Creating Circular Consumer Journey Maps for Customer Journey Mapping
This skill teaches you how to build a circular customer journey map based on McKinsey's Consumer Decision Journey model, replacing the outdated linear funnel with a loop that reflects how real consumers research, evaluate, buy, and return.
To create a circular customer journey map, start by identifying the four CDJ phases—initial consideration, active evaluation, moment of purchase, and post-purchase experience—then map real consumer touchpoints into a continuous loop instead of a linear funnel. Connect the post-purchase experience back to the initial consideration set to visualize loyalty loops and repeat purchase behavior, reflecting how modern consumers actually make decisions.
Outcome: You'll produce a reusable circular journey map that reveals where customers enter, loop back, drop off, or accelerate through their decision process—giving your team a shared visual model for allocating budget and designing interventions at the touchpoints that actually matter.
Prerequisites
- Familiarity with the McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey framework and its four phases
- Basic understanding of customer touchpoints and channels
- Access to customer behavioral data (analytics, surveys, or interview transcripts)
- Comfort with visual diagramming tools (Miro, FigJam, Lucidchart, or even whiteboard)
Overview
Traditional customer journey mapping follows a linear path: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, done. But that model was built for a world where brands controlled the narrative through mass advertising. Today's consumers bounce between Google searches, Reddit threads, peer recommendations, and brand websites in unpredictable patterns. The McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey recognized this reality by modeling the purchase process as a circular loop rather than a straight line.
Creating a circular journey map means visualizing the four CDJ phases—initial consideration, active evaluation, moment of purchase, and post-purchase experience—as a continuous cycle. The critical insight is the loyalty loop: satisfied customers skip the active evaluation phase entirely on repeat purchases, while dissatisfied customers re-enter the full loop or exit to competitors. Your map needs to capture both paths.
This skill walks you through building that circular map from scratch, using real customer data rather than internal assumptions. The output isn't a pretty poster for the conference room wall—it's a working diagnostic tool that reveals where your brand enters and exits consideration sets, where competitors intercept your buyers during active evaluation, and whether your post-purchase experience creates genuine loyalty loops or silently bleeds customers back into the open market.
How It Works
A circular customer journey map works by arranging the four CDJ phases around a loop instead of along a timeline. The visual structure itself encodes a fundamentally different mental model than a funnel.
In a linear funnel, every stage narrows. You start with many prospects and filter down to buyers. The implicit assumption is that the process ends at purchase. In a circular map, the post-purchase experience feeds directly back into the initial consideration phase. This means two things: first, that existing customers can short-circuit the loop (the loyalty loop), and second, that every touchpoint in the post-purchase phase is simultaneously a touchpoint in someone else's initial consideration phase (through reviews, word-of-mouth, and social proof).
The map uses the circular layout to show how brands get added to and removed from consideration sets during active evaluation. Arrows and connection lines show the flow of influence—which touchpoints push consumers forward, which cause them to loop back for more research, and which trigger the loyalty shortcut. Layering real data onto this structure (touchpoint frequency, channel influence scores, drop-off rates) transforms it from a conceptual diagram into an actionable strategy tool.
The reason this matters for customer journey mapping specifically is that circular maps expose opportunities that linear maps structurally cannot represent. A funnel can't show you that your best acquisition channel is actually your post-purchase onboarding email, because in a funnel, onboarding happens after the end of the journey. In a circular map, that connection is visible and obvious.
Step-by-Step
Step 1: Gather Real Customer Decision Data
Before you draw anything, collect evidence of how your customers actually make decisions. This is the step most teams skip, and it's why most journey maps end up as fiction.
Pull data from three categories:
Behavioral data: Web analytics showing common page sequences before conversion, attribution reports showing channel paths, search query data from Google Search Console showing what people searched before finding you, and time-to-conversion data showing how long the decision process takes.
Qualitative data: Customer interviews (even 5-8 will reveal patterns), post-purchase surveys asking 'What other brands did you consider?' and 'What ultimately made you choose us?', sales call recordings or transcripts showing common questions and objections, and support ticket themes from the first 30 days.
