We've been drawing the same funnel on whiteboards for 30 years. Awareness, consideration, conversion. It was never that linear. It's time to stop pretending it is.
We've been drawing the same funnel on whiteboards for 30 years. Awareness, consideration, conversion. It was never that linear. It's time to stop pretending it is.
The funnel was a useful mental model when media was broadcast and consumers had limited choices. You ran a TV spot, people became aware, they walked into a store, they bought. Clean. Sequential. Measurable in a blunt, post-hoc kind of way.
That world is gone.
Today a customer might discover you through a TikTok they saw at 11pm, add to cart on their phone, abandon it, get a retargeting ad on Instagram two days later, read three Reddit threads about your brand, watch a YouTube review, and then finally buy — on desktop — after their partner mentioned they'd heard of you.
That's not a funnel. That's a web. And the brands winning in DTC right now are the ones who've accepted that and built their marketing accordingly.
What this means practically:
Stop optimizing for funnel stages in isolation. Your awareness spend and your conversion spend are not separate budgets doing separate jobs — they're part of the same continuous relationship with a customer who doesn't care about your internal org chart.
The brands I've seen scale fastest in the last few years share one trait: they treat every touchpoint as both a brand moment and a conversion moment. The TikTok that makes someone laugh also has a link. The email that drives a sale also tells a story.
The funnel is dead. Build a web instead.