General Marketing Thingys

My love/hate relationship with the funnel.

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I have a complicated relationship with the marketing funnel. On one hand, I love it. It’s elegant. It’s simple. And it’s one of the most useful and illustrative conceptual models our industry has ever produced.

On the other hand, I HATE IT. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s woefully incomplete. And we’ve been teaching it, illustrating it, and building marketing plans around it for more than a century without bothering to fix one rather glaring omission.

A little history. The marketing funnel has been around for a long time. Its origins date back more than 100 years, when advertising pioneer Elias St. Elmo Lewis introduced the principles that eventually evolved into the four-stage A-I-D-A model we use today: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. (Technically, Lewis’ first A stood for Attention, but the underlying idea about moving through these stages was quite similar.)

The concept is beautifully simple, logical, and easy to understand. And when you visualize that progression as a funnel, it gets even better. The wide opening at the top represents the universe of consumers who might become aware of your brand. As they progress through the stages, the funnel narrows, illustrating perhaps the most important reality: not everyone who becomes aware will become interested. Not everyone who’s interested will develop desire. And not everyone who desires your product will take action.

There’s leakage at every stage. And this is why the conceptual model is so useful. [Sidebar: There are a lot of people out there who genuinely think that reaching a million people with an ad campaign means that a million people will suddenly consider buying your product. Your current client is probably one of them.]

The funnel, as a model, helps us understand how marketing impacts consumers and their perceptions over time. It also reminds us that the job of marketing is mostly about progressively creating the appropriate conditions for consumers to make decisions.

The funnel is also one of the best teaching tools in the business. In fact, I use it with my grad students every semester. However, the tragic flaw of the funnel is that it treats the action as the finale. And that’s where the “hate” part of my love/hate relationship with the funnel strolls onto the stage.

Here’s why. The A-I-D-A model simply ends at action. And then, nothing. It’s like “YAY! We did it! We got a consumer to take an action! We’ve reached the bottom of the funnel! Order the pizza and beer and then let’s take the afternoon off!” It has that “Mission Accomplished” ethos written all over it. It’s ridiculous.

First, let’s consider what “action” actually means. It might mean visiting a website. Or downloading a PDF. Or offering up an email address. It doesn’t always mean making a purchase, or an initial appointment. And as we all know, downloading a PDF, while a cute KPI, is not going to get your client renewing your budget for next year. The marketing job is not done when someone reads your e-book, bro.

Now let’s assume that the action is indeed a purchase. The consumer has navigated through all four stages, chosen your brand over the competition, and handed over some hard-earned money. That’s a win.

But what happens next? Do we simply display the thank you page, wave goodbye, and turn our attention to the next batch of unsuspecting prospects? Of course not. That would be marketing malpractice, especially because you’d be abandoning the relationship right at the moment when it’s become most valuable.

In fairness, smart marketers have understood the importance of retention, loyalty, repeat purchase, and advocacy for decades. And many funnel-faithful marketers include some of these things, but they tend to do so outside of the model. That stuff happens on a different floor of the building. So, if we’re willing to admit that there’s usually more to the conceptual story, why do we keep leaving out the last chapter? That’s like having Freebird or Hotel California, but without the guitar solos at the end.

Models matter. Especially the ones that are being taught in both undergrad and grad schools. They influence how we think, what tactics we may prioritize, and ultimately, where we may spend our marketing dollars. The funnel is so ubiquitous that we now have acronyms like TOFU, MOFU and BOFU (which all sound silly to me, by the way) to represent top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel activities. So, when something this popular and widely utilized under-represents the whole story, I think we’re doing the industry a disservice by perpetuating it. We have to illustrate what happens next, and include it as an essential element of the model.

So I propose a modest addition to the venerable AIDA framework. Let’s call it AIDAI. Just add another “I” at the end. And it stands for Involvement.