Competitive context: Review sites where customers compare you to alternatives, Reddit and forum threads discussing your category, and competitor content that ranks for your target keywords.
Organize this data by the four CDJ phases. Don't worry about being precise—you'll refine the classification as you build the map.
Tip: The single most valuable question you can ask recent customers is: 'Walk me through how you decided to buy this. What did you do first?' The unprompted narrative reveals the actual journey structure better than any analytics dashboard.
Step 2: Define the Initial Consideration Set
The initial consideration set is the small group of brands a consumer has in mind when they first recognize a need. Unlike a funnel's broad 'awareness' stage, this is a specific, limited set—typically 2-4 brands.
Using your customer data, answer these questions:
- How do customers first recognize the need your product addresses? (trigger events)
- Which brands are in the consideration set when they start? (your direct competitors at the moment of need)
- What existing knowledge or past experience shapes this initial set? (brand recall, previous purchases, recommendations from friends)
- What percentage of your customers had you in their initial consideration set versus discovered you during active evaluation?
Document each entry point into consideration. Some customers will start with you already in mind (brand awareness is working). Others will discover you later during research (content and SEO are working). Both paths need to be visible on your map.
On your circular diagram, the initial consideration set sits at the top of the loop—the starting position. List the typical trigger events that initiate the journey and the 3-5 brands most commonly present at this stage.
Tip: If more than 60% of your customers discover you during active evaluation rather than having you in their initial consideration set, your brand awareness investment is underperforming relative to your content marketing and SEO. This single data point reshapes budget allocation.
Step 3: Map the Active Evaluation Phase
Active evaluation is where consumers add and remove brands from their consideration set through research. This is the most complex phase to map because it's non-linear—customers bounce between channels, revisit sources, and change direction based on what they find.
For your circular map, document:
Touchpoints used during evaluation: List every channel and source your customers use to evaluate options. Common ones include Google search, review sites (G2, Capterra, Yelp, depending on category), YouTube reviews, Reddit threads, comparison blog posts, free trials or demos, peer recommendations, and social media.
Sequence patterns: While the overall journey is non-linear, there are usually 2-3 common sequences. For example, 'Google search → comparison blog → review site → free trial' might be your most common path. Identify these from your analytics and interviews.
Brand additions and removals: Mark where brands typically enter and exit the consideration set. If competitors frequently get added after a specific type of search query, that's visible on the map. If your brand gets removed after prospects see your pricing page, that's visible too.
Influence weight: Not all touchpoints are equal. A peer recommendation might outweigh ten display ads. Note which touchpoints most frequently trigger advancement toward purchase versus which cause loopback to more research.
On the circular diagram, active evaluation occupies the right side of the loop, flowing from the initial consideration set toward the moment of purchase. Use arrows of varying thickness or color to show which touchpoint paths are most common.
Tip: Pay special attention to where brands get ADDED to the consideration set during active evaluation. McKinsey's original research found that the number of brands under consideration actually increases during this phase—the opposite of funnel narrowing. If you're not showing up during active evaluation, you're invisible to the majority of eventual buyers.
Step 4: Document the Moment of Purchase
The moment of purchase is narrower than most teams realize. It's the specific point where the consumer commits—not the entire checkout flow, but the decision trigger that tips them from evaluating to buying.
Map three things at this stage:
Decision triggers: What finally causes the purchase? Common triggers include a limited-time offer, a successful free trial experience, a compelling demo, a peer's direct recommendation, hitting a deadline that forces action, or a competitor failing at a critical moment (site down, bad customer service experience).
Channel of purchase: Where does the transaction happen? Website, in-store, app, through a sales rep, through a reseller? This matters because the purchase channel determines what last-mile experience you control.
Friction points: What almost prevented the purchase? Complex checkout, confusing pricing, missing payment method, unexpected shipping costs, required account creation? These are the leaks right before conversion.
