Started from the bottom
I had a history professor in college who liked to say that “conservatives always win.” He had a flare for the dramatic and penchant for banging his chalk on the chalkboard as he made points. His point was that it’s a lot easier to win when your default position is saying “no” than when it’s convincing people to embrace new ideas. I think there’s a similar asymmetry in the marketing world that sometimes makes our jobs harder than they need to be.
With due apologies to my good friend Rachael and everyone else who hates them, I’m going to talk about funnels.
A big part of my job at Mattel was trying to get groups with different goals to speak the same language around efficiency and effectiveness. It was a challenging game of balancing organizational incentives and business KPIs. I didn’t solve it, but I learned plenty about navigating it, funnel in hand.
Like the humble beer bong, the plastic-and-duct tape wonder that uses one as key input, funnels are about efficiency and effectiveness. Beer bongs get cheap beer down your neck at the maximum speed allowed by gravity, while marketing funnels help us evaluate how quickly people change their state from unaware to owners of a product. They’re both dumb but they’re the best thing we have so far for their respective jobs.
On it’s face, the marketing funnel is unbiased. It charts the linear movement toward purchase. But we can’t leave good things alone and we’ve broken it into multiple stages — breaks that allow us to measure progress against different business needs.
If you start at the bottom it all seems to make sense. Say I know that 500 people bought something from my website, but not much else. We have tons of behavior to track to give us a clear understanding of what they did: how many visited, how long they spent there, what other pages they visited first, where they were right before they came to my website.
Move farther up the funnel and it still tracks. What percentage of people served a video ad watched the whole thing. How many clicked on an ads. How much it cost to get that click or view. What they searched for. What kinds of content they watched on YouTube before making that search. Which of my audience segments they come from.
The air gets thinner as you get to the top of the funnel. We can measure things like how many total people we reached. But by definition we’re changing attitudes, not expecting behavior. We’re talking desire, motivation, and belief. We have tons of ways to evaluate these things but their reliability is suspect because our minds look for the rational explanations for their curious urges.
Who’s going to admit that they bought a pair of shoes because someone posted a funny video on TikTok while wearing them? What do we believe and when did we start believing it? How does it compare to the other 4 million people in a target audience? This is hard to articulate and harder to chart, even though most marketers intuitively know this is where marketing can be a force multiplier.
The asymmetry I mentioned has two parts: measurement and time. Unlike the beer bong, which involves yellowish fizz moving at a relatively constant rate toward your belly, each stage of the marketing funnel encompasses different amounts of time and, as discussed above, is measured differently.
Measurement: The funnel as a whole measures effectiveness (revenue/ $ spent) pretty well. Though only the bottom measures efficiency ($ spent/ action) well, efficiency is a juicy temptation to large organizations.
Time: The top of the funnel is our entire lives, minus a few brief moments when we search, click, or buy. Brands are built over time in our minds, but business is measured constantly in behavior.
The asymmetry of measurement and time throughout the funnel can lead to bottom-of-the-funnel bias: spending disproportionate money on actions with behavioral measures because they offer quick hits of quantifiability and progress. To paraphrase John Wooden, this mistakes activity for achievement.
Statistician George Box said that “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
As I’ve retired my beer bong and shaken off my fitful haze about funnels, I’ve warmed to the marketing funnel’s triangular imperfection. It’s a useful model because so many people understand that it tracks people from non-customer to customer. It’s that much more useful if we have a shared understand how implications around time and measurement can affect what it’s telling us about what we should do. Just because we don’t have a good way to measure it doesn’t mean it’s not ciritcal to the business.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
