Funnels are to marketing what the steering wheel is to a car. Without funnels, marketing doesn’t really exist and goes astray even with the least bit of misalignment. But the funnel as we know it is dead.

The core idea behind a funnel is refinement – it separates a large potential audience into chunks of the audience that are listening, interested and finally, the ones that are ready to buy. 

Pretty neat, right? Well, it doesn’t work anymore. 

Most funnels look something like this. 

RIP. 

Who killed the marketing funnel?

In a rare incidence of self-awareness in marketing, the funnel strangled itself when it was stretched beyond measure. 

To be fair, the funnel gets the basic ideas right in that it teaches marketers to focus on first building awareness of the product, engaging with the customers, and slowly warming them up to their purchase. Rinse. Repeat. 

The problem is that it’s assumed linearity that’s best expressed on fancy PowerPoint presentations and excel sheets but rarely noticed in actual consumer behavior. Consumers don’t function like computers and don’t follow well-defined algorithms. 

Think of the last time you bought a phone or you bought cookies from a new D2C brand that you didn’t know existed before you clicked an Instagram ad. Did you spend a day getting yourself aware of the brand and then liking their posts the next day and then on the third day you were ready to take the plunge? I think not. 

The truth is, that with connected device ecosystems, there’s constant access to information, advertising, and camouflaged branding messages that have made us all hyper-aware and hyper-engaged. At any given point, we’re processing thousands of data points about a variety of products that we may or may not ever buy. 

Now think of the marketer who’s building, tracking, breathing this funnel, and wondering why you’re engaging with the brand constantly but not buying – it’s not because you need to see *more ads*, it could be because you are: 

• Not interested in the product
• Don’t have the need for it 
• Can’t afford it
• Just curious about the category 
• Bored and scrolling endlessly 
• Interested in just the content
• A marketer screwing other marketers’ attribution 😉 

Thus, it’s not a problem with the marketing, it’s a problem with the assumption that people move linearly through various stages of engagement with a brand and that that relationship concludes with the swipe of a credit card. 

In fact, the crucial points of customers’ post-purchase experience, service, word-of-mouth, loyalty, and all moments post the buying journey are often ignored in most conventional funnels. Marketing, hence, is reduced to a sales-enablement exercise rather than one of building a brand that’s larger than life and evokes emotional responses in its audience. 

Introducing the discovery loop

Whether it’s a B2B or a B2C offering, the linear and hierarchical structure of the funnel keeps. marketing in the dark about what’s actually happening. For most products and services, the consumer journey is neither linear nor hierarchical. In fact, it’s an ever-expanding loop of discovery, engagement, and consideration. It looks something like this. 

Let’s break down the three most important characteristics of this discovery loop. 

1. Infinite – By definition, there aren’t any well-defined entry or exit points for the audience. One could skip all the stages of a conventional marketing funnel and directly become a customer through word-of-mouth or one could engage with the brand only to drop off at the moment of truth. 

2. Porous – The discovery loop is porous meaning that it’s not heavily shielded at the boundaries. It implies that instead of having a one-time action and consequence, the audience keeps discovering, re-discovering, and dropping off the journey. 

3. Parallel – The interesting bit here is that people often drop off only to join a competitor’s loop and prolific buyers are often present in dozens of such journeys – simultaneously!

The full circle

While the discovery loops are an evolution of the old marketing funnel, it’s important to realize that buyer journeys are constantly evolving and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. 

Once you start framing your marketing journey as a loop, you stop eliminating people just because they haven’t bought yet. A loop is ever-expanding and hence, offers unlimited potential to keep engaging with and selling a larger set of audiences without having to chuck them at every stage. 

One parting thought: Many products now take advantage of community as a channel or go full throttle on paid advertising to produce the revenue – while leaving the brand building for another day. 

There aren’t any wrong answers as long as marketing activities achieve the stated goals but it’s immediately necessary for marketers to start thinking in loops and focus more on building the right post-purchase loyalty loops that can drive in a lot of business and improve NPS. 

After all, in a world that’s constantly selling, it is worth standing out as a brand that cares.