Last week a client turned her laptop around and showed me the funnel. Wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, five stages, each a different shade of the brand blue. Rebuilt for next year's budget. It was, to be fair, a beautiful slide.
Then I asked how she bought the coat she was wearing.
She laughed and told the whole story. A friend wore one to brunch in March. She looked it up, forgot about it, saw it again in September on somebody in line at Stumptown, asked a group text whether it was worth the money, got two yeses and one strong no, waited, and bought it in a store six months after the brunch.
None of that is on the slide.
The funnel is an accurate picture of how your company assigns budget and an almost entirely fictional picture of how a person decides to buy something.
The stages exist because somebody has to own each one. Awareness belongs to brand, consideration to content, conversion to performance, retention to lifecycle. That is a reporting structure, genuinely useful for running a department. It is not a description of a human being, who does not experience your awareness spend and your lifecycle email as separate teams and cannot tell you which one moved her.
What actually happened in that coat story was a loop, not a line. She left. She came back. She left again. The most decisive input was a group text I will never see, cannot attribute, and could not have bought.
Three consequences for the plan you are writing now. One, stop assuming decay. People who did not convert did not fall out of anything, they went and lived their lives and some will return in March. Two, budget for the parts you cannot measure, because the group text is where the decision gets made and your only lever is giving people something worth repeating. Three, measure at the level of the decision rather than the stage. Ask customers how they got here. The answers are messier and truer than the dashboard.
Glossier built a company essentially on the group text, which is why the funnel never explained it well. Salt & Straw has a line out the door on a rainy Tuesday because somebody's cousin said you have to go, and no attribution model will ever credit the cousin.
I am not arguing for abandoning the diagram. I am arguing for demoting it to what it is, an org chart.
What actually happened in that coat story was a loop, not a line.
It rained the entire walk back to my car, which in Portland in late September means the year has turned. I kept thinking about the friend at brunch in March, who has no idea she sat at the top of anyone's funnel, and who did that brand's most valuable marketing all year for free.