The Maze: The media plan did not disappear. It moved upstream. When people start shopping by researching, comparing and validating, the first brand advantage is no longer interruption. It is being useful wherever the research happens. BCG’s Global Consumer Radar puts a number on the shift: digital media appears in 17% of consumer journeys on average, versus 8% for traditional media. For influence on the chosen brand, the split is 51% versus 38%. That is not a verdict to abandon TV, radio, print or out-of-home. It is a warning that reach is a poor proxy for being considered.
Discovery now has several front doors, and most are digital. Internet research appears in 22% of surveyed journeys. Social media and brand or retailer websites follow at 20% each; online ads reach 13%; LLM search reaches 11%. Together, those digital routes average 17%, more than twice the 8% average for TV/radio, print and billboards. A shopper can move from a creator recommendation to a retailer page, a search result and an AI comparison without once encountering the old, neat funnel. The practical consequence is brutal in its simplicity: if product facts, availability, reviews and category language are weak, the brand is absent from the part of the journey where consideration is being built.
Influence at choice is more concentrated than usage at discovery. Social media is the most influential listed source for brand choice at 56%, with LLM search at 55% and brand or retailer websites at 51%. Internet research is 47%, online ads 45%, TV/radio 42%, print 39% and billboards 35%. The digital group’s 51% average exceeds the traditional group’s 38% by 13 percentage points. These are not conversion rates and they do not prove that a post or answer caused a purchase. They do show that, among respondents’ reported journeys, the places where people go to resolve uncertainty have become the places that shape the brand ultimately bought.
The website has become a source file, not merely a destination. A brand or retailer site has the same 20% journey presence as social media and is named as most influential for brand choice in 51% of journeys. That puts first-party product information between social’s discovery power and LLMs’ growing comparison role. The operating job is not to write generic “SEO content.” It is to maintain clear specifications, price and availability signals, comparison-ready descriptions, answers to recurring questions and proof that holds up when a human or a machine asks for it. BCG’s recommendation to make content structured, factual and continuously refreshed is less a channel tactic than a catalogue discipline.
Traditional media still participates, but it is no longer the default shortcut to consideration. TV/radio reaches 12% of journeys and has 42% brand-choice influence; print is 7% and 39%; billboards are 6% and 35%. Those are meaningful figures, particularly when a category, geography or moment makes broad salience valuable. But the aggregate gap matters because research-led buyers do not simply receive a message. They interrogate it. A campaign can create memory; it cannot compensate for an unfindable product page, stale retailer data or a weak answer when a shopper asks what is actually different.
Why it matters: Marketing teams often split “brand” and “performance” as if one creates demand while the other harvests it. Research-led journeys scramble that distinction. The brand now competes inside a distributed evidence system: social posts, search results, retailers’ product detail pages, reviews and LLM answers. The winning unit of work is not the campaign asset alone. It is a maintained body of product truth that can be discovered, understood and trusted across every one of those interfaces.
Sources: BCG, *The Research-Led Consumer Journey Is Changing the Rules of Marketing Influence*, published June 17, 2026; BCG Global Consumer Radar survey, November 2025, N = 12,308.
