I didn't get into business to follow maps. I got into it to draw them.
Yet for two decades, the marketing profession has been collectively hypnotised by a map drawn in 1898. The marketing funnel — a concept so old it predates the Ford Model T — has dictated strategy, shaped teams, and defined success. I’ve built teams on its logic, reported to boards with its acronyms, and watched agencies charge fortunes to "optimise" it.
I now believe it is fundamentally, irrevocably broken. A relic of a simpler, linear world that no longer exists. Continuing to cling to it isn't just lazy; it's commercially suicidal. The future belongs to firms that have the courage to burn the map.
The funnel’s appeal was its elegant simplicity. Coined as AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) by E. St. Elmo Lewis, it gave a chaotic process a reassuring structure. It turned the messy art of persuasion into a clean, scientific-looking diagram. Top of Funnel (TOFU), Middle of Funnel (MOFU), Bottom of Funnel (BOFU). It was easy to grasp, easy to draw on a whiteboard, and easy to build a team around.
You could have a content team for TOFU, a product marketing team for MOFU, and a sales or performance marketing team for BOFU. Everyone knew their place. Success was measured by conversion rates from one stage to the next. It made marketing predictable. Or so it seemed.
In my early agency days, we lived by this model. We’d build elaborate content journeys, mapping articles to "Awareness," webinars to "Consideration," and case studies to "Decision." It felt professional. It felt strategic. But the data never quite fit. We’d see a customer read one blog post and buy a £50,000 service a day later. We’d see another download ten eBooks and never respond to a sales call.
The model told us the first customer was an anomaly and the second was a "stuck lead." The reality was that the model was wrong. It was trying to force human behaviour into a rigid, top-down process that didn't reflect how people actually make decisions. It was a useful lie for a time, but its utility has expired.
Where It All Fell Apart: The Horsemen of the Funnel's Apocalypse
The model didn’t just fray at the edges. It was torn apart by a series of fundamental shifts in technology and consumer behaviour. These changes aren’t novel observations — what’s shocking is how little marketing strategy has changed in response to them.
The funnel demands a customer start at the top and work their way down. Reality is a chaotic mess. A potential customer sees your CEO on a podcast, forgets the brand name, sees a targeted ad on Instagram two weeks later, asks for recommendations in a private Slack group, gets a link from a friend on WhatsApp, Googles your reviews, and then finally visits your website to buy.
Which stage of the funnel is that? It’s all of them and none of them. The journey isn’t a slide; it’s a pinball machine. Attributing the final sale to the last click (the Google search) is a failure of imagination. The real work was done in the podcast, the ad, and the private Slack group — touchpoints the funnel has no language for.
Look at a UK success story like Gymshark. Ben Francis didn’t build a £1 billion brand by meticulously managing a TOFU-to-BOFU content plan. He built it by seeding a community, sponsoring athletes who were genuine fans, and creating a cultural wave on social media. People didn’t “discover” Gymshark and move into “consideration.” They were immersed in its world. The purchase was a symptom of that immersion, not the end of a linear journey. The funnel is a useless tool for explaining or replicating that kind of success.