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The Marketing Architects
The Death of the Funnel
00:26:01
Concern about short-termism among marketers jumped from 25% in 2022 to 55% in 2025. Budget allocation barely moved. The funnel may not be dead, but it might be damaging your brand. This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob debate whether the marketing funnel...
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- [00:00]
A
When it comes to like a meta, it's not a funnel, it's a syringe. It's pumping cash right into the veins of Zuckerberg. It's just perfectly designed to make money for the connected platforms like that. I mean, why wouldn't they continue to build around that in their case studies and in their best practices? And we already know the language, so it must be right. And it's why they make the money they do.
- [00:27]
B
Marketing Architects hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Alena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co hosts Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob Demar is the chief product architect of misfits and machines.
- [00:47]
A
Hello Hello.
- [00:49]
B
We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. Today we're talking about the marketing funnel. Is it dead? Dying? Is it just misunderstood? Everyone from Google to Ehrenberg Bass to the trade press has declared the traditional funnel is obsolete. If we kill the funnel, what do we do instead? And does constantly reinventing it actually help marketers, or is it just making it harder to communicate our results? That is the topic for today, and I'm going to kick us off, as I always do, with some research. This episode was inspired by a recent Marketing Week article by the Trade Desk Reality Check column titled Marketers constant attempts to reinvent the Funnel are losing them credibility. The article acknowledges the growing body of evidence that the traditional awareness, consideration, conversion funnel oversimplifies how people actually buy. Google released some research called the Messy Middle research, and they show that buyers don't move linearly. They loop between exploring and evaluating in chaotic, unpredictable ways. And Work's Multiplier effect report made the case that separating brand and performance into upper and lower funnel buckets is a false dichotomy. Thinkbox has also released research on this in their profitability 2 report, showing that the media mix across categories is heavily biased towards short term tactics and therefore not optimized for ROI or profit. But this article argues that all this funnel reinvention is actually backfiring. The authors tested new frameworks with senior marketers and the feedback was brutal. They said things like it's too complicated. If it takes more than a couple minutes to understand a chart, I've lost executive Another said that they could see pushback if they tried to replace the language of awareness, consideration and conversion. So the evidence for rethinking the funnel is strong, but the marketing industry's habit of constantly replacing it with something more complex might hurt our credibility. Let's get into it. I thought we should just go ahead and start with the question everyone listening probably just wants to have answered, which is, do we think the funnel is still a relevant framework for marketers?
- [02:44]
C
I'm a fan of mental shortcuts, and I think the funnel is useful as a shortcut. But I think somewhere along the way, marketers started treating it as a map of how humans behave. And I think that's what this article speaks to, what you're speaking to. Elena, you know what the research shows across thousands of campaigns, millions of dollars in spend many, many years, is that advertising works by shifting probabilities. Every time someone sees your brand, you're incrementally increasing the chance they'll choose you the next time they're buying in your category. And that happens very slowly across many years, mostly outside of any purchase moment. I think the the funnel implies people are moving through stages with intention. And the reality is that most buying is very low involvement. It's very fast, it's habitual. People reach for what's familiar. The brands that end up winning are the ones with the strongest mental availability, meaning when a buying moment arrives, your brand is the one that comes to mind first. So the funnel doesn't really have a great mechanism for that. It's built around a rational, sequential buyer who in most categories simply doesn't exist. Rob is a funnel nightmare for a marketer.
- [03:57]
A
Gosh, yeah, I agree with you, Angie. It's funny, I heard someone use this analogy once. The QWERTY keyboard is really not optimal, but we've all sort of learned it, We've all kind of use it. I mean, it's a framework. So from that standpoint, the funnel is relevant. But yeah, it's not exactly optimal.
- [04:18]
B
Yeah, I would agree with you. I think that it's useful for teaching someone generally about how marketing could work, maybe where it becomes not as useful as when you are truly planning all of your marketing decisions around a traditional funnel. And a lot of ad platforms have built their products around the funnel. So sometimes marketers are sort of forced into this funnel. Thinking meta literally lets you optimize for awareness, consideration, or conversion. And a lot of the other similar platforms do the same. How much do we think the funnel is surviving just because these platforms are sort of forcing them on marketers?
