The marketing funnel hasn’t died. Let’s get that out of the way.

Awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, the stages are real. People do become aware of things. They do consider options. They do decide. The framework still works as a way of thinking about how demand moves.

What doesn’t work is the assumption that your customer moves through it the way the diagram suggests. Neatly. Sequentially. One stage at a time.

That version of the journey never existed. And if your strategy is built on it, you’re designing for a user who isn’t real.

The consideration phase was always a mess

A few years ago, Google published a piece of research they called “the messy middle.” The idea was simple: between the moment someone recognises a need and the moment they buy, there’s a chaotic loop of exploring and evaluating that doesn’t follow any pattern. People open tabs, compare options, read reviews, get distracted, circle back, ask someone, forget about it, and then buy three weeks later through a completely different channel.

The research was solid. The framing was useful.

But honestly, anyone who has worked in CX or spent time close to real customer behaviour already knew this. The consideration phase was never a clean step between awareness and decision. It was always a loop. Google just gave it a name and backed it with data.

What matters isn’t the label. What matters is the question it raises: if we already knew the middle of the journey was chaotic, why are most brands still designing as if it isn’t?

What has actually changed

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The mess itself isn’t new. What’s new is where it happens.

Five years ago, a customer in the consideration phase would bounce between Google, a couple of comparison sites, maybe your website, and a competitor’s. The brand still had a reasonable level of presence across those touchpoints. You could optimise your site, run some paid search, build a decent landing page, and you were in the game.

Today, that same customer might see your brand mentioned in a TikTok comment. Then ask ChatGPT for recommendations. Then read a Reddit thread where someone tears apart your competitor, or you. Then hear about a completely different option on a podcast. Then check your Instagram to see if your brand feels right. Then ask a friend on WhatsApp.

By the time they land on your website, if they ever do, they’ve already formed an opinion. And they formed it in places where you had zero control over the narrative.

That’s the real shift. Not that the journey is messy, it always was. But that the mess now happens in spaces the brand doesn’t own, doesn’t control, and in many cases, doesn’t even monitor.

The customer hasn’t changed. The environment has.

The control problem

This is what most strategies miss.

Brands still invest the majority of their resources in the parts of the journey they control, their website, their ad campaigns, their email sequences, their conversion funnel. And those things matter. But they represent a shrinking portion of the overall experience.

Think about it. If a potential customer has already been influenced by a Reddit thread, a TikTok creator, and an AI-generated recommendation before they ever see your homepage, what exactly is your landing page optimising for? You’re polishing the last five percent of a journey that was already shaped somewhere else.

The uncomfortable truth is that most brands are spending eighty percent of their effort on the touchpoints they own, while eighty percent of the customer’s decision is being shaped on touchpoints they don’t.

That’s not a media problem. It’s not a channel problem. It’s a strategy problem.

The only thing you can control

So if you can’t control where your customer discovers you, in what order they encounter you, or which sources they trust more than your own content, what can you actually do?

You can control what they find when they get there. And more importantly, you can make sure it’s consistent with what they already heard somewhere else.

This sounds obvious. It isn’t.

Most brands say one thing on their website, something slightly different on social, something vaguer in their ads, and something completely disconnected in how their team talks about the product. Each channel has its own tone, its own message, sometimes its own positioning. And when a customer bounces between all of them, which they will, the experience feels fragmented. Incoherent. Forgettable.

The brands that survive a chaotic journey aren’t the ones with the most touchpoints. They’re the ones that say the same thing in all of them.

Not the same words. The same idea. The same position. The same clarity about who they are, what they do, and why it matters.

That’s what holds up when a customer enters your world from any direction, at any stage, through any channel. Not a funnel. Not a framework. A point of view that’s clear enough to work everywhere.

The funnel is a framework. Not a map.

The funnel still works, as a way to organise how you think about demand. Use it for that. But the moment you treat it as the literal path your customer walks, you’ve already lost them.

Your customer will discover you in ways you didn’t plan for. They’ll evaluate you in places you don’t own. They’ll make their decision based on signals you didn’t send, a comment, a recommendation, a conversation you were never part of.

You cannot design for that with a linear plan. But you don’t need to control those channels. You need to control what feeds them.

When your narrative is consistent across every touchpoint you do own, your website, your content, your social presence, the way your team talks about what you do, that clarity travels. It’s what a customer repeats when they recommend you. It’s what a creator picks up when they mention you. It’s what an AI pulls from when someone asks for a recommendation in your category.

The brands that are hard to explain are hard to recommend. In any channel. By anyone.

A brand with a clear point of view gives people the language to talk about it, even in spaces it has never touched. You’re not controlling the conversation. You’re making it easy to have.

That kind of clarity doesn’t come from a dashboard or a funnel. It comes from the work most companies skip, the thinking that happens before anything else gets built.

And right now, in a world where your customer’s journey is more fragmented than ever, that thinking isn’t a nice-to-have.

It’s the entire game.