If you can’t say what problem your product solves, AI won’t either

The customer journey boils down to one minute of inspection. David Edelman recently described this change as a convergence of behaviors that were occurring separately.

As decisions become more pressing, brands need to be clearer about what they are trying to solve for the customer. Many organizations increase the workload instead, without honing the basic strategy.

Changing after a compressed trip

Edelman’s argument, outlined in his March 2026 Think Google book, is built around an acronym developed by the Boston Consulting Group and Google: stream, scroll, search, and buy.

His central insight is that productive AI has tied these four behaviors together so tightly that the old model — awareness, then consideration, then purchase, each in its own systematic way — no longer describes reality. Consumers jump between platforms, multitask, and shift less between entertainment and purpose.

A data point that stopped me cold: people are now asking AI-powered search engines long, rich, emotional questions. Not keywords. Sections. They share context, limitations, preferences, and urgency.

AI then splits those queries into multiple search streams and aggregates the results in real time. What once required dozens of browser tabs – hours of work – now takes seconds.

Edelman draws two conclusions from this.

• The basic unit of competition has changed. Products are now evaluated as solutions to specific situations, not as products within a category.
• The general demand framework – need creation, demand, and demand transformation – should be taken simultaneously, not sequentially. You can no longer do them in order because the journey does not continue in order.

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Enter Pogo – and Kelly’s uncomfortable truth

Walt Kelly gave us Pogo, the philosophical possum of the Okefenokee Swamp, whose most famous words were the 1970 Earth Day poster announcement: “We have met the enemy, and we are.”

Kelly’s most persistent target was not the corrupt outsider, but the human tendency to make mistakes to make progress. His characters were always busy – plotting, planning, campaigning, re-planning – and almost never understood why.

Another line often attributed to him also captures it: “Having lost sight of our goals, we redoubled our efforts.”

Read Edelman’s argument through that lens, and the pattern becomes hard to ignore. He describes the products that are racing to fit the compressed customer journey – more content, more specificity, “response testing,” more presence on all platforms and formats. The advice makes sense.

But without clarity about what the brand is trying to solve for the customer, more content and more channels Pogo swamps quickly run into the same mud.

Dig deep: Why clarity now determines who survives

The compression trap: When speed replaces clarity

Edelman is right that travel is stressful. But oppression can serve two different masters.

For brands with crystal-clear positioning – brands that know exactly what problem they’re solving and who it’s for – pressure is a gift. It helps the buyer to build confidence quickly.

Warby Parker, which Edelman cites approvingly, is a clean example: its at-home try-on program, transparent pricing, and consistent returns all provide a single, consistent answer to the specific question: “Can I trust you to buy glasses without trying them on in a store?” All of that product information is intended for one purpose only.

For brands that don’t have that clarity — brands that have accumulated layers of messages over years of campaign and campaign marketing — compression is a disaster. An AI-enabled consumer query now encompasses everything a brand has ever said across every channel, every format, every platform.

If those signals are inconsistent, contradictory, or simply out of sync, the combined response will be chaos. The buyer will proceed. In Pogo’s Swamp, a creature running too fast doesn’t know where it’s going and ends up in the wrong place too soon.

Edelman shows this when he writes that a brand should be understood as “a sum of signs that make a company appear as a solution.”

You are right. But I’m going to push it harder: customer journey compression is not a technical problem. It is a problem of intentions.

Most brands cannot clearly explain, in one sentence, what a particular situation is the best answer to. If you can’t say it clearly, the AI ​​won’t be able to explain it.

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One of Edelman’s brilliant ideas is that some of his clients have created a “false trade-off between product and performance.”

Marketing departments argue about budget allocation between product development and demand generation as if they were separate activities. This is, as Kelly’s characters would say, an impressive argument that misses the point entirely.

Kelly has spent years debunking this kind of intra-organizational warfare – committees forming research committees, campaigns being launched to counter the confusion created by previous campaigns.

Organizations are often active and busy, and they are often distracted by their processes. The product vs. performance debate is the marketing equivalent of explaining why two groups can’t collaborate because their mandates are structured differently.

In compressed travel, the product is performance.

• The clarity of a product’s positioning determines whether it appears as the right answer to a particular question.
• The quality of its content determines whether it captures the need at the right time.

These are the same things viewed from two angles.

The brands that win Edelman’s press tour — Nike, Glossier, IKEA, Warby Parker — don’t seem to have this internal conflict. They simply decide what problem they are solving and build everything around that answer.

Dig deeper: Product vision: How to measure and shape it

‘Response testing’ is part of the solution

Edelman recommends what he calls “iterative feedback testing”: test what a consumer would encounter across social discovery, video search, store listings, and AI assistants for their most common customer scenarios. He says, gaps and inconsistencies are quickly visible.

This is excellent advice. And, if I’m dull in Kelly’s spirit, it’s only part of the medicine. The test shows you where your signals are inconsistent. It doesn’t tell you what to go with it.

You can test your way to a perfectly matched set of messages that fail to answer any real consumer question, because the messages weren’t designed around real consumer situations in the first place.

You need to evaluate your goals. What exactly is your brand the solution to? It is not a product category. It is not a feature set. The real situation.

It is the tension in a person’s life that this type, not the competitor, is best placed to resolve. Until that question is answered with clear clarity, the answer test is collecting the swamp without draining it.

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That Edelman gets absolutely right

None of this is meant to diminish what Edelman wrote. Instead, his framework for thinking about compressed travel is the most coherent I’ve seen in years.

Three things he saw should be tattooed somewhere on the clothes, wrists, hands, necks, and behind the ears of all marketing professionals.

‘Streaming and scrolling create an opportunity. Searching for a selection of properties. Buying happens wherever confidence rises.’

That’s not just a definition of media design. It is a theory of consumer psychology. Confidence is the driving force behind a purchase. If you prepare impressions without asking whether those impressions build confidence, then you are busy and going nowhere.

Products must move from ‘product language’ to ‘solution language.’

This sounds simple and, in fact, it is transformative. The default mode for most brand organizations is to lead by what they do.

Edelman says lead with the situation you’re solving. That is a fundamental reorientation of how marketing is conceived and executed.

‘Are you a customer solution? Will they know?’

Two questions. The first is a question of strategy. The second is the question of execution. Most marketing fails by answering the second question without honestly answering the first.

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We met the enemy

Kelly’s Pogo ran for 25 years, and the swamp never ended. The characters were likable, the sarcasm was sharp, and the silliness continued because the creatures couldn’t tell the difference between effort and progress. Kelly found that amusing.

The history of marketing, filled with elaborate, powerful, and expensive campaigns from defunct companies, is not so funny.

Edelman gave us a useful map of the compressed customer journey. It’s fast, sophisticated, AI-mediated, and prizes clarity above all else. What he is saying – although it falls under his argument – is that pressure is also indicative.

Brands built on accumulated momentum, legacy awareness, and category inertia will find that a fast journey exposes their obsolescence more brutally than a slow one.

A stressed customer journey requires better thinking. And better thinking, as Pogo understands, starts with realizing that the problem is not there in the swamp. It’s here inside — in the planning meeting, the brand brief, the slippery slope goals that everyone in the room regrets is wrong, but no one challenges.

With apologies to Pogo, “We’ve encountered the enemy of the compressed customer journey. And our inability to clearly state what we really are.”