- [04:53]
C
I have a take on how much are we actually using the funnel A little later, just in terms of Budgeting decisions and things like that. But platforms built funnel stage optimization to their products because it sells more campaign types. So that's just a commercial decision dressed up as media science. And marketers accept it because the interface makes it feel sort of rigorous. I think the deeper problem is that platform control the measurement, and that measurement is built on last touch attribution, meaning the platform gives credit to whatever touchpoint happened closest to purchase. So your paid search campaign looks brilliant, your television potentially looks weak, and the data confirms that you should shift more money towards search. You know, when we think about what econometric modeling shows consistently across categories, it's that a huge share of those search clicks exist because of the brand advertising that happened weeks or months earlier. The person typed your brand name into Google because something made your brand mentally available to them. The platform takes the credit for the click. The brand investment that caused the click potentially gets cut. So it's just a very expensive misreading of cause and effect. I think it can be really dangerous. These different campaign types in, in these platforms and it's happening at enormous scale across the industry.
- [06:10]
A
I think when it comes to like a meta, it's not a funnel, it's a syringe. It's pumping cash right into the veins of Zuckerberg. You know, it is, it's just perfectly designed to make money for, for the connected platforms like that. I mean, it's just, it's, it was like engineered and why wouldn't they continue to build around that in their case studies and in their best practices? And we already know the language, so it must be right and it's why they make the money they do.
- [06:41]
B
When I was prepping for this episode, one thing I was thinking of is are there categories where the funnel actually does describe like really well how people buy? And then are there others where it just naturally this is going to completely fall apart?
- [06:56]
C
I think there are categories that there's maybe more relevance. High consideration purchases would come to mind for me. Enterprise software, mortgages, a new car, something where a person likely spends weeks researching, involves multiple decision makers, goes through a genuine evaluation process, even though I'd say it describes a process more than it explains what advertising should do. But the shoe fits a little more, I would say, in high consideration. Where it falls apart. Our categories may be more like packaged goods, cereal, shampoo, beer. People buy those categories dozens of times, if not more a year, quickly, with almost zero deliberation, they reach for a brand that comes to mind first or is just there on the shelf. And so mental Availability and physical availability are really important. That's Byron Sharp's framework at Ehrenberg Bass. And the data behind that is super strong. The category I think that really illustrates a bit of a trap is, is in the DTC world, right. They grew up in digital environments where every stage of the funnel was trackable, so it felt like validation. But where they were actually measuring was a very small population of highly activated buyers, while the much larger pool of potential customers stayed outside of their view. And so they optimized the funnel, quote, unquote brilliantly and hit a growth ceiling. And the lack of a focus on a funnel fed into that problem just in that then they have insufficient reach, which is, as we know, a really important lever for growth.
- [08:29]
A
Is it an oversimplification or over generalization to say that B2B tends to be better for the funnel than B2C?
- [08:38]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think there's B2C that, like I said, does still have more of a funnel in terms of the customer journey that a. That a consumer would go through. But I think it's fair that a lot of B2B SaaS, you know, platform purchase decisions, things like that, are heavily researched. You're probably, we've talked about this before. You're probably not being shopped if you're not one of the top five that that person knows about. So awareness is super important. There's not a lot of physical availability in the B2B world that can make it hard where maybe not top of funnel awareness matters more. So I could kind of go with you there.
- [09:15]
A
So, you know, for me, that was, I mean, and you hit on it, Ange, with B2B. And I was even thinking about, you know, software as well. Just SaaS tends to be, you know, you can get caught up into the funnel pretty easily because you are doing research, you're trying to, you know, figure it out. And I think we've even seen, you know, in our own product experience when we were developing products ourselves, and we've talked about it a million times, but like with stuffies, where the funnel actually didn't work right, like if we were going to sit here and go, okay, we're really building funnels for mom, we would have missed out on, on the real buyer of grandmas. So, you know, there's definitely cases there where you can, you know, in the consumer space where it definitely can. Can go backwards on you.
- [09:57]
B
Yeah, I was thinking that the funnel, I think, can fall apart in any category really. So, like, just pick, pick your. Pick your poison. But I were one. I was trying to think of ones where it does apply well and I think it's almost categories where there's pressure to go through the funnel is thinking about college admissions. Like they always say, okay, you should look become aware of a lot of different colleges consider like you got to tour more than one. I was always told that you can't just go to the first one you look at and then you make the decision. Or I was thinking wedding venues pressured to do that too but. And that could apply to B2B SAS too if you have to show everyone, hey, I went through this process but you still might have something in mind that you know you're going to go with no matter what. And you just have to like go through this sort of fake funnel in order to, to prove that like the school you picked or the venue or the software has actually been vetted when someone had something in mind.