On the circular diagram, the moment of purchase sits at the bottom of the loop—the narrowest point. Show the 2-3 most common decision triggers as inputs and the purchase channel as the output flowing into the post-purchase phase.
This phase connects directly to the work described in the sibling skill on optimizing moment-of-purchase triggers, where you learn to design interventions that increase conversion at this critical point.
Tip: Interview customers within 48 hours of purchase if possible. The further from the decision, the more they rationalize and reconstruct a logical narrative that doesn't match what actually happened. You want the messy, real version.
Step 5: Build the Post-Purchase Experience Loop
The post-purchase phase is where circular maps fundamentally diverge from linear funnels. In a funnel, the journey ends at purchase. In the CDJ model, post-purchase is the bridge that either creates a loyalty loop (customer skips evaluation on next purchase) or ejects the customer back into the full decision journey for a competitor.
Map two distinct paths from post-purchase:
The Loyalty Loop (inner circle): Document what happens when the post-purchase experience exceeds expectations. This includes onboarding quality, product performance, customer support interactions, community engagement, and proactive communication. When this path works, the customer's next purchase decision jumps directly from trigger to purchase, bypassing active evaluation entirely. They don't comparison shop—they just buy again.
The Re-evaluation Exit (back to full loop): Document what causes customers to re-enter the full consideration and evaluation cycle. Triggers include product disappointment, poor support experience, a competitor's aggressive marketing, price increases, or simply the passage of time weakening brand loyalty. These customers go back to the initial consideration phase, but now with experience data that shapes their next evaluation.
On the circular diagram, post-purchase occupies the left side of the loop. Draw two clear paths: one short loop back to purchase (loyalty) and one full loop back to initial consideration (re-evaluation). The relative width of these paths is your retention story.
For detailed strategies on strengthening the loyalty loop, see the sibling skill on building post-purchase loyalty loops.
Tip: Quantify the loyalty loop if you can. What percentage of repeat customers skip active evaluation entirely versus re-evaluate each time? This ratio is one of the most valuable metrics your circular map can surface, and it directly measures whether your post-purchase experience is generating loyalty or just repeat transactions.
Step 6: Layer Touchpoints and Data onto the Circular Structure
With the four phases mapped, you now have a skeleton. The next step transforms it from a conceptual model into a diagnostic tool by layering real touchpoint data.
For each phase, add:
Touchpoint inventory: Every interaction point between the customer and your brand (or competitors). Place them at the correct position in the circle. Use the methodology from the sibling skill on identifying touchpoints across CDJ stages for comprehensive coverage.
Channel labels: Group touchpoints by channel (organic search, paid ads, email, social, in-person, etc.) using color coding or visual grouping.
Data annotations: Add quantitative data where available. Conversion rates between phases, traffic volume at each touchpoint, NPS scores at post-purchase milestones, average time spent in each phase, and drop-off rates at critical transitions.
Competitor presence: Mark where competitors appear in the customer's journey. Are they showing up in Google results during active evaluation? Are their ads appearing during your customer's consideration phase? Are their content or reviews influencing your customers' decisions?
Emotional indicators: Note the customer's emotional state at each point. Confused during evaluation? Anxious at purchase? Delighted or frustrated post-purchase? These emotional markers reveal experience design opportunities.
The visual result should be a rich, data-layered circle that tells a complete story. Anyone looking at it should immediately see where the biggest opportunities and biggest risks are.
Tip: Use no more than three visual layers (e.g., touchpoints, data metrics, and emotional state). Adding more creates visual noise that prevents the map from being useful as a communication tool. If you need more detail, create phase-specific deep-dive maps that zoom into one section of the circle.
Step 7: Identify Strategic Gaps and Intervention Points
The map is not the deliverable—the insights are. Walk through the completed circular map and identify:
Phase transition failures: Where do customers stall or exit? If there's a large gap between active evaluation and purchase, your moment-of-purchase triggers are weak. If the loyalty loop is thin, your post-purchase experience is leaking customers.
