What is liminality’?

There are times in life when we feel betwixt and between, when our identity is shifting. It is as if we are standing at a doorway with no clear feeling about whether to stay or go. Three classic examples are:

• Adolescence
• Caring for a newborn, and
• Approaching retirement

Adolescence is the time when teenagers want to transition away from childhood to an adulthood that they can’t quite envisage, or don’t feel ready for. They are betwixt and between.

Carers of newborns who left a structured day in a work environment where identity was marked by titles and hierarchy. They have now become immersed instead into the chaos of parenting where there is no structure, there are no titles and only one hierarchy – the baby whose needs must be met. Carers in this situation have left their old identity behind but have not yet taken on a new role of parent-in-charge. They are betwixt and between.

People approaching retirement may feel that work is no longer as interesting or as rewarding as it used to be – but at the same they may have no idea what they would do if they stopped work. They are betwixt and between.

The anthropological term for this is ‘liminality’. Liminality in anthropology is a state of transition between one stage and the next, especially between major stages in life. It has been used more recently by consumer researchers (like me) to refer to all sorts of transitions that affect our sense of identity, including for example what to do about greying hair as you age.

Liminality creates uncertainty

When we stand at these metaphorical doorways, we can feel full of uncertainty about who we are.

Liminality and customer journeys

At Susan Bell Research we build expectations of liminality into customer journey research, for example for investment journeys.

• The path taken by retail investors rarely fits a conventional customer journey map because the stock market is so dynamic. Investors can find themselves ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ as the market changes. Investment is also a learning experience – people learn what works and what doesn’t. Some investors experience investing as “fumbling, bumbling and stumbling”

Zigs, zags, fumbles, bumbles, and stumbles don’t fit well into the standard linear customer journey pathway, but they do fit the liminality concept well. This is because liminality is about the transformation you feel when you go from one state or stage to another, and how uncertain and difficult that can be.

Liminality is also an important consideration in retirement journey research. For example, a woman forced into retirement after redundancy said she “stumbled and fell‘” trying to work out who she was and what she wanted to be and do. She made subtle shifts in what she did and how she looked during this period as she played with the ‘retiree aesthetic’.

If your customer journeys are characterised by twists and turns, then consider whether liminality is the cause.

Make sure you talk to us to find out what is really going on in the lives of your customers.

What matters is how people’s needs change as they transition from one life stage to another.