The Moment Is the Marketing
Your best marketing might not look like marketing at all. It might look like the moment someone realized you meant it.
There is a moment in every relationship with a brand when the customer decides what you really are. It is almost never in the ad. It is usually something small: how fast someone answered, how a problem was handled, whether the person on the other end used their name, whether the package arrived the way it was promised.
That moment is your marketing. Everything else is an invitation to it.
I want to talk about why so many organizations spend their energy on the invitation and so little on the moment itself—and what happens when you reverse that.
We Budget for Attention and Improvise the Experience
In many organizations, the marketing team owns the message and someone else owns the experience—operations, customer service, the front desk, a volunteer. Those groups often do not talk. So the campaign promises warmth, and the first phone call delivers a hold queue. The brand says one thing and the moment says another, and people believe the moment every time.
This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of design. Moments get improvised because no one is assigned to them. And improvised moments are inconsistent by nature.
Jessica LaShawn’s Perspective
I tell clients that a moment is the smallest complete unit of a brand. You cannot have a brand without moments, and you cannot fake a moment. People are inside it. They feel it in real time.
That is good news, because moments are manageable. You may not be able to rebuild your entire organization this quarter, but you can choose three moments that matter most and make them unmistakably yours. The welcome. The handoff. The ending. Get those right and people start describing you in ways no slogan could.
When you design a moment, design for a feeling first. Relief. Confidence. Belonging. Then decide what has to be true operationally for that feeling to happen every time.
Personal Reflection
I keep journals, and when I look back through them, I notice I rarely wrote about the big announcements. I wrote about moments—a conversation, a quiet encouragement, a door that opened when I did not expect it. Those were the entries that shaped what I believed about myself and what I believed was possible.
That is why I take moments seriously in business. People are journaling you in their minds whether they write it down or not.
Moments the Familiar Names Designed on Purpose
Disney parks are famous for treating every guest-facing role as part of the show. Whether or not you are a theme park fan, the principle is useful: the person sweeping the walkway is part of the experience, so they are trained like it.
Chick-fil-A became widely known for a consistent courtesy—the familiar response to a thank-you—and for drive-through operations designed to stay calm even when lines are long. The point is not the phrase itself. It is that a small, repeated moment became a recognizable part of the brand.
Putting this into practice? Explore Branding Consultation — Your Brand Impact Strategy with Jessica LaShawn.
A Closer Look at the Handoff
Of the three moments in the Moment Map, the handoff is the one organizations most often ignore, because it does not belong cleanly to any single department. The welcome belongs to sales or the front desk. The ending belongs to whoever closes out the file. But the handoff—the point where one person or one system passes a customer to another—belongs to the seams between departments, and seams are where organizations are weakest.
Think about what happens when a new client moves from the person who sold them on a service to the person who will actually deliver it. If that transition requires the client to re-explain their situation from scratch, the brand has just taught them something unflattering: that the organization does not talk to itself. If, instead, the new contact already knows the context and picks up naturally, the brand has taught the opposite lesson, and it did so without saying a single promotional word.
Questions Worth Sitting With
I often ask clients to sit with a simple but uncomfortable question: if a stranger experienced only your handoff moment, with no other context, what would they assume your organization values? Some leaders discover the honest answer is efficiency over people, or process over relationship, and that discovery is more useful than any amount of brand messaging could be, because it points directly at what needs to change.
A second question worth sitting with is who actually owns each moment on your map. Not whose job description mentions it, but who would notice first if it quietly went wrong. If the honest answer is no one, you have found a moment that is being improvised rather than designed, and improvisation is exactly what the Moment Map exists to replace.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A well-designed welcome can be as simple as a receptionist who already knows a visitor’s name and why they are there, instead of asking them to announce themselves to a room full of strangers. A well-designed ending can be as simple as a final conversation that closes the loop honestly, rather than letting a relationship fade into silence. Neither requires a large budget. Both require someone deciding, ahead of time, what the moment should feel like, and then building the small operational habits that make that feeling repeatable.
Organizations that take this seriously often start by shadowing their own customer journey the way a researcher would, writing down exactly what happens and how it feels at each of the three moments. That exercise alone, done honestly, usually surfaces more useful insight than a full rebrand, because it shows leadership where the brand is actually being built, moment by moment, whether anyone planned it or not.
What the Research Suggests
B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore’s Harvard Business Review article “Welcome to the Experience Economy” argued decades ago that experiences are a distinct economic offering, not a decoration on top of goods and services. Later work in HBR on customer emotions makes a related case: emotional connection shapes behavior in ways satisfaction scores alone may miss.
The JLC Moment Map
Three moments that carry most of a brand’s reputation.
- Welcome: The first time someone feels expected.
- Handoff: Where responsibility passes between people or steps.
- Ending: How the experience closes and what it leaves behind.
The Moment Map is deliberately small. The welcome sets expectations. The handoff tests whether your organization is one brand or several departments wearing the same logo. The ending determines what people remember and repeat.
Strengthen those three and the moments between them tend to improve, because your team finally has a shared picture of what good looks like.
What This Means for Your Brand
For your brand, start by listing every moment a customer passes through, from first discovery to the final follow-up. Then circle the three where people are most likely to form an opinion. Those are your marketing priorities, whether they sit in the marketing department or not.
Give each moment an owner, a feeling, and a standard. You will be surprised how quickly the rest of your marketing starts to sound true.
Your next campaign may be wonderful. But somewhere this week, a customer is having a moment with your brand that matters more.
Design it. Own it. That moment is the marketing.
Sources & Further Reading
- Welcome to the Experience Economy — Harvard Business Review
- The New Science of Customer Emotions — Harvard Business Review
- The Peak–End Rule — Nielsen Norman Group