Competitor interception points: Where do competitors insert themselves into your customers' journey? If they're dominating search results during active evaluation or running retargeting ads during your customers' consideration phase, these are attack surfaces you need to defend.
Underinvested touchpoints: Are there high-influence touchpoints where you have little or no presence? A common finding: companies invest heavily in awareness but have almost no presence during active evaluation, which is where most brand switching actually happens.
Loyalty loop strength: What percentage of customers take the short loyalty loop versus re-entering full evaluation? If the loyalty loop is weak, post-purchase investment should be your top priority because acquiring a customer twice is vastly more expensive than retaining them once.
Experience inconsistencies: Are there jarring transitions between phases? A great evaluation experience followed by a frustrating purchase process is a classic pattern that circular maps reveal clearly.
For each gap or opportunity, note the specific intervention: what you would change, at which touchpoint, to improve the transition. This becomes your prioritized action plan.
Tip: Present the map to your sales and customer success teams before finalizing insights. They'll immediately spot patterns you missed because they live in the details of customer interactions daily. Their input often reveals that the 'small' touchpoints your analytics can't measure (like a follow-up phone call or a personal email) are actually the most influential moments in the journey.
Step 8: Maintain and Iterate the Living Map
A circular journey map is not a one-time deliverable. Customer behavior shifts, competitors change tactics, new channels emerge, and your own product evolves. Treat the map as a living document.
Quarterly reviews: Revisit the map every quarter with updated data. Check whether touchpoint influence has shifted, whether the loyalty loop is strengthening or weakening, and whether new competitors have entered the consideration set.
Trigger-based updates: Major events should prompt immediate map revisions. A new product launch, a competitor's major campaign, a significant change in your pricing or positioning, or a platform algorithm change (like Google introducing AI Overviews) all reshape the journey.
Version control: Keep previous versions of the map so you can track how the journey evolves over time. Year-over-year comparison often reveals the most strategically important trends—like active evaluation phases getting shorter as a category matures, or loyalty loops weakening as new competitors enter.
Team access: Store the map where your entire marketing, sales, product, and support teams can access it. The map's value comes from being a shared mental model that aligns decision-making across teams. A beautiful map locked in one person's Figma file has zero organizational impact.
Connect your circular journey map work to the broader McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey framework for ongoing strategic context. The map is one tool within a larger system for understanding and influencing how consumers decide.
Tip: Set a calendar reminder for the first business day of each quarter to pull fresh data and review the map. Without this discipline, even the best journey maps become stale artifacts within 6 months.
Examples
Example: B2B SaaS Project Management Tool
A mid-market project management SaaS company wants to understand why they win deals against Asana and Monday.com but have low repeat expansion revenue. They have web analytics, 12 customer interviews, G2 review data, and sales call recordings.
Initial Consideration Set: Customer interviews reveal that when a team lead recognizes the need for a new PM tool, they typically have 2-3 brands already in mind from peer recommendations and past experience. The company appears in only 35% of initial consideration sets—most customers discover them during active evaluation.
Active Evaluation: The dominant path is Google search → G2 comparison page → company's comparison landing page → free trial signup. The map shows that G2 reviews are the most influential touchpoint, and the company's average rating (4.2) is lower than Monday.com (4.5). A second common path starts from Reddit threads in r/projectmanagement where the brand is rarely mentioned.
Moment of Purchase: Sales call recordings show the primary purchase trigger is a successful 14-day trial where the team lead gets at least 3 team members actively using the tool. When trial adoption stays below 3 users, the deal dies. The map highlights trial onboarding as the critical conversion bottleneck.
Post-Purchase and Loyalty Loop: Here's the key finding—the loyalty loop is almost nonexistent. When teams need to expand licenses or renew, 68% of decision-makers re-enter full active evaluation rather than auto-renewing. Post-purchase touchpoints are limited to quarterly billing emails and an annual NPS survey. There's no ongoing engagement, no community, no proactive account management for mid-market accounts.