The idea is simple: after a consumer takes action, marketers should be working just as hard to encourage continued involvement with the brand as they worked to generate awareness, interest, desire, and action in the first place. Some of that involvement is practical. Product updates. Warranty information. Service reminders. Helpful content that makes the product easier or more enjoyable to use. And when that initial action is NOT a purchase, involvement can keep the brand top of mind for a consumer who has expressed some level of interest. A well-conceived brand app can be an excellent example of the “I” part of the funnel in action.

Consider Starbucks. Its app (and the embedded rewards program) provides ongoing reasons and avenues for customers to continually interact with the brand, accumulate benefits, explore offers, and return for future purchases. It also does not require a purchase…you can download the Starbucks app even if you’ve never purchased. (And that download, interestingly, is an action that might ultimately lead to a first purchase!)

BMW offers “Performance Driving Schools” across the country, where they offer classroom lessons and driving classes, including for teens. BMW extends the purchase of your vehicle by showing you how to take the “ultimate driving machine” and learn how to drive it as such. But here’s the cool part: You don’t need to be a BMW owner to participate. The “action” here is simply showing interest. (And note how compelling it might be to sit behind the wheel of an M5 and drive it like a race car.)

Other brands go even further and create opportunities for purchasers to not only continue interacting with the brand, but also to interact with other purchasers. Jeep and Harley-Davidson, for example, offer opportunities for owners to participate in events, to organize group rides, and to form communities that reinforce the emotional connection between consumer and brand.

These aren’t merely clever promotional tactics. (I mean, they are.) They’re deliberate efforts to extend the customer relationship beyond an initial action, even if that action is an expression of interest. And they work in different ways, across different categories, for different reasons.

Now, let’s be clear. Not every brand can take advantage of these opportunities. I can’t imagine a meetup of enthusiastic toilet paper purchasers getting together for extreme wiping lessons. But the potential is there in different ways, and every brand should be asking what meaningful ongoing involvement might look like.

And that’s my beef with the current four-stage funnel. It simply ends. And that’s why I not only think that Involvement should be the fifth stage, but I also think it should shift the way the model flows. Once added, it creates a continuous loop stage between Action and Involvement. It looks like this:

The brand actively encourages involvement. Involvement stimulates additional actions. Those actions create opportunities for deeper involvement. And around we go.

And the additional action does not necessarily have to be a repeat purchase. (Although that’s delicious.) Sometimes it’s participation in an event. Sometimes it’s sharing content, or offering a testimonial, or recommending the brand, or simply choosing to stay connected in various ways. But here’s the quiet part that I’ll say out loud. Continued involvement can reinforce preference, reduce perceived risk and ultimately create deeper trust. Which implies that future actions may not require the same journey through awareness/interest/desire. The relationship itself has changed, and illustrates that nice, neat, linear funnels are not so linear after all.

I’m not suggesting we abandon the traditional funnel. I’m suggesting that we finish it, and avoid ending with a splat. Because the job of marketing isn’t simply to move consumers from awareness to action. It should be to create and sustain valuable relationships that encourage consumers to keep acting, interacting, participating, advocating, and yes, even keep purchasing when that’s appropriate too.

Six for 2026: the marketing truths that actually matter this year.

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Well, it’s a new year, and you know what that means. Gyms are overcrowded with people determined to stick to their beach-body resolutions, and bloggers everywhere are posting “2026 prediction” lists.

Predictions are dangerous because they’re a zero-sum game. You’re either dead-on, or dead wrong. So let’s not do that. Instead, let’s remember that marketing doesn’t change so much as it adapts to its environment: new tools, new methods, new channels. So this post isn’t about trends. It’s about truths –  the ones I think will be smacking all of us in the face in 2026.

Truth #1: GEO is re-shaping search.
If SEO was about ranking pages, then GEO is about shaping answers. Even though it’s still important, being “findable” is no longer the ultimate goal. In almost stunning and sudden fashion, prospects aren’t scanning the top 5-10 blue links on Google…they’re reading a synthesized and sophisticated response from a generative engine (like Gemini, most ubiquitously) and then moving on with their day.

