Marketing funnel

The marketing funnel is the model ordering the path to purchase into stages, classically from awareness through consideration to purchase, with many people at the top and few at the bottom. As a language for organising activity the funnel is useful: the distinction between creating demand and harvesting it remains essential. As a description of real buying behaviour it misleads: people do not move through neat stages, they enter and exit at arbitrary points, and most category buyers are not on the way to a purchase at all. Used as a measurement frame, the funnel additionally rewards the last step and undervalues everything that created the demand.

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