What If There Is No Funnel?

When I hear marketers talk about funnels, I experience an immediate, most unfortunate visual. It’s a visceral synesthesia of cows being squeezed and pressed through chutes.

I don’t wanna be a cow squeezed and pressed through a chute. And I’m not sure humans follow, even metaphorically, the squishy, vertical drop down a funnel. McKinsey wrote about this dynamic back in 2009 when the internet upended the consumer journey. The dynamic observed in 2009 was the the journey was a loop. Consumers might engage in activity that seemed lower funnel (e.g. check and click on inventory and prices; load into cart), but then loop back to brand awareness activity (read product information and reviews).

So it was of interest when I read a MarTech colleague’s post that the marketing funnel becomes “more simple and useful when you remove the MOFU middle.” He says that, outside of brand building and activation, taking consumers through a middle step actually means taking consumers on a journey of your design. “Progression becomes the goal,” he says, “and we become in the game of prescribing content. We make assumptions about what audiences want, and what we think they should want next.”

I might add that we often see KPIs thrown on the middle that are not brand building and not activation, but an ineffective and non-corollary Frankenstein of the former and latter.

The real consumer journey is non-linear and messy. For measurement, let’s start at the end and keep things simple.