The new challenge for search marketers is less about keyword management and campaign groups, and more about establishing authority and clarity through curated content. We have to answer the question: If an AI bot has to explain our brand, what would it say? And if your positioning is even a bit fuzzy, the machine will happily invent something equally nebulous for you. And you probably won’t like it.

This is not a technical or platform problem with Google Ads. It’s the new reality, and a challenge to upgrade our thinking and our writing.

Truth #2: AI will not solve your marketing problems.
Most AI-powered marketing today is simply the automation of work that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place. Re-hashed content, surface-level messaging, and ugh, those AI-generated videos and commercials that are shiny, but hollow.

Make sure you know who you are, what makes you different, and whom you want to care about those things. Because AI won’t make a bad strategy better, it’ll just help you deploy it faster. So hey, let’s be careful out there.

Truth #3: Brand still matters (and always will.)
From the time the idea was first introduced, (it was as far back as the late 1950s by a Harvard professor called Neil Borden,) the concept of brand is what helps companies distinguish themselves in loud and cluttered categories. Brand helps reduce cognitive risk for consumers…when they’re not sure what the comparison criteria are, they can fall back on the idea that “I know something about this company.” (That’s true even if what the consumer “knows” is what you’ve been telling them all along. Yay advertising!) Brand drives preference, and preference is a marketing force that can’t be easily usurped.

Truth #4: Offline marketing is not going away anytime soon.
Despite the popular thinking that social media is the only channel that matters, the physical world is still out here kicking ass. And while we all embrace digital channels for their efficacy, let’s remember that old engines will continue to run as long as you start them up every now and again, and keep the oil clean.

Direct mail still delivers reliable returns. Events still drive serious leads. Popups (stores, experiences, installations,) are still, well, pop-ular. When a brand shows up in some physical form, whether in a mailbox or face-to-face, it signals scale and even seriousness. In a world where the media cycle is based on the next post with a million views and influencer promo codes, offline marketing tells consumers you actually give a shit.

Truth #5: Selling the category is still sticky.
When consumers don’t quite understand the nuances in a given category, they default to less risky decisions, like buying on price or relying on referrals. But that might not favor YOUR brand.

Brands that educate consumers on the category help to reframe the entire decision process. (This is why category content is so popular.) When you do this, you tell consumers that your brand “gets it” and is there to guide in some way. And the best part? None of that feels “salesy.” Instead, it feels like help to the consumer, and your brand gets the halo effect.

Truth #6: The middle of the funnel is where decisions get made.
I rarely talk about funnels (except that one time, in this post) because consumers are not abstract concepts that “move” through a space. But as a conceptual framework, funnels help illustrate the consumer journey across the time variable.

Top of the funnel marketing is easy…it’s just about attention. Brands will do all kinds of dopey things to get attention, (remember when iHop said they were switching to a burger company?) and they still seem to work. Conversely, the bottom of the funnel is largely an outcome function, and almost always offer-driven.

But the middle? Ooof. That’s the hard part. It’s hard because it’s messy. Because it’s harder to measure. And because it demands work, mostly in the form of strong, informative and relevant content. It’s hard mostly because that’s where the leakage lives.

Content that helps educate consumers on the category (see Truth #5 above) and helps them decide at their own pace can do more long-term brand building (see Truth #3 above) than just “getting the click.” If your funnel goes from “hello” to “buy now,” you’re gonna struggle.

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The job of marketing hasn’t changed, and it won’t change just because it’s 2026 and we have some shiny new tools at our disposal. It’s still about managing perception, reducing risk, and driving preference at the moment of choice. Face the truth(s) and make this the strongest year ever for your brand and your clients.

Southwest is headed south.