Strategic interventions identified from the map: (1) Invest in Reddit presence during active evaluation, (2) improve G2 review solicitation to close the rating gap, (3) redesign trial onboarding to drive 3+ user adoption in first week, (4) build a post-purchase engagement program (monthly webinars, in-app tips, quarterly business reviews) to strengthen the loyalty loop and reduce re-evaluation on renewal.
Example: Direct-to-Consumer Skincare Brand
A DTC skincare brand sells primarily through their website and Amazon. They notice high first-purchase rates from Instagram ads but poor repeat purchase rates. They have Shopify analytics, Instagram ad data, 200 post-purchase survey responses, and Amazon review data.
Initial Consideration Set: Survey data shows most first-time customers weren't looking for a skincare product at all—they were triggered by an Instagram ad featuring before/after results. The initial consideration set is essentially created by the ad rather than pre-existing. This means the brand is almost entirely dependent on paid media for entering consideration.
Active Evaluation: After seeing the ad, the typical path is: Instagram ad → brand's Instagram profile (checking social proof) → website product page → Google search '[brand name] reviews' → back to website for purchase. The map reveals a critical moment at the Google search step: customers who find genuine third-party reviews convert at 4x the rate of those who only find the brand's own testimonials. The brand has almost no presence on skincare review blogs or YouTube.
Moment of Purchase: The primary trigger is a first-order discount (15% off) combined with free shipping. Without both, cart abandonment is 78%. The map shows this suggests weak brand conviction at purchase—customers are price-triggered rather than value-convinced.
Post-Purchase Experience: Product satisfaction is high (NPS 62), but the post-purchase experience consists only of shipping confirmation and a discount code for next purchase. There's no usage guidance, no skincare routine content, no community. 72% of customers don't repurchase within 12 months.
The circular map reveals the core problem visually: the brand has strong initial consideration (via paid ads) and reasonable conversion, but the loyalty loop barely exists. Money is being spent to acquire customers who then leak back into the full market. The map drives three interventions: (1) build a post-purchase email sequence with skincare education content to drive engagement, (2) create a subscription/replenishment option timed to product usage cycles, and (3) invest in third-party reviews and YouTube influencer content to strengthen active evaluation for the next generation of customers—many of whom will be influenced by current customers' reviews.
Best Practices
Start with customer data, not internal assumptions. Interview at least 5-8 recent customers before drawing the first version of your map. Internal stakeholders will project what they think happens; customers will tell you what actually happens.
Keep the visual format genuinely circular. Resist the temptation to 'straighten' the loop into a horizontal flow for presentation convenience—the circular layout is the insight. When people see a circle, they intuitively understand that post-purchase feeds back into consideration.
Differentiate between first-time buyer journeys and repeat buyer journeys on the same map. Use the loyalty loop (inner circle) for repeat buyers and the full outer loop for new customers. Visualizing both on one map shows where investment should shift as your customer base matures.
Annotate competitor presence at each phase, not just your own touchpoints. The most actionable insight from a circular journey map is often where competitors intercept your customers during active evaluation—something a brand-only map would miss entirely.
Assign a clear owner for each phase of the circle. If nobody owns the transition from active evaluation to purchase, nobody optimizes it. Phase ownership prevents the map from becoming a shared responsibility that nobody actually acts on.
Use the map to challenge budget allocation directly. If 70% of your marketing spend targets the initial consideration phase but your data shows that most brand switching happens during active evaluation, the map becomes the evidence for rebalancing investment.
Common Mistakes
Drawing the map based on internal assumptions without real customer data
Correction
Always ground the map in actual customer interviews, behavioral analytics, and competitive intelligence. A journey map built from a conference room brainstorm reflects the team's biases, not the customer's reality. Even five customer interviews will overturn at least one major assumption.
Treating the circular map as a one-time deliverable that gets presented once and filed away
Correction
Schedule quarterly reviews with fresh data. The map should be a living document stored where all relevant teams can access and reference it. Assign an owner responsible for keeping it current. An outdated journey map is worse than no map because it creates false confidence.
