Let Go of the Funnel: New Marketing Rules

The marketing funnel is dead, long live the funnel. This type of statement reminds me of when my original mentor Regis McKenna said first, "PR is dead" (he the then guru of technology marketing/PR) and later "branding is dead." However, in this case I think the funnel is being replaced in the world of marketing models, and here's why.

In a provocative and compelling HBR article on "Branding in the Digital Age," McKinsey strategist David Edelman presents the research/analysis that consumers no longer predominantly move through the classic marketing funnel in the same way that they have. In this new digital era, consumers now have much more complex relationships with brands, and these relationships no longer just start with a general awareness of some select set of brands to address a particular need and end with the purchase of a specific brand.

Instead consumers are engaged in a circular, and not necessarily end-game dominant customer journey; they are no longer the passive observers of paid media selected to advance focused product decisions. More likely consumers are massively multi-tasking in the various brand considerations, for a variety of reasons, and engaging with a vast array of brands in these emerging ways:

• Engaging ... in a complex evaluation of many brands across a swath of media for many purposes
• Evaluating ... various brand promises for authenticity and sustainability to determine what promises they can "live" with
• Buying ... an array of brands to experiment, to broaden exposure, without consideration for loyalty of any particular brands
• Enjoying ... the many brand experiences, and considering how they want to evolve those experiences in the future
• Advocating ... becoming one of the brand voices, and bringing others into the brand fold
• Bonding ... becoming a part of the fabric of the brand itself

Quite simply, consumers are becoming part of the brands themselves. Marketers must interact with them completely differently. With this new, shall I say "paradigm," marketing needs to write a new playbook, and step into some evolved roles:

1. Become the orchestrator: Consumers interact with a variety of owned media channels typically run inside an organization by a range of groups/divisions. To present a coherent brand, marketing needs to take on an orchestrating role, and own these media channels.
2. Become the content supply director, and publish the content: Marketing is now orchestrating a tsunami of content, from all over the company, to appropriately position products, services, and the company itself. So, marketers need to take on publisher-like roles, and oversee the rapidly expanding content supply chain.
3. Become the market intelligence officer: Information comes in from IT, sales, customer services, customer engagement, and so on, and is not always well-managed or usually not well-analyzed. Marketing needs to own the market insights process, and help the organization see the relevancy of the information they have.