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Southwest Airlines current logo

Over the last several weeks, Southwest Airlines has made some big announcements. First, it announced that its “open seating” policy will be a thing of the past, now switching to assigned seating and offering premium seating as early as next year. The other doozy they just dropped (it tickled me to write that,) is that the airline will now be charging for baggage.

There were some less-doozy-ish announcements too, like making its fares available on aggregators like Expedia, significant changes to its loyalty program and a partnership with Icelandair.

This reminds me a lot of that whopper of a whiff (now I’m on a roll,) by Dunkin Donuts a few years back. (See post here.) Let that – and the subsequent parting of the ways with CMO Tony Wesman – be a lesson on self-inflicted marketing wounds.

Now, turning back to this mother of a misstep, (it just comes naturally to me,) let’s look at how Southwest was different from all other airlines. First, it did not have assigned seating. You just got on the plane and sat where you found one. Second, it never charged baggage fees. In fact, you could check up to TWO bags for free. They had a robust and passionate consumer base that preferred Southwest’s quirky, “we’re-not-like-the-other-guys” approach. It’s what contributed to the idea that Southwest was the airline “with heart and hospitality.”

As an aside, Southwest was quite different operationally as well. They chose to fly the same airplanes (interestingly, the Boeing 737, which includes the 737 Max 8,) across their entire fleet. This meant that their maintenance and mechanical functions could be streamlined for both speed and efficiency. By not serving other manufacturers, Southwest never had to wait for an Airbus expert, or contact a McDonnell Douglas specialist, if some kind of maintenance was needed on an airplane. That same efficiency carried over to sourcing parts, and buying in bulk…all Boeing OEM and likely the same third-party suppliers.

When you look at any marketing category, it’s sometimes hard to see which player has an advantage, or if any player has an advantage at all. That was never the case with the domestic airlines category: Southwest was BY FAR the most strategically well-positioned brand in the category. Those consumer-facing and behind-the-scenes aspects of the brand made the company interesting. And different. And almost entirely focused on keeping costs down for the consumer, which was always welcome news in a world where the price of everything seems to be going up, up, up, and fast.

As a result, Southwest pretty much beat the snot out of their rivals. Planes always full. Reviews always positive. Loyalty always very high.

Southwest Airlines former logo

Enter Elliott Investment Management. They’re some hot-shot hedge fund that likes to get press by “activist investing,” which is code for acting like a big baby after you buy a significant stake in a company. Led by Paul Singer, their founder and lead investment officer, Elliott purchased a roughly 10% share (about $2 Billion) in Southwest Airlines in June of 2024, and began to systematically trash the house. First they called a “special meeting” to openly criticize the CEO and the board of directors for not chasing profits. Then they forced resignations and retirements of key executives, installed their own CEO and half a dozen other cronies, all of whom likely devised these “policy changes,” like trying to wring up to a hundred bucks more out of every Southwest passenger on every flight.

So – if you want to know why Southwest would basically chew off its own arm when it had an established and defensible market position, it might simply be because some rich dude in Palm Beach wants to show the world how big his balance sheet is, legendary brand position be damned.

IMHO, this won’t end well for Southwest in either outcome scenario. If the company makes these radical changes, and it starts to deliver a profit in a year or two that would be acceptable to Elliott Investment Management, then I’ll eat crow AND they will have done so at the expense of a wonderfully and strategically differentiated brand. They’ll just be another commoditized domestic airline that consumers will shop based on slim price margins and/or if they service a particular destination. I think I’ve heard of them…JetBlue, right?

And what if Southwest Airlines does NOT show a profit? What if they lose more money? What if they become poach-able by some other airline that finds their routes and their operations desirable? Well then, Mr. Singer, you’ve killed a very successful company AND a very important brand for no good reason.

And that’s why I’m miffed in my mittens: either way this goes for the company, a really strong brand dies in the process.

Listen kids, work as hard as you can to make your brand different in some meaningful way.

Be different.

STAY different.

