I’ve been researching an upcoming international trip and gave an email address at one point.
I was overwhelmed by the aggressive marketing tactics that came next: a string of offers all designed to rush me through the classic marketing funnel stages as quickly as possible.
They ignored where I actually was in the process, and instead pushed deals, deals, deals. I was a “mark” trapped in marketing automation software.
Customers aren’t buying machines on a linear path to purchase. And yet the classic marketing funnel can lead marketers to see them that way. Marketers can get “funnel vision.”
Marketers have been using a “marketing funnel” framework since long before the Mad Man era.
In 1898 an advertising executive named Elias St. Elmo Lewis defined four linear steps to define how an ad guides a consumer: Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action. This framework became known as the AIDA model.
In the 1920s, an author added a funnel image to the AIDA model and the Marketing Funnel was born. It has since become part of our marketing canon. The terms and stages vary, but the Marketing Funnel makes its way into just about every marketing strategy deck.
Businesses started to map functions to the funnel. In B2B organizations, for example, demand gen sits at the top, content at the middle, and sales enablement at the bottom.
And yet marketing “funnel vision” can cause us to completely misread the customer and miss opportunities. They can ignore the complex needs of individual humans who don’t think about brands very much and oversimplify how to communicate to them.
In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute revealed the 95:5 rule. He found that only 5% of potential B2B buyers are actually in the market to buy in any one time.
I really like the insight paraphrased from John’s colleague Jenni Romaniuk:
“You can’t push buyers down a funnel, but you can catch them as they fall.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
