Times Have Changed, But the Funnel Has Not
The consumer marketing funnel is over 125 years old. Yet marketers have continued to use the funnel in an attempt to understand a consumer’s journey, from brand awareness all the way down to brand loyalty.
How is it possible, with all the nuances of marketing in 2024, that an evaluation tool developed in 1898 is still considered the best-in-class standard?
Begging More Questions Than Answers
So often, we find that the traditional funnel leads to more questions than answers, and the data the funnel provides fails to trigger the appropriate action for meaningful change.
We hear so many of the same questions from marketers at every turn –
- Are our marketing funnel metrics any good?
- What do they really mean for our brand?
- How do these numbers compare to other clients you’ve worked on?
- How do these numbers compare to my competitors?
- Are there benchmarks for brands or campaigns like ours? How do we stack up?
- Why is there attrition at certain points in the funnel, and what’s causing it?
- What do we need to focus on? What are we doing right, and what needs to change to move our brand in the right direction?
While all of these are great questions, hardly any could be adequately answered by the single set of numbers living in the marketing funnel.
The Consumer Journey is No Longer Linear
The standard practice assumes that consumers live in a descending funnel, making consideration and purchasing decisions in a linear fashion that is both steady and predictable. As marketers, we know that is rarely true.
And marketers are regularly tasked with making sense of a more dynamic consumer journey, where interests, needs, and decisions shift daily, and marketers need to shift with them.
EvolveMKD, an NYC-based PR and Digital agency, knew they needed to develop a tool that could better illustrate the magnitude and impact of those shifts, arming marketers with the means to take evaluation further. The new tool needed to assess a brand’s stability, while quantifying and making sense of the pattern and range of a fluctuating consumer journey. Moreover, the tool would need to not just identify irregularities in the consumer journey but help marketers understand the reasons why they’re occurring.
And lastly, the new tool needed to provide context. We need to be able to measure and contextualize brand performance in the context of competitors and aspirational brands, hoping to see how brands stack up, and what others are doing to drive the changes they want to see.
Enter EvolveMKD’s BrandWave™ – Reimagining The Marketing Funnel For Today
EvolveMKD’s BrandWave™ was designed to address the challenges mentioned above and more. The multi-dimensional tool provides insights to help marketers fine tune messaging to create meaningful noise, amplify marketing efforts that really make waves, and help turn a “Fading Out” BrandWave™ into the “Roaring Buzz” BrandWave™ they can be.
The tool was developed through a proprietary consumer study that examined the common marketing funnel metrics (awareness, interest, consideration, and loyalty) of over 50 brands, all with varying legacies, consumer perceptions, and other considerations, across more than 20 industries.
So What Exactly Is EvolveMKD’s Brandwave™ & How Is It Relevant To The Modern Marketer?
BrandWave™ represents the fluid consumer perception of your brand at the common stages of your current marketing funnel and introduces four proprietary markers of brand health and stability. A BrandWave™ gives you a more comprehensive look at the complete customer lifecycle, providing insights around loyalty and post-purchase sentiment. This is a macro view helping marketers see the forest for the trees, revealing the questions (and answers) that help you reshape your marketing efforts.