The Purchase Funnel Is Bullshit
Your client won’t shut up about it. Your boss puts it in every presentation. It sounds genius at first, doesn’t it?
The funnel, the holy trinity of advertising frameworks: Awareness. Consideration. Conversion. A simple, universal, profound tool to unlock the secrets of advertising.
Wrong. The funnel is the worst thing ever.
Picture the funnel as what it is: a lockpick. Neat, right? The ultimate tool to unlock any door, crack any code, solve any problem, beat any lock. Except no. In real life, a lockpick isn’t a magic key. It’s a flimsy piece of metal you jam into a lock and wiggle around like a moron until you have replicated the mechanism inside. It’s messy, it’s imprecise, most of us don’t know how to do it, and frankly infuriating and should only be a last resort. That’s the funnel, to a T. Your idea? That’s the lock. And the funnel is the rusty lockpick that forces you to twist and mutilate your ideas until they fit and conform into its arbitrary little framework. Congrats, you unlocked it by destroying everything that made it great.
The Funnel-Shaped Coffin
That’s the magic of the funnel: it makes every idea worse. Instead of unlocking free thinking brilliant campaigns, you’re forcing your ideas to be easily dismantled by the funnel’s painfully restrictive logic. Every idea needs to be stretched, diced, and shoehorned into “Awareness”, “Consideration”, or “Conversion.” Trigger warning, here’s how your funnel sausage gets made:
“This campaign? Oh, it’s definitely Consideration… or maybe a blend of Consideration and Conversion. Actually, you could call it Awareness if you squint hard enough.”
The funnel is meant to become its own self-fulfilling prophecy. You can take any idea, twist it around, and make it fit. Worse, you start brainstorming funnel-compatible ideas. Instead of thinking outside the box, you’re building your own sad little triangular one. And if your idea doesn’t align with the funnel, you leave yourself with two equally stupid options:
1: Kill the idea because it doesn’t fit the funnel. Instead of “breaking the rules” you just break the lock. Pour one out for creative freedom.
2: Torture the idea until it fits. Twist, chop, sand off the edges until the funnel accepts. Make that lockpick slide in like butter. Congrats, you destroyed everything that made the idea great.
What you’ve created isn’t a universal key. It’s a system that demands every lock must be weak enough to crack with a shitty pick. That’s not a strategy. That’s capitulation.
LinkedIn Lunatics
I saw this moronic LinkedIn post trying to bash Liquid Death over the funnel, sourced from an article that, to be fair, did its research. They’re a $1.4 billion canned water brand, one of the fastest growing companies on the planet, built all in less than four years. Well, some apparent advertising math-magicians had the gall to say this:
“If we’re really drilling down into the detail, you’ll find that Liquid Death’s top-of-funnel conversion (that is, converting people from merely being aware of it to actually considering drinking it) is 41%, below the competitor average of 50%, and much below the market leader, FIJI water, where 57% of people move down the funnel from awareness to consideration.”
Call the marketing police? It’s part of an incredibly thorough review of the brand’s “funnel flop” by Tracksuit. Hey, Liquid Death could smack “drink this and die” on every can and still outsell. But because they flunked FunnelMath 101, they’re a big flop? This is the kind of nonsense the funnel enables. A brand that’s building an empire out of canned water — literally the most basic human commodity and to that extent, a hard category to start fresh today— and somebody is trying to bury them under meaningless conversion metrics because they won’t fit nicely into this funnel-shaped dungeon. Bravo. That’s how we ended up with nervous clients demanding we funnel our ideas with funnelvision all the way to funnelville, in our little funnelmobiles.
Legacy of Mediocrity
“But the funnel works! It’s lasted this long for a reason!” Wrong. So has glitter, and like glitter, the funnel is everywhere and ruins everything it touches. The ad industry is full of zombie “best practices” that refuse to die, and the funnel is arguably one of the worst. Just look at testing: pay people to sit in a sterile room and force-feed them ads, then apply your findings to the real-world. You all know it’s counterproductive, and the funnel is no better. It’s outdated, it’s not groundbreaking, and it’s time to throw it into the sun alongside testing and unsolicited newsletters.