- [10:46]
C
Yeah, it's that high consideration I think is probably the common denominator.
- [10:51]
B
Well, one thing I was wondering about is Ang there's a lot of articles like if you, if you search like is the funnel dead online you could find a lot of commentary on it. Not hard to find an article to feature for this. How much are senior marketers at big brands truly using the funnel as their primary marketing framework? Do we think this problem is maybe a little overblown or sophisticated marketers still relying on it?
- [11:12]
C
It's hard to know for sure what level of dependency they have. But I would say this. I think brands genuinely care about awareness. I think there are very few boardrooms in the United States or in the world where you've got a board saying awareness doesn't matter. But caring about awareness and making good investment decisions because of it are two very different things. Work just published data, I think I saw it yesterday showing concern about short termism went from 25% of marketers in 2022 to 55% of marketers in 2025. So the worry is real and growing. And yet budget allocation barely moved in that same period. Work calls that the Seydou gap. And so the reason it persists comes back to what we just said about attribution. When last touch gives all the credit to the bottom, brand investment becomes invisible in the quarterly numbers. So even intellectually believe in awareness and making budget decisions, you know, end up kind of systemically defunding it because the data that they're handed or that they're pulling out of their attribution tells them to. The funnel gives us this language for awareness I think marketers are having a hard time tying a measurement system to it that protects those funds.
- [12:23]
B
Let's talk about what is the real cost of this sort of thinking. Can we point to specific bad decisions that we think brands make because they're trapped by platforms or their own thinking and just the funnel stages.
- [12:35]
C
I was thinking about the creative brief, where maybe the funnel thinking does its earliest consistent damage in a, in a campaign. If you have a brand decide TV is an upper funnel channel, that that label can kind of shape the brief. So the brief says build emotion, tell a story, and the agency delivers something that's cinematic and beautiful and completely impractical for the person that might be watching it. So the problem there is that TV reaches everybody simultaneously. People who've never heard of you, people who bought last week, and people who are actively shopping right now and would respond to something clear and useful. Funnel thinking told you those people belong in a different channel. So your TV creative could potentially ignore them entirely. I think we've talked about this before. The best TV creative holds both jobs at once. It builds memory for that out of market viewer, the person that might be buying six months from now, who needs your brand lodged in their head before that moment arrives. And it gives the in market viewer something that's practical and actionable with a clear offer, a simple cta, a direct articulation of what you do. Campaigns with both emotional resonance and a clear call to action outperform purely emotional campaigns on long and short term metrics. That emotion makes you memorable, the clarity makes it really useful. And the funnel, I think convinced marketers that those two jobs belong in separate channels or are separate creative briefs at the very least, is it too elementary
- [14:05]
A
at the end of the day to just say, if you're looking at, well, what are the costs? There's three big ones that you actually starve at the top to feed the bottom. Right. And you're, you're really paying through the nose to target people that are already interested in you. And you're just continuing to battle finance with are we doing short term wins or long term shrinkage?
- [14:28]
C
It's a good point, Rob. Like you're starving the top, but what in turn that does is starve the bottom eventually.
- [14:34]
A
Right? But it feels like that's what you're doing. I'm reallocating that energy that isn't going to deliver right away to hit that spreadsheet.
- [14:44]
B
All right, so we've talked about, I think pretty thoroughly the challenges with the traditional funnel. And we're not alone. The Marketing industry also seems to feel broadly that the funnel is out of date. So instead, people have been proposing new models, things like the messy middle fractals, flywheels, infinity loops. We love an infinity loop. And the senior marketers that were interviewed for the article I opened with said that they felt these replacements were often too complex for the boardroom. So if a funnel is easy to understand, executives are more likely to lean into it. And when they've been trying to use these more complicated models, people feel like they're going to lose executives. Tom Roach, who has been one of the bigger critics of the funnel, actually agrees that we'd be, as he says, mad to try and kill it. Instead, he proposed a modified funnel that swaps awareness, consideration and conversion for building, nudging and connecting. So he's keeping the simple shape, but updating the thinking behind it. So what do we think? Is there an alternative framework to the funnel that we like?
