Funnel Vision: Why Marketing Needs to Catch Up With How People Actually Buy

AI Is Making the Old Journey Even Harder To Defend

This becomes even more pronounced as AI starts to play a bigger role in discovery. Consumers never lie to a search bar, but an LLM potentially tells us even more. Instead of entering a handful of keywords, people can explain what they need, why they need it, what matters to them, and the constraints they are working within.

The difference is also in what comes back. Search traditionally presented consumers with a curated selection of possible and relevant answers and left them to continue the research themselves. Increasingly, people are asking AI for the answer itself.

That creates a very different challenge for brands. If someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, being somewhere on page one is no longer necessarily enough. Brands need enough credible, useful information out in the world for AI systems to understand what they offer, the problems they solve, and when they are a relevant answer. That makes GEO increasingly important, but it also makes the quality and authority of the content behind it matter.

AI should also make it possible to create relevant content at a scale that was previously difficult or prohibitively expensive. But simply producing more content shouldn't be the ambition. The opportunity is to use that scale to be genuinely useful in more of the places where consumers are making decisions, while consistently sounding and behaving like the same brand wherever they find you.

Personalization Doesn’t Mean Knowing Everything About Someone

That same consumer-first thinking should apply to personalization. Marketers have spent years working towards one-to-one communication, but we need to challenge the assumption behind it: do consumers actually want brands to know them that well?

Probably not. What they want is for brands to understand the problem they are trying to solve.

There is a meaningful difference between recognizing that someone needs comfortable sneakers delivered tomorrow and demonstrating that you know an uncomfortable amount about their life. AI gives marketers access to far richer signals around intent, but having more information doesn’t automatically mean we should use all of it. Good personalization should make an experience more relevant or useful, rather than proving how clever the technology behind it is.

Start With What You Want the Consumer To Do

Moving beyond the funnel also means reconsidering how marketing plans are built and measured. My advice? Start with the outcome, particularly when the objective is commercial growth. Where can the purchase happen? What needs to be true for somebody to make it? Where are those consumers spending their time? From there, marketers can work backwards to build the right experience around them.

It also changes which numbers deserve our attention. An enormous impression figure may look good in a presentation, but it doesn’t tell us much about whether marketing changed behavior. Incremental sales and incremental customers are far more interesting: did we reach somebody new, did they buy, and did our activity create growth that wouldn’t otherwise have happened?

There may not be another neat diagram waiting to replace the funnel, and perhaps there doesn’t need to be. The more useful shift is to stop designing marketing around our own structures and start with how people actually behave.

As AI changes how people discover products, research choices, and make decisions, that principle becomes even more important. The technology might be changing incredibly quickly, but the person on the other side of it is still human. Marketing should plan accordingly.