Even at the expense of some nominal basis points in potential additional profit.
Real brands with real positions are hard to come by these days.

What’s next. For text.

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This week, it was announced that Apple is adopting RCS (Rich Communications Service) as a standard feature on its next iOS version. RCS is aptly named, as it does enable more rich forms of communication to be sent over the texting network. (Textwork? Nextext? Just spitballing.) Now, instead of just text in a blue – sometimes green – bubble, or the occasional animated GIF from friends or bit.ly link from brands, images and videos can now be shared, and even interactive features.

Obviously, this news is rife with marketing and business implications.  A survey from Juniper Research, a UK-based telecom research firm, found that “business messaging traffic will grow from $1.3 billion to $8 billion in 2025.” Wowzers. That’s a lot. And soon. Some of that growth is to be realized in no small way by Apple’s 900 million devices entering the fray.

RCS is also notable for providing end-to-end encryption so that messages can’t be intercepted. Apple, who has been prickly about privacy, especially as it relates to marketing via mobile devices, probably saw this is an opportunity to deliver more robust services to iPhone users while toeing the line of its newer, harsher security stance.

As it relates to marketing, the possibilities seem both endless and exciting. More rich media often holds the door open for more robust and interactive engagements. Surveys. Games. Direct app downloads. Oh my!

So, could this be a kind of renaissance moment for the oft-maligned outpost known as direct marketing? Methinks perhaps. Instead of just offering the standard “reply STOP to opt-out” or  “1 to reply YES” options, recipients of RCS messages can now explore the brands’ text-messaged offerings in private, low-risk interactions and decide (if the brands do this correctly) on a number of engagement pathways.

So everybody wins: brands get to design and deliver more interesting and more entertaining features directly to consumers to increase engagement and drive whatever metrics they’re chasing. Consumers get to engage with cooler marketing tactics while still feeling in control of the conversation (remember, you can opt out or just delete anytime you like.) Heck, direct marketing wins by getting a slick, new, digital shot in the arm.

But the real winners? It’s the carriers.

That’s right. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. At least in the United States, they stand to gain most from this boon since they’ll be double-dipping their way to some of that 4X growth predicted by Juniper in their report.

For Dip 1, it will cost brands more to send these richer engagements across the texting network (Textnet? TheNextwork? Still working on ideas.) through the various third party mass texting platforms that enable them. Because the platform rates will go up on a per-message basis as well to cover the increased carrier fees. Hmmm.

And for Dip 2, carriers will quietly pass additional fees on to consumers on their monthly bills. That old “text and data fees may apply” disclaimer is now going to cost a titch more than it used to the more you start opting in for these newer, brighter, more colorful and more animated engagements. The fees will be nominal to each consumer, but across these networks of hundreds of millions of subscribers, it will amount to some delicious over-the-transom revenue from both sides of the marketing equation. And with no additional infrastructure costs.

Well done, you sneaky little bastards.

Here’s mud in your A.I.

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If you’ve been paying attention to the industry news, there’s been a LOT of chatter about AI, (artificial intelligence,) and its various applications. And some of them are really intriguing and useful. With the ability to run predictive diagnostics, artificial intelligence (better described as data-driven machine learning,) is ideal for applications that can benefit from robust and speedy automation.

As is our way, it doesn’t take long for something useful and intriguing to be repurposed into something base and silly. Case in point: AI is also being used now for some fairly sophisticated parlour tricks, like recreating the Mona Lisa.

(Moves soapbox to the foreground.)

But the application of AI in marketing, and most specifically in the creative process, is really (in this sentient blogger’s opinion,) an overreach.

There’s no data set for creativity. In fact, there are no rules. What makes something “creative” is that it is indeed CREATED. By a human being. Part of why we buy paintings, and music and novels and sculpture is because we know there’s a backstory of someone who sweat it out in a studio or at the typewriter. Someone whose fingers bled. Someone who made mistakes, and tried variations, and threw whole passages in a trash can. We celebrate that humanity and that pain and the entire process when we consume anything creative. Not just the end result.

