In the beginning was the channel. Then there were channels, plural, and they were managed separately, by separate teams, with separate KPIs, and they didn’t talk to each other, and that was called “multichannel,” and it was fine, more or less, in the way that most things that are somewhat disorganized are fine. And then came the consultants, and they looked upon the channels, and they said: “What if the channels were not separate? What if the customer experience were seamless across all touchpoints? What if we called it ‘omnichannel’ and charged accordingly?” And lo, the omnichannel age began.
That was approximately fifteen years ago. In the interim, the word “omnichannel” has been used to describe approximately every possible combination of marketing activities, from genuinely integrated customer experiences to a company that has a website, an Instagram, and a newsletter they send out on alternating Thursdays when someone remembers to log into Mailchimp. The word has traveled so far from its original meaning that it now functions primarily as a signal of seriousness rather than a description of capability. Saying you have an omnichannel strategy is like saying you have a strategic approach to breathing. It sounds important. It is impossible to disagree with. It commits you to absolutely nothing specific.
What Omnichannel Was Supposed to Mean
The genuine version of omnichannel is straightforward and genuinely hard: a customer’s experience of your brand should be coherent and continuous regardless of which channel they use, and the channels should share information so that the experience improves with each interaction rather than resetting to zero every time the customer moves from your app to your store to your customer service line. If you called your bank last week and explained a problem, you shouldn’t have to explain it again when you open the app. If you put something in your online cart and then walk into the physical store, the store associate should know, or at least the system should.
This is technically achievable and organizationally catastrophic. It requires shared data infrastructure across systems that were built at different times by different teams and frequently don’t communicate. It requires breaking down the organizational silos where the digital team, the retail team, the CRM team, and the customer service team each own their piece of the customer and protect it from the others. It requires someone with enough authority and enough persistence to force these teams to coordinate, and that person either doesn’t exist or is currently stuck in a steering committee meeting about the omnichannel strategy deck.
The Omnichannel Strategy Deck
Most companies’ omnichannel journey begins with a strategy deck. The deck outlines the vision: a seamless customer experience, unified data, integrated communications, consistent brand presence across all touchpoints. The deck is beautiful. The vision is compelling. The roadmap at the back of the deck has sixteen workstreams and a three-year timeline and a budget that gets cut in half during the next planning cycle.
What actually gets implemented, typically, is the visible layer: the same visual identity applied consistently across channels, a content calendar that tries to coordinate messaging across platforms, a CRM system that is technically integrated with the website though the integration works less well than the vendor implied. This is not nothing. Consistency of appearance and message is genuinely valuable. It is also not what the omnichannel strategy deck promised, which was a fundamentally different customer experience powered by unified data and seamless transitions between touchpoints.
The gap between the deck and the reality is explained, in subsequent decks, as “Phase Two.” Phase Two will address the data infrastructure. Phase Two will break down the silos. Phase Two is always eighteen months away and has been eighteen months away for four years. In the interim, the company publishes case studies about its omnichannel approach that describe Phase One as if Phase Two had already happened.
The Omnichannel Meeting
The organizational reality of omnichannel is a meeting. Usually a recurring meeting. The Digital team presents their metrics. The Retail team presents their metrics. The CRM team presents their metrics. Everyone’s metrics look reasonable in isolation. Nobody can explain the customer who appears in the Digital data, the Retail data, and the CRM data as three different people with three different histories. The meeting ends with an action item to “align on attribution,” which produces a sub-meeting, which produces a shared document, which is last edited eighteen months ago.
The meeting exists because the organizational structure hasn’t changed to match the strategy. You can declare yourself omnichannel all you like, but if the incentives still reward each channel team for their channel’s performance in isolation, the coordination will be perfunctory. The channel managers are not being obstinate — they’re being rational. They are optimizing for the thing they’re measured on, which is not “contribution to a seamless customer journey” but “channel revenue” or “channel engagement.” The omnichannel strategy sits above the incentive structure without changing it, like a banner hung over a building that is structurally exactly the same as before the banner went up.
The Honest Version
Here is what honest omnichannel communication would look like: “We are consistent in our visual identity and messaging across channels. Our website and app share data reasonably well. Our retail and digital teams meet monthly and have a good working relationship. Our customer service team has access to purchase history. We do not yet have fully unified customer profiles or seamless cross-channel handoffs, and that infrastructure project is in the roadmap for 2026.” That’s a real description of a real capability. It’s also never what appears in the brand presentation, because it sounds like an admission rather than a strategy.
The word “omnichannel” will continue to mean everything until it means nothing, and then a new word will arrive — probably something involving “unified” or “integrated” or “total customer experience” — and the cycle will begin again with fresh slides and the same underlying coordination problems. It’s not cynicism. It’s just how language works in marketing: the vocabulary evolves faster than the reality, and the gap between them is where most of the budget lives.
For those keeping score at home, the NoBriefs shop is itself available across multiple channels. Not because we have an omnichannel strategy — we just have a website and some social accounts and a desire to sell good things to people who are tired of bad words. The KPI Shark does not care which channel you use to find him. He is, you might say, channel-agnostic.
