The New Funnel

I remember back in elementary school (okay, vaguely—but no jokes about how long ago that was, please) when I first learned about converting measurements.  Back then, we’d spend forever turning inches into feet, feet into yards, cups into pints, pints into quarts and every other measurement of volume, distance, and time into other measurements of volume, distance and time.  Then things got crazy when we had to learn how to change centimeters into meters, milliliters into liters, and so on.  Want to drive a kid insane?  No problem.  Add in converting from standard measurements to metric system measurements.  I remember a test in which we had to measure various shapes in order to discover their area.  We had to be careful to use the correct ruler (some of us, the correct side of the ruler) so we measured in the right system.  If you measured correctly, you got good marks.  If you tried to use a standard ruler for a metric question, you failed.  If you didn’t use the correct formula for determining the area of a square, you failed.

Well, you probably know by now that I’m not just reminiscing.  I belong to about twenty news feeds too many, and on one of them, a marketing piece popped up.  With my background in marketing, sales, and business development strategy, it’s hard for me to pass up on clicking on a title that involves marketing.  This particular post declared that the funnel model of marketing is dead.  That’s right.  Dead.  Not in trouble, not sick.  It’s dead.  I read with interest, and I’m always amazed at how quickly business experts move to declare the end of something.  You see, I don’t think the funnel is dead at all.  I think it’s just been converted. A short while ago it was liters, and now it’s gallons, or something like that. Just as a European in the United States has to put some thought into distances expressed in miles before beginning a journey, marketing executives now have to put some thought into how they measure marketing effects and a customer’s journey into the funnel.

The funnel represents a fairly clear understanding of the path from a potential customer to an actual customer, but the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action) process is no longer influenced in the same manner it was a few decades ago or even one decade ago.  I find it interesting that so many marketing experts are ready to throw away the model instead of learning new ways to understand and influence customers within the various stages.  Certainly, there are new factors to consider that might give us four or five different kinds of prospects in the Interest or Decision stage, but realistically, they’re still in that stage, right?  Has all of humanity changed into something else or have people instead changed the way they gather and act on data?  I think it’s the latter, and I think marketing professionals have to start thinking about the funnel in a different light, but I’m not ready to say it’s not a funnel just because I have to measure it with a different ruler.