This edited passage is taken from Ashley Faus’s Human-Centered Marketing ©2025. Kogan Page Ltd. has granted permission for its reproduction and adaptation.
There is no benefit to mapping content to the conventional funnel because the journey acts more like a playground than a straight line.
The traditional funnel has several drawbacks, such as underestimating the sophistication of the buyer, assuming that every member of the audience plans to and will become a customer, and providing few options for post-purchase retention tactics.
We must radically reconsider our audience journey framework if we are to create a smooth, enjoyable experience based on trust.
The traditional buyer’s journey funnel, which emphasizes three crucial stages—awareness, consideration, and decision—is well-known to most marketers.
The funnel makes the assumption that the audience journey starts with awareness, but in reality, it starts long before marketers realize that the individual is on a journey.
Presenting The Playground
The journey should be viewed as a playground where people can move around, sideways, up, and down. They can visit the content (equipment) in any order. They are free to come and go as they like. Additionally, they are able to use the content in the “wrong” way.
How often do you make your audience go through unnecessary steps in an attempt to get them to buy before they’re ready, or worse, complicate the purchasing process because you have to fulfill requirements for a white paper, demo, and case study?
What causes this to occur? It is based on the notion that in order for prospects to become leads and continue moving forward, we must push them down the funnel.
The Customer Journey Map’s Drawbacks
Every customer journey map culminates with the prospect turning into a lead and choosing to buy the business’s product. Opportunities for expansion, cross-selling, upselling, and retention are not taken into account in this linear journey map.
The looping journey misses the complexity, but it at least recognizes the extra post-purchase phase.
Many software-as-a-service providers, for instance, have user caps for various product tiers.
Many SaaS products have a free tier with user gates, feature gates, or both to encourage free users to become paying customers, as product-led growth (PLG) has become a major go-to-market strategy.
Conventional journey maps mask the messy middle part of the customer journey, which includes battling competitors when it’s time for the customer to renew, using strange tricks to stay under the user limit, and negotiating long contracts for more seats.
This draws attention to yet another flaw in the funnel and the journey maps that are used to guide people through it. It is a measurement tool for the past, not a strategy tool for the future.
You are right to start with a prospect having a problem, looking for a solution, and finally selecting your offering if you chart the paths of those who did, in fact, become customers.
However, you cannot just look at what happened in the past, on owned platforms, in the shortened time period where the buying process “officially” started if you are trying to map your content and distribution strategy, build a net-new audience, and refine your narratives to resonate with that audience.
Additionally, think about a situation after a purchase in which a marketer intentionally complicates the customer’s journey in order to monitor the interaction more closely.
We get a false sense of security from gathering more data. We can definitely persuade them to spend more money if we know a little more about them.
The distinctions between an economic buyer and a user are also overlooked by traditional funnel models. Although many marketers are aware that purchasing involves a variety of stakeholders, they make the assumption that each one joins the process in a straight line.
For instance, in larger organizations, before introducing a new tool, an economic buyer may have to go through a procurement process that includes a security assessment, compliance checklist, and legal or contract review.
According to the linear funnel, these stakeholders must be taken into consideration during the “decision” stage of the purchasing process.
Nevertheless, anyone who has dealt with procurement in a big business will tell you that it’s challenging and frequently discourages even initiating a purchasing process.
You must persuade me that I will be able to purchase in order to get me to do so. I’m much more likely to choose you as a vendor if you make the procurement process simple for me because I know I’ll be able to finish it.
Imagine a different situation where teams are given the authority to buy services and tools independently. All of these teams are currently in the “post-purchase” stage.
The invoices may eventually grow to the point where they should be consolidated, which could lead to a more thorough vendor review. The economic buyer is now in the “awareness” phase since they have just learned about you as a vendor, even though you have gained a lot of users.
Alternatively, they may need to be persuaded that resolving this issue should remain a top priority. Alternatively, by launching a request for proposals (RFP) or investigating rivals, the buyers may proceed straight to the “consideration” stage.
Perhaps they agree with the issue, but they would like to consider alternative approaches. Even though there is already a vendor addressing this issue, they may still need to learn about other potential solutions.
The spend may be significant enough to necessitate a more extensive review by the procurement, security, compliance, and legal departments after you choose to consolidate a contract.
Who knows what stage of the funnel you’re in at this point? Is it “retention” with users who have lost their purchasing power?
Does the economic buyer have awareness or consideration? Is it awareness or choice on the part of teams that aren’t the economic buyer but have the power to block the deal?
As you can see, it becomes very difficult to try to map linear personas to a linear funnel while also mapping content!
These situations also downplay or disregard the buyer’s level of sophistication. The majority of buyers in a business-to-business (B2B) setting are highly knowledgeable. They may have previously purchased solutions and have extensive knowledge of the problem space.
They are capable of conducting independent research and frequently favor completing the preliminary screening stages prior to contacting a business to start the purchasing process.
Indeed, according to TrustRadius, 43% of buyers reported speaking with vendor representatives in 2021; in all but the largest deal sizes, that percentage fell to an average of one out of four buyers.
Rather than relying on vendor-provided information, buyers favored doing their own research.
Free trials or accounts (56%), user reviews (55%), and community forums (37%) were preferred by buyers over vendor-provided content like marketing collateral (14%), blogs (14%), and customer references (15%).
A 2024 report from 6sense, a business that provides data to revenue teams to speed up deal conversions, confirmed this trend. It was discovered that B2B buyers are already 70% of the way through the purchasing process when they deal directly with sellers.
We frequently observe that by the time a marketer realizes a buyer is in the purchasing process, they are far behind the buyer’s understanding of the problem space, investigation of the solution space, and preference for a particular set of solution providers.
They are not blindly contacting a salesperson or visiting the company website.
Rather, they have read about the advantages and disadvantages of various providers from people just like themselves, and they have consulted a carefully selected list of reliable sources, such as discussions with their personal network, information gathered through crowdsourcing, and peer recommendations on social media and forums.