Go ahead and type “the purchase funnel” into Google. What do you get? Autofill with “is dying,” “is dead,” “is broken,” and a bunch of other ways to say, “Please, just let it rest in peace already.” Thousands of articles, over decades, all mourning the supposed death of this marketing relic. And yet, it’s an unkillable cockroach, crawling back into every agency meeting. Why? Because it’s not actually dying. It’s just bad. A bad strategy that doesn’t work. And every time it predictably flops, we don’t blame the tool, we blame its imaginary failing health. “Oh, it’s not us, the funnel, it’s just… uh… sick.”
Free Your Ideas
Stop boxing in your ideas. And, can we acknowledge for a moment that the funnel isn’t even a box? It’s a triangle. Ever been in a triangular room? It’s hell. That’s your idea, cowering in this awkward, pointy, claustrophobic space, stripped of its creativity, and suffocating under the weight of its own terrible foundation
Advertising should be about building great locks, not contorting them to fit a crappy pick. The funnel isn’t a tool for unlocking greatness. It’s a straightjacket for creativity.
So, What’s the Solution? Stop Washing Raw Chicken.
The magic answer to the funnel’s shortcomings? This is going to hurt to hear but: nothing. There was no need for it in the first place. Great advertising was made before the funnel, and is still made by folks who don’t think about the funnel. In fact, here’s another analogy:
For years, everyone was told, “You must rinse your chicken to wash off bacteria!” So, people dutifully stood over their sinks, splashing salmonella all over their counters, hands, and utensils. Then, lo and behold, science steps in and says, “Actually, this does nothing. In fact, it makes it worse—way worse—it spread germs everywhere. Just cook it properly, you dingus.”
The funnel is rinsing the chicken of advertising. It’s an unnecessary step that feels productive but actually creates more problems than it solves. Just focus on the actual cooking (or in this case, making good ads). The outcome of a successful campaign, or a tasty, safe-to-eat roast, is the only thing that matters.
You should already know the intention of your campaign. Like, from the brief. If the idea is supposed to inform, maintain interest, or drive sales and signups, that should be crystal clear. And if the brief doesn’t tell you? Guess what — you’re not working with a brief.
You don’t need to break your brain trying to cram your ideas into three arbitrary boxes like Awareness, Consideration, or Conversion. Just work toward the goal the brief gave you. Make your idea do what it’s supposed to do without sweating over whether it’s “too Consideration-y” or “not Conversion-y enough.” Good ideas don’t need to be boxed in. They just need to work. We cooked a great chicken. Then we thought we had to rinse it to make it better. Now we know that was a mistake. Well-intended, but counterproductive. So we stopped the extra acrobatics.
That’s the solution to the funnel. Toss it out the window and work towards the goal in the brief with original ideas.
Where the Funnel Belongs (With Extra Spite)
Let’s not pretend the funnel is entirely word salad. As a post-mortem tool, it’s a decent measuring stick for dissecting campaigns… decent enough. Measure what worked, what bombed, and what left everyone scratching their heads. Use the findings as insights for the future. But using it as a starting point for your ideas? Hard pass. It has no place where the idea begins. And by no means, like the LinkedIn guru, should you use it as a means to an end. It’s one way to measure results—not the way.
You don’t build brilliance by preemptively dumbing it down. The idea is the lock. The funnel is the lockpick. And the universal key? It doesn’t exist. That’s kind of the whole point of locks. First, you build the lock. Make it intricate, robust, and something worth protecting. If a skilled smith can pick any lock with a paperclip, then that’s how we should see the funnel: a twisted, contorted paperclip that only certain people are qualified to tinker with when the real work is already done, instead of designing an idea that can be broken open by anyone with a funnel fetish and a LinkedIn account.