- [15:45]
C
I think that this is dependent upon the brand that you work for, for the marketing team only, I would say, but I just go to like, if we're going to orient the board or the EMT to a simple framework so that we have a common language and can keep the brand moving in the right direction in terms of, of what's ultimately going to drive growth. I just come back to Bennett and Field. On the investment side, long term brand building and short term activation work together with roughly a 60, 40 starting point as an anchor and then sharp on the audience side. Reach as many buyers and potential buyers in your category as possible with creative that builds distinctive memory structures. Those two things together replace most, I think of what the fun is trying to do. Again, the marketing team, I think can, can break that down and go, okay, do we want to stay with awareness, consideration and ultimately conversion and intent, or do we move over to Tom Roach's model specific to that brand? But I think the reason that they've struggled to replace the funnel in boardrooms is measurement. Mental availability growing is a real thing with real business impact. But it's harder to put in a quarterly dashboard than a conversion rate. So the funnel wins on reportability. And until you have a measurement system that the board trust, whether that's econometrics or incrementality testing, you'll keep defaulting back to the funnel because those are the metrics that show up cleanly in the numbers.
- [17:09]
A
I totally agree with Roach. I think if you take a step back, we're all in the world of branding and we've talked about on this podcast just how Hard it is to create a brand, right? And the funnel is a brand. Whether you like it or you don't like it, it's really hard to replace it. And if we were going to come in like a new CMO and go, we just need a new logo, we need a new brand, we know that's just difficult and there's so much equity in the funnel. But evolving the brand to start to mean something that much clearer and more meaningful, I think is, is spot on. I think Tom Roach, I like his, his language in there, building, nudging, connecting. I think that's really easy to remember and feels more authent.
- [17:54]
B
I think that both of your perspectives could come together. Like I like Tom Roaches. It's almost like he's taking the funnel and he's starting to make it like a little more squishy, like it's not so precise. And then and I agree like eventually trying to move into more of the Bennett and field thinking, the long and the short. But that probably is going to take education and time and agree it depends on your company's situation. If your brand's not doing well, probably not a great time to walk in and say we're not going to report on conversion funnel numbers anymore.
- [18:19]
C
And two to the point earlier, are we in a high consideration sale or are we buying toothpaste? What are the things that really matter in terms of what's going to drive growth?
- [18:27]
B
What about thinking about this from a media planning perspective? Ange, if a brand came to us and said we want to try to move beyond funnel based media planning, what would you tell them to do instead?
- [18:38]
C
Start with reach. The first question I think every brand should answer is what's the share of total category buying population that we've reached with the advertising that we're doing or have done in the last, say 12 months? In most cases, I think that number is shockingly low. Brands spend enormous energy optimizing a small audience while the majority of potential buyers stay untouched. Once you know that number, the planning question I think becomes much clearer. How do we maximize reach across the full category? With the right balance of brand building and that short term activation, the 60 40, like I said, is just an anchor for a starting point. But there's a lot of research to dig into. You can survey your own customer audiences as well to better understand what percent of that audience is shopping at any given time to help what that media plan should look like. But I would say this too. Before you get to redesigning the media plan, we need to rebuild the measurement system. Because if you change your strategy, but keep that last touch attribution as your reporting system, you're going to recreate funnel logic. Regardless of what you call the new framework, the measurement is where that funnel actually lives. So fix that first and the media plan becomes a much more honest conversation.
- [19:51]
B
That's a good point. That probably start with measurement first and then how do we adjust our media recommendations? Rob Ange talked a bit earlier about how the funnel can affect our creative decisions. And one way it has is it's created this sort of artificial divide between your brand creative and your performance creative. So what do you think great creative looks like when you stop thinking in these distinct funnel stages?
- [20:14]
A
Yeah, I think to just acknowledge what you just said there. From a best practices standpoint, it's certainly makes sense that people are looking at where their ad is in the funnel. Right. That's just nature. Maybe in the higher up in the funnel you're going to go, okay, maybe a little bit more brand in nature, lower the funnel, going to get a little bit more, close the deal. That makes sense. But at the end of the day, we've always lived by the philosophy of marketing architects. Remarkable work that works remarkably. So there's a job to be done here and that job is to one is to, you know, seed great distinctive assets into the minds of the consumer, build that mental availability. But we're also in advertising and we are here to sell a product at the end of the day. The agency that I started at many, many moons ago, they use the line sales overnight, brand over time like that is the job that we are, we're trying to do at the end of the day. And that's the job that your creative should be doing.
