The end of the road for Journey?

Unsplash / Matt Foxx

The New York Times recently discussed the concept of Journey, what we at OZ call a Deep Metaphor.

Many people have grown tired of the word “journey.”  As the article describes, everything has become a journey – people describe their fertility journey, their sobriety journey, their weight-loss journey, their spiritual journey.  We journey through grief and illness. We journey through marriage and parenthood.

Perhaps the problem is with the word rather than the concept.  According to linguistic research, use of the word skyrocketed between 2006 and 2019.  But we didn’t start thinking about various aspects of life as a journey in 2006.  Journey-themed phrases like “at a crossroads,”  “going off track,” and “on the right path” have been in common use for decades.

This presents a challenge for marketers, especially those who work in areas often framed as journeys – financial services and health and wellness come to mind, but there are other examples. 

Although the word journey has grown trite – and even offensive to some people, as the article notes – that doesn’t necessarily mean the idea of journey is irrelevant.  It isn’t usually a choice to think of something as a journey. It is an unconscious act.  It is a choice to call it a journey, though.

One option in communications is to convey the idea of journey without using the word.  After all, most successful movies follow a pattern known as the Hero’s Journey. But they don’t say in big letters at the beginning of the movie, “This is a story about a hero on a journey.” They just tell the story and use the journey as a behind-the-scenes framework.

Alternatively, marketers could proactively look for other metaphors to serve as the basis of communication.  Most topics are nuanced and we think about them using a set of metaphors, not just one.  If you don’t want your experience to be seen as a journey, you may need to think creatively about other metaphors that could resonate just as effectively – either a metaphor already in consumers’ minds or one that your brand creates that essentially trains people to think differently.