Marketing Funnels are Over

For years, marketing loved the funnel because it made people look predictable. Awareness at the top. Consideration in the middle. Conversion at the bottom. Neat. Presentable. Easy to turn into a slide. The problem is that people have not behaved that way for a very long time. Google’s research on the “messy middle” framed decision-making as a looping process rather than a straight line, and more recent BCG research published by Think with Google pushes that even further, arguing that modern consumers move through a constant state of streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping across touchpoints rather than a tidy sequence of stages.

‍

What this means in practice is simple: people do not progress.

They hear about you on a podcast, forget your name, see your founder on LinkedIn, open an email three months later, search your reviews at midnight, walk past your storefront on a Saturday, then convert after a friend brings you up over dinner. The purchase does not happen because one channel “worked.” It happens because enough moments stacked up with enough consistency to create belief. Salesforce’s guidance on multi-touch attribution reflects this reality directly: conversions are often the result of multiple touchpoints, not a single first or last interaction.

This is why funnels feel increasingly outdated. Not because structure is useless, but because the old structure assumes order where there is actually movement. It assumes a staircase where there is really a web. It assumes that brands control sequence, when in reality consumers control pace, platform, and priority. McKinsey’s framing of omnichannel marketing centers exactly this shift: customers now move across in-person and digital channels according to their own preferences, expecting those channels to feel seamlessly integrated rather than siloed.

The strategic implication is bigger than “be on more platforms.” Omnipresence without coherence is just noise. Showing up everywhere only works if what people encounter feels unmistakably connected. The message cannot fracture from TikTok to email to in-person conversation to search result. The brand promise cannot mutate depending on format. If a customer has to re-meet you every time they cross a touchpoint, the system is broken.

‍

So the real assignment now is not funnel optimization. It is signal design.

Brands need to think less about forcing people downward and more about creating a network of reinforcing cues. The question is no longer, “How do we drive them to the next stage?” The better question is, “What does someone repeatedly learn about us, no matter where they enter?” That requires consistency in voice, clarity in positioning, and a level of organizational discipline many brands still underestimate. Think with Google’s work on influence maps suggests that understanding modern journeys requires mapping behaviors and influence, not just plotting linear steps.

‍

This is where brand starts pulling harder than campaign.

A campaign can create a spike. A brand creates recognition across time. In a non-linear world, that recognition becomes the bridge between scattered interactions. It is what allows someone to see a social post in April, a founder interview in June, and a product mention in September and still feel the same underlying point of view threading through all of it. Harvard Business Review’s work on omnichannel retail has repeatedly shown that customers engage across channels, and that advantage compounds when those channels work together rather than independently.

The brands that win this next era will be the ones that stop worshipping attribution models built for cleaner behavior than actually exists. They will stop treating social, search, email, events, retail, and founder presence as separate lanes with separate identities. They will build for re-entry. They will expect people to leave and come back. They will understand that conversion is often the visible end of an invisible accumulation.

The brands still designing for a staircase are missing the fact that the market already lives in a maze.

‍