The same is true in marketing. Writing anything – an ad, a blog post, a commercial script – is hard. It’s taking business rules and mandatories into consideration and asking a creative person to then do intellectual gymnastics, linking sometimes disparate ideas in unexpected ways, without a net. Can you write an algorithm for that? Sure, but the results are likely to be shit – the kind of shit a hack would conjure.

For instance, you’ve probably seen these kinds of promotions for having AI write your next blog post.

What’s really happening there? I don’t claim to have knowledge of any of their algorithms, but I’d bet my last dollar that these are search bots that crawl the web for every piece of content written in the last 10 years about a particular subject. They ingest this huge data set, pick out bits and pieces using sorting criteria that prioritize those with the most clicks, comments and instances, and then rearrange and reconstruct a new version for you.

That’s not creating. That’s recreating at best. And theft at worst.

ChatGPT, the latest and supposedly greatest iteration of AI language prowess, has added a sexy wrinkle into their algorithm. Instead of just swiping content and repurposing it, it adds a level of dialogue formatting to make it sound more conversational, and thus more natural and believable. It claims to “answer follow-up questions” and “admits its mistakes.” And given that it is machine-based learning, it gets “better” the more often it’s used. (It’s driving educators crazy, as students who use it can be deemed to be cheating, not researching.)

What a paradox: a machine learning model that improves the more often it’s used, but also degrades the craft proportionately in the process. [Some disclosures: OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT is funded in part by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and just got a billion dollar injection of capital from Microsoft.]

In a recent viral kerfuffle on social media, recording artist Nick Cave (throaty lead singer with The Bad Seeds) reacted to a song that was “written” by ChatGPT “in the style of Nick Cave.” He could not have put it any better:

“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”

Okay, back to marketing, and particularly the art of writing good advertising. Part of the craft is developing a sense of counterintuitive thought and embracing lateral thinking. Another big part is the symbiotic relationship of the headline and the image. But so much of modern advertising is about contextualizing the brand into the cultural moment from which it arises.

Think of how many great headlines and taglines would never – could never – be written by AI, by virtue of this necessity for divergence and a sense of the cultural periphery.

“Think Small” from DDB was a radical notion at the dawn of the 1960s. As Americans – less than two decades removed from World War II – were upwardly mobile, one of the most pervasive (and comical) trends in automobile-dom was an oblique obsession with size. Bigger was better, and American cars looked like ocean liners. The nation was also wildly nationalistic at the time, and DDB’s assignment was to sell a small, quirky German car to this audience.

To get to the heart of these cultural undertones and suggest an opposite notion was a radical idea. And paired with the spare art direction (bless you Helmut Krone) and that sea of white space, it became a touchstone for our industry. Could AI ever reach that level of insight? Of rebelliousness? Of sheer chutzpah?

“Think Different.” When this campaign (from TBWA/Chiat/Day) was released in the 1990s, it was paired with images of pioneering artists, thinkers and doers, like Einstein, Picasso and Miles Davis. It also featured zero body copy. What’s so interesting about the head/tagline is that it’s not even good English. But it was a fine encapsulation of the Apple brand in that moment and what it stood for. Would AI dare to break grammar rules to create an emotional response?

I suppose it’s mildly ironic, or at least cheeky, that I chose two classic advertising examples that use the word “think” in the headlines. And perhaps that’s exactly what I’m driving at, and what Nick Cave was fuming at.

Maybe I’m an old fart, but I prefer the consternation. The suffering. The pacing and the waiting and the wondering if this “idea” has legs. Give me time to think about what’s going on in the world. Give me the sudden burst of insight when the neurons start to fire. Give me the end of the sentence that starts with “wouldn’t it be cool if…” Give me a person, thinking about another person, and getting them to actually think different.

There’s nothing artificial about that.