BU 242 Unit 3 purchase-path map example

Twenty-Four Hours From a Dead Air Conditioner to a Cool Bedroom: A Purchase-Path Map of One Renter's Replacement, With Both Pauses Marked

Student Name

Business, Herzing University

BU 242: Creating Customer Value in the Digital Age

Instructor Name

February 18, 2026

Twenty-Four Hours From a Dead Air Conditioner to a Cool Bedroom: A Purchase-Path Map of One Renter's Replacement, With Both Pauses Marked

This paper maps one purchase from the moment the buyer noticed a need to the moment the product was in use. The buyer is Tasha Morrow, the composite Philadelphia renter introduced in Unit 1, a member of the same-day replacer segment defined in Unit 2. Her path began at about 2 p.m. on Sunday, June 22, 2025, when her window air conditioner failed, and ended at about 2:15 p.m. on Monday, June 23, when a replacement was finally cooling her bedroom. The map records each stage in the order she met it, with what she was trying to do, what the seller put in front of her, how long it took and what she did next. Two stages are marked as pauses, where she stopped and came back later. The commentary after the map reads it rather than repeating it.

How the Map Is Organized

Lemon and Verhoef (2016) describe the customer journey as moving through prepurchase, purchase and postpurchase stages, with touchpoints owned by the brand, by partners, by the customer and by outside sources. Court et al. (2009) argued that buyers do not narrow choices in a straight funnel but move through consideration, active evaluation, the moment of purchase and the experience afterward, often looping back. This map uses both ideas. Its stages are grouped as prepurchase, purchase and postpurchase, and it records the loop that occurred when the first purchase failed and the buyer started again.

Richardson (2010) recommended that journey maps record the customer's actions, motivations, questions and barriers at each stage. The map below keeps the four columns this course asks for: the buyer's goal, what the seller presented, elapsed time and the buyer's next action. Times come from order emails, pickup notifications and text messages kept by the buyer, listed in the appendix.

The Map

The table shows the path in eleven stages. Rows marked as pauses are where the buyer left the path and returned later.

Reading the Map: Where the Time Went

The map shows that the seller's parts of the path were fast. Checkout took four minutes, and the store had the unit ready less than two hours after the order. The slowest stages were not the seller's operations at all. The longest was the second pause, fourteen and a half hours, which existed only because the first purchase could not be used. The second longest was the waiting stage, which was reasonable for same-day pickup. If the goal of the purchase was a cool bedroom, the path took about 24 hours, of which roughly two thirds were caused by a single mismatch.

Time matters because this buyer's situation was defined by it. For a same-day replacer, a path that is fast in its seller-controlled stages but produces an unusable product is slower than a slow path that produces the right one.

Reading the Map: The Missing Question

Stage 3 is where the path went wrong, though nothing looked wrong at the time. The listing told Tasha the unit could cool up to 350 square feet, which made it seem more than adequate. It did not ask, and she did not think to check, what kind of window it fit. The only mention of window type appeared in the installation manual she opened at stage 8, more than three hours later. Put in the vocabulary of Lemon and Verhoef (2016), the brand-owned touchpoint with the most influence over the decision was the product page, and it was silent on the attribute that decided whether the product could be used.

The first pause is also informative. Tasha left the path to ask her landlord for permission, which shows she was aware of her constraints as a renter. The seller had no way to know this, but a question about window type at the same moment would have met a buyer already thinking about her home's limits.

Reading the Map: The Loop

Court et al. (2009) observed that buyers often return to active evaluation after purchase. Tasha did so in the most costly way possible, starting a second search on Monday morning with more knowledge and less patience. In the second search she knew her window type and searched for units that would fit it, but the retailer's listings still offered no way to filter by window type. She settled on a portable unit because its kit fit sliding windows, even though portable units generally cool less efficiently than window units of similar rating. The loop therefore produced a working room but a second-best product and a first product still to be returned, which is the subject of Unit 7.

Appendix: Records Behind the Map

The times in the map come from the following records kept by the buyer: the Sunday order confirmation email at 3:05 p.m.; the ready-for-pickup text at 4:52 p.m.; the pickup receipt timestamped 5:38 p.m.; text messages with the landlord at 2:52 and 3:01 p.m.; text messages with her sister at 6:44 p.m.; and the Monday order confirmation at 9:48 a.m. with its pickup receipt. Arrival at the store and the start of the installation attempt are the buyer's own estimates. All records belong to the composite case built for this course.

References

Court, D., Elzinga, D., Mulder, S., & Vetvik, O. J. (2009). The consumer decision journey. McKinsey Quarterly, (3), 96-107.

Lemon, K. N., & Verhoef, P. C. (2016). Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 69-96. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0420

Richardson, A. (2010, November 15). Using customer journey maps to improve customer experience. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2010/11/using-customer-journey-maps-to