This screenshot from Shar VanBoskirk’s presentation deck offers stark truths about how we make decisions.

Are marketers staking too much on their perceptions of their buyers’ journeys? Recent research from Forrester and Google suggests that buying behaviors are changing dramatically, throwing many marketing assumptions into question.

Let’s take the buyer’s journey, for a start. According to Forrester’s Jay McQuivey (@jmcquivey), the digital environment has driven fundamental changes in customer behavior; effectively laying waste to any notion a marketer may have of a linear sales funnel. We’re in an era of hyper-adoption, McQuivey says, which is characterized by the rapid and nearly simultaneous adoption of new behaviors. People are increasingly willing to try new things, providing doing so has little cost, whether that cost is in terms of dollars, time or privacy. For marketers, the challenge is in keeping the fast-moving and increasingly fickle audience engaged, as McQuivey notes…