The latent pipeline concept that I layed out last week is one that sounds good on its surface, but as a German colleague of mine would say, "where is the detail?" The key to operationalizing latent pipeline is having a really good grasp of marketing from the customer's perspective, that is, online. What I call this (and this is my term) is online topography. I call it this because it reminds me a lot of a topographical map. You have features on the map (mountains, streams, trails) and you also have altitude, a scalar field that permeates the whole two-dimensional plane.

This is similar to what a fully fleshed out online topography looks like. To make one, you need three things:

A use case, for example, moms searching for nursery schools in Washington, DC

A pipeline, from the customer's perspective

A map of all the places customers go to achieve this use case

Then, you sum all of the customers up (i.e. integrate the function) and you have your topography.…