who’s done it before—and done it well.
• Greater cross-functional clarity: On Demand Talent know how to present insights in formats that resonate with marketing, finance, operations, and the C-suite.

Let’s say a fictional tech startup is entering a new market. They’ve done the research but don’t have the internal expertise to translate findings into strategic priorities. By bringing in an On Demand Talent journey mapping specialist, they can visualize the customer journey across acquisition, onboarding, and retention—and use those visuals to align their 2025 roadmap.

Whether supplementing your current insights team or stepping in during transition periods, On Demand Talent ensures your customer insights don’t just sit in a folder. They help bring those insights to life in visually compelling, strategically aligned ways—at the moment you need it most.

Once you have consumer research and a well-crafted journey map in hand, the next challenge is embedding that work into strategic planning. Creating an insight-driven strategy doesn’t happen by accident—it requires intention, structure, and strong team alignment.

Start with planning alignment

Begin by connecting journey insights to specific business questions. Whether it’s improving customer retention, optimizing a product launch, or identifying white space for growth, clearly mapping insights to decision points helps teams stay focused and aligned.

In Q3's pre-planning season, actively involving strategic planning teams in the journey mapping process gives them ownership of the insights. When cross-functional leaders see their input reflected in the mapping process, they’re more likely to act on the outcomes during annual planning.

Embed journey maps into strategic frameworks

The most powerful journey maps are not standalone tools—they are baked into your broader strategy development playbook. During strategy sessions, use journey visuals to guide conversations, prioritize investments, and validate assumptions. This creates a continuous thread from research findings to planning outcomes.

Best practices to turn insights into strategic action

• Revisit your journey maps regularly: Consumer behavior evolves. Make your journey maps living documents, and plan quarterly or biannual check-ins to update them.
• Use insight champions: Appoint team members to advocate for the integration of customer insights across planning meetings and documents.
• Coordinate cross-functionally: Invite stakeholders from marketing, sales, operations, product, and finance to interpret the journey together. Their perspectives can unlock practical applications that weren’t obvious from research alone.

Consider a fictional example: a healthcare brand uses a journey map to identify critical dropout points in their patient intake experience. By integrating this into their Q4 strategic planning, they shift investments to improve onboarding communications and see measurable gains in patient satisfaction and efficiency by the following year.

The key takeaway? Consumer research has greater impact when it’s deeply embedded in the planning process—not tagged on after the fact. Through strong internal alignment and practices like journey mapping, strategy becomes not just informed by insight, but powered by it.