- [21:14]
B
I do think it's, I agree with you that it's smart to look at where is this ad landing in the funnel. Are they about to make a purchase and adjust your creative? I also think you could go way too far with that sometimes where like you don't necessarily always need to tell people over and over, like buy this, buy this, buy it now, buy it out. Like people aren't dumb, like they're gonna know to cut through and buy and things like that.
- [21:35]
A
Absolutely. But it's still, you know, even at the bottom of the funnel, even when you are asking for that sale, there's still branding opportunity in there.
- [21:41]
B
Right.
- [21:41]
A
That's where your distinctive assets are, can still live. And sometimes we just throw that stuff out because we're like close the deal. But no, we're still borrowing that Equity that we, we paid good money for higher up in the funnel. Let it work for you.
- [21:55]
B
Well, to wrap us up. When are you most likely to resort to impulse buying?
- [22:00]
C
I just think for me, the funnel kind of collapses in moments where physical availability really matters. I think about airports, gas stations. You know, I walk in probably not really needing anything, and I go from buying nothing to buying something I don't need in about 30 seconds. And the funnel really had probably pretty little to do with it. I purchased what was available and visible. Maybe brand preference played a role in what I grabbed. But what that situation really shows is how important physical availability is. Not just being stocked and being there, but even things like shelf placement, proximity to the register. How convenient can you be inside of a convenience store? So that's where I think of it.
- [22:44]
A
I definitely resort to impulse buying when I'm awake. There's just so much goodness out there to be had. And in today's world, it just keeps coming at us. I mean, Amazon, it's like, come on. I mean, it's just, how does it know what I want? I just, you know, it's just there and I only push a button and it shows up at my door. It's like we are engineering a world where impulse buying is probably the primary mode of buying.
- [23:11]
C
It is crazy how Amazon really disrupted physical availability because typically you think of an online purchase as not physically available, but the speed at which you can get it and how you make buying decisions different today based on that availability and speed to the front porch in comparison to maybe how you would consider a brand. And making a purchase based on your awareness and consideration of that brand is, is pretty crazy.
- [23:40]
A
Well, even my impulse buying has been outsourced by algorithms with zero click buying. Like, it's just, it's everywhere.
- [23:48]
B
I was thinking very similar to both of you. One was the experience. And I don't shop at Target like I used to, but back in the day, people talk a lot about, you go into Target and you walk out with all these things that you never even thought you were going to get. So I thought of that. And then I was also thinking Amazon because I feel the same way. Like I do a lot of impulse buying on Amazon that you wouldn't even expect. So I agree. It definitely has changed that type of online shopping.
- [24:11]
A
So, I mean, there's a reason why Amazon and Jeff Bezos owns the world. When you have to go into a store and you have to look around and you have to walk down, you have to carry something around with you. There's just that added mental friction. Right. Versus just this click and it's there.
- [24:29]
C
Yeah. I do feel like those purchases, at least for me, though, are sort of incremental. My most recent example on is like, a towel. Towel that perfectly fits my dog. I don't know if you have a dog and you get them out of the shower or the tub and you try to drape a towel over them and they shake it off or whatever. And, like, I don't really need that, but I needed it when I saw it. But I wasn't gonna, like, shop for it, right? It was like, no, that's fine. I'll take that one.
- [24:57]
A
The thing that Amazon does so well, too, is I invent products all the time. So I'm at the gym and I'm like, they make gym bags round. Why don't they make them square in the shape of a gym locker? And then I go to Amazon and someone already made it, and then I buy it, right? So it's like. It's just.
- [25:16]
B
It's like this.
- [25:18]
A
You have an idea, you go there and it's. It's been invented.
- [25:21]
B
Okay, I think that's a good place to wrap us up. That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing. I'm sorry, what's the QWERTY keyboard?
- [25:40]
A
Oh, come on. Are you serious?
- [25:43]
B
Stare down.
- [25:44]
A
I'd like you to look at.
- [25:44]
B
Is that my keyboard?
- [25:45]
A
I'd like you to look at your keyboard and read the top row of keys. See, this is a learning podcast. We're all learning here.
- [25:55]
C
You just made Rob's day. Marketing Architects.