Making the map too complex by including every possible touchpoint, data point, and annotation on a single view
Correction
Limit the main map to three visual layers maximum (touchpoints, key metrics, and one additional dimension like emotional state or competitor presence). Create separate deep-dive views for each phase if you need more detail. The primary map needs to be readable in under 60 seconds to be useful as an alignment tool.
Omitting the loyalty loop and treating post-purchase as the end of the journey, effectively recreating a linear funnel in circular packaging
Correction
The loyalty loop is the entire point of a circular map. Explicitly show two paths from post-purchase: the short loyalty loop (repurchase without evaluation) and the full re-evaluation path (back to initial consideration). Quantify what percentage of customers take each path—this ratio is the map's most strategically valuable metric.
Mapping an idealized journey instead of the messy, non-linear reality where customers backtrack, stall, and revisit earlier phases
Correction
Include backward arrows and loops within the active evaluation phase. Show that customers often research, narrow their options, encounter new information, and widen their options again before purchasing. If your map only flows forward, it's a funnel in disguise.
Other Skills in This Method
Mapping the Initial Consideration Set
How to identify and analyze the brands and options consumers include in their initial consideration set before active research begins.
Analyzing Active Evaluation Behavior
Techniques for tracking and understanding how consumers add and remove brands during the active evaluation phase through digital research, reviews, and peer input.
Optimizing Moment-of-Purchase Triggers
How to identify and influence the critical decision-stage touchpoints that convert active evaluators into buyers at the point of purchase.
Building Post-Purchase Loyalty Loops
Designing post-purchase experiences that create ongoing loyalty loops so customers skip re-evaluation and repurchase directly.
Identifying Touchpoints Across CDJ Stages
How to audit and catalog every brand touchpoint across the four CDJ phases to find gaps and high-impact interaction opportunities.
Replacing Funnel Thinking with the Decision Journey
How to transition your marketing strategy from a linear customer journey funnel to the non-linear CDJ model with practical examples.
Frequently Asked Questions
What tools are best for creating a circular customer journey map?
Miro, FigJam, and Lucidchart all work well because they support freeform diagramming with shapes, arrows, and annotations. For polished presentations, Figma or Adobe Illustrator gives you more visual control. For collaborative workshops, Miro is the most common choice because multiple people can edit simultaneously and add sticky notes during mapping sessions.
How is circular customer journey mapping different from a traditional funnel?
A traditional funnel shows a one-directional narrowing from awareness to purchase, implying the journey ends at conversion. A circular customer journey map based on the McKinsey Consumer Decision Journey shows post-purchase feeding back into consideration, captures the loyalty loop where repeat buyers skip evaluation, and reflects the reality that consumers add and remove brands during active evaluation rather than simply narrowing down.
How many customer interviews do I need before creating a journey map?
Five to eight interviews with recent customers will reveal the major patterns for most businesses. After 8-10 interviews, you'll typically see diminishing returns where new interviews confirm existing patterns rather than revealing new ones. Supplement interviews with behavioral analytics data to validate what customers report against what they actually do.
Can I use circular customer journey mapping for B2B with long sales cycles?
Yes, and B2B is where circular maps often provide the most value. B2B buying committees cycle through active evaluation multiple times, and the loyalty loop is especially important because enterprise renewal decisions are high-stakes. Adjust the map to show multiple stakeholders' parallel journeys and longer time horizons at each phase—weeks or months instead of days.
How often should I update my circular customer journey map?
Review the map quarterly with fresh data at minimum. Update immediately after major events like a product launch, competitor entry, significant pricing change, or platform algorithm shift. Keep previous versions for year-over-year comparison—the evolution of the map over time often reveals the most strategically important trends.
What's the most common mistake in customer journey mapping with the CDJ model?
The most common mistake is drawing the map based on internal assumptions instead of real customer data. Teams project what they think the journey looks like, which almost always overestimates brand awareness, underestimates competitor influence during active evaluation, and completely misses what happens post-purchase. Even a small number of customer interviews will overturn at least one major assumption.