The marketing funnel is one of the most enduring ideas in modern marketing.
It’s also one of the most outdated. For decades, marketers have built strategies, budgets and reporting around the same model: awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, conversion at the bottom.
It’s neat. Logical. Easy to explain in a boardroom.
There’s just one problem: customers don’t buy that way anymore.
In 2026, the idea that people move politely from awareness to purchase is increasingly detached from reality. The old funnel assumes customers march neatly down a pre-planned path. In reality, they’re sprinting across platforms, doubling back, and making decisions in moments.
Despite this, many organisations still organise their marketing around a linear funnel built for a completely different era of media, tracking and customer behaviour.
They’re bringing a 2010 playbook to a 2026 battlefield and wondering why their results are plummeting.
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By GlobalDataSo here’s the cold, hard truth: the marketing funnel isn’t just broken – it’s dead. And it’s time marketers finally buried it.
The slow nurture playbook has expired
Several structural shifts have broken the assumptions that the marketing funnel once relied on for success.
Privacy changes have weakened tracking and remarketing, email engagement continues to slide, and attribution is becoming harder to trust as customer journeys fragment across devices and platforms.
At the same time, consumers have become faster decision-makers.
Someone researching a mortgage or personal loan can access comparison tools, calculators, product information and reviews within minutes. The same is true for credit cards, savings products and digital banking services.
In many cases, a consumer forms a decision long before a nurture sequence has even started doing its job.
This key challenge facing brands today is that intent can both appear and disappear within the blink of an eye. If your marketing can’t capture that intent in the moment, you’re not just losing the click; you’re surrendering the customer to a competitor who moved faster.
The customer journey didn’t bend. It broke
The traditional funnel is built on the idea that audiences cycle through three core behaviours: brand awareness, then consideration, then conversion.
But the customer stopped following that script years ago.
Consumers now research products across multiple tabs, platforms and devices simultaneously. They bounce between sources, compare alternatives and loop back through their decision-making process before committing.
A customer researching a credit card might see a TV advert during a football match, Google the offer on their phone, open three comparison tabs, watch a quick explainer video on social media and scan a handful of reviews.
Sometimes that process takes days. Sometimes it takes half an hour. Sometimes, they’re filling out the application page in minutes.
In other words, the neat little funnel marketers love to draw on slides no longer reflects how real customers behave.
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has been calling this out for years. Its research shows modern customer journeys are fragmented and non-linear, with consumers constantly switching between behaviours such as searching, scrolling, streaming and shopping.
Rather than forcing that messy behaviour into a neat funnel, BCG proposes a different framework: influence maps.
Instead of asking what stage someone is in, this strategy identifies the touchpoints that influence decision-making – because influence can happen anywhere.
Every touchpoint now has to pull its weight
Many marketers are still clutching the old playbook with white knuckles, adamant that it’s got some life left in it yet.
But the truth is that the traditional funnel leaves no room for the new era of marketing, where any interaction with a potential customer might be the moment they decide to convert.
In this landscape, every touchpoint must be capable of educating, persuading and converting simultaneously. Basically, if your marketing can’t take someone from “I’ve never heard of you” to “take my money” in a single interaction, you’re losing.
That doesn’t mean every ad needs to come in swinging.
It means every interaction must support a decision if the customer is ready to make one. If that information isn’t there, customers will keep moving. And in digital markets, that switch happens in seconds.
Why banks need to rethink acquisition
Few industries are feeling this shift more acutely than financial services.
Historically, banking relied on long decision cycles and strong brand familiarity. Consumers often spend weeks researching mortgages, loans or credit cards before choosing a provider.
Today, much of that research happens online in compressed bursts. Prospective borrowers will check different lender websites, comparison platforms, consumer reviews and social media explainers in a single afternoon.
In other words, the marketing battle is often won or lost before the bank ever speaks to the customer.
For banks competing head-on with digital-first challengers and fintechs, that changes the rules of acquisition. Marketing can’t keep trying to shepherd prospects down a neat path that no longer exists. It must influence customers and capture intent wherever it appears.
From funnel stages to influence systems
This is where influence maps earn their keep.
Instead of organising marketing around funnel stages, organisations identify the touchpoints that genuinely influence customer decisions and focus investment there.
For financial institutions, that might mean strengthening digital product pages, improving educational content or investing more heavily in channels where intent already exists, such as search and comparison platforms.
The job now is to build a marketing system that can influence and convert customers wherever they encounter your brand.
In practical terms, that means:
- Designing marketing that can convert within a single interaction.
- Creating richer, more persuasive digital experiences.
- Aligning messaging across every customer touchpoint.
- Investing in channels where customer intent is already present.
In short, marketing should be engineered as a complete customer acquisition system, not a sequence of isolated campaigns.
The funnel had its moment. That moment has passed
The marketing funnel was a useful simplification for an earlier era. But now, customer behaviour has changed faster than marketing frameworks have.
Today’s journeys are messy, fast and multi-channel. Consumers move constantly between platforms, sources and devices, gathering information and forming decisions far more quickly than most marketing strategies assume.
2026 will be the year many marketers realise they’ve been polishing a funnel built for a customer that stopped existing years ago – while the brands winning the battle are influencing buyers wherever and whenever intent appears.
Sabri Suby is the founder of Australia’s fastest-growing digital marketing agency, King Kong
