Why We Reinvented The Marketing Funnel

Times Have Changed, But the Funnel Has Not

?The consumer marketing funnel is over 125 years old. Yet marketers, including us here at EvolveMKD, have continued to use this in an attempt to understand and action against a consumer’s journey from brand awareness all the way down to brand loyalty.

How is it possible, with all the nuances of marketing in 2024, that an evaluation tool developed in 1898 is still considered the best-in-class standard?

?Begging More Questions Than Answers

?So often, we find that the traditional funnel leads to more questions than answers, and the data the funnel provides fails to trigger the appropriate action for meaningful change.

We hear so many of the same questions from clients at every turn –

·????? Are our marketing funnel metrics any good

·????? What do they really mean for our brand?

·????? How do these numbers compare to other clients you’ve worked on?

·????? How do these numbers compare to my competitors?

·????? Are there benchmarks for brands or campaigns like ours? How do we stackup?

·????? Why is there attrition at certain points in the funnel, and what’s causing it?

·????? What do we need to focus on? What are we doing right, and what needs to change to move our brand in the right direction?

While all of these are great questions – and ones we share ourselves – hardly any could be adequately answered by the single set of numbers living in the marketing funnel.

The Consumer Journey is No Longer Linear

The standard practice assumes that consumers live in a descending funnel, making consideration and purchasing decisions in a linear fashion that is both steady and predictable. As marketers, we know that is rarely true.

And marketers are regularly tasked with making sense of a more dynamic consumer journey, where interests, needs, and decisions shift daily, and marketers need to shift with them.

We knew we needed to develop a tool that could better illustrate the magnitude and impact of those shifts, giving us the means to take evaluation further. Our tool needed to assess a brand’s stability, while quantifying and making sense of the pattern and range of a fluctuating consumer journey. Moreover, we needed a tool that could not just identify irregularities in the consumer journey but help us understand the reasons why they’re occurring.

The Funnel Lives In Isolation – Brands and Consumers Do Not

Until now, the traditional funnel lived in a vacuum, completely devoid of any context needed to draw meaningful insights from the data. In the real world, consumers are inundated with external factors, from cultural and political, that effect their exposure to marketing efforts.

On the other hand, brands are seeking to evaluate their performance in the context of their competitors and brands they aspire to, hoping to see how they stack up, and what others are doing to drive the changes they want to see.

Our tool needed to capture those intangibles and outside forces, so that brands can see the big picture and contextualize their brand health.

Enter EvolveMKD’s BrandWave - Reimagining The Marketing Funnel For Today

Our BrandWave was designed to address the challenges mentioned above and more. The multi-dimensional tool provides insights to help marketers fine tune messaging to create meaningful noise, amplify marketing efforts that really make waves, and help turn a “Fading Out” BrandWave into the “Roaring Buzz” BrandWave they can?be.

The tool was developed through a proprietary consumer study that examined the common marketing funnel metrics (awareness, interest, consideration, and loyalty) of over 50 brands, all with varying legacies, consumer perceptions, and other considerations, across more than 20 industries.

Contact us to create your custom BrandWave and learn more about the latest revolution in consumer marketing