The Marketing Spiral

CM Comrade Scott Weisbrod points us to a Forrester report that proclaims the death of the traditional marketing funnel.  OK, I buy that—the proliferation of interactive technologies had altered consumer behavior.  The funnel may not be as relevant as it once was.  The report suggests that engagement is becoming an increasingly important metric to measure:

"Engagement goes beyond reach and frequency to measure people’s real feelings about brands. It starts with their own brand relationship and continues as they extend that relationship to other customers. As a customer’s participation with a brand deepens from site use and purchases (involvement and interaction) to affinity and championing (intimacy and influence), measuring and acting on engagement becomes more critical to understanding customers’ intentions. The four parts of engagement build on each other to make a holistic picture."

You can take a look at how they propose to measure engagement in four parts here.

But it's this visual above—the maze like funnel that I don't entirely get.  I think it's supposed to show that unlike the traditional funnel, digital technologies have made what was once a linear path—well, less linear.

But what if it wasn't a path at all—nor a funnel that begins wide and ends narrow.  What if consumer behavior is more like a spiral that begins with an interaction as opposed to a communication.  And what if the spiral amplifies the more the consumer engages.  From interaction, to engagement, to participation, to conversation to affinity to community?  What would that look like?

   
Messing with the traditional funnel is like treading on sacred ground.  But I don't think the "Spiral" is that far off.  Think about it:  Often times our first interaction with a brand is through a digital touch point like a site.  Maybe we heard about it from a friend or somewhere else.  We interact with it—we give it a try.  If we like it—that leads to deeper levels of engagement.  Maybe this repeats itself adding more "cycles" to the spiral.  We continue to engage.  Some of us even begin to participate.  We transition from downloading to uploading our media.  We talk about how great the experience is.  To our peers, to each other.  We become evangelists—the spiral actually expands as we engage with multiple touchpoints—not only the digital ones. 

All of this adds up to a positive associations with whoever is responsible for providing the excellent experience.  We come together with others who feel the same way.  We instantly bond with them over our shared interests and experiences.  Community forms.  Then one day, someone who's never tried brand or service X hears about it from a friend.  A member of some community.  They fire up their digital device of choice and the interaction begins once again—a new spiral is formed. 

This post came together rather quickly—so the marketing spiral could be way off.  But I thought it would be worth a shot.

Update, or maybe the funnel simply gets flipped? (compliments of Brandon Murphy)

Comments

[Jonathan Trenn]

What do you mean by 'community'? What attributes to they hold? How do they form? What types of products/servies have an actual 'community'?

[Tim Brunelle]

David-- Totally agree about "sacred ground." However your funnel is architected, it's the one slide in your company's PPT that can't be touched! So kudos for facilitating some discussion on new approaches. I think magnetism is a factor as well, in terms of:

- How magnetic is the first experience? How often and how fast will you (the individual) return?
- How magnetic is the experience across all participants?

Some folks might also connect a "Brand Interaction Rate" with the Marketing Spiral. Another form of magnetism, I guess.

And finally, who cares if the post came together quickly--it's a solid idea! Good enough to get at least two comments in a matter of hours. In essence, this post has its own micro Marketing Spiral.

Rock on.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Davide ;-)

I think the view as a funnel was always an "internal" projection -- wanting to make sense of the many big and smaller stories that guided a customer to our door.

When I think of spirals, I think of something that spins down at some point. How about calling it a circle? Then it starts to make more sense. Do visit some time, my dear. We've been talking about lots of juicy topics (for you).

[John Whiteside]

I think it's important to recognize that different kinds of brands have different processes, and different users behave differently. I like the spiral and think it describes a real process pretty well; it doesn't replace the funnel, though, because there are still plenty of people who think, "I really need a widget," do a search on widgets, and then click something and buy a widget - and never want to hear about widgets again. Different buyers, different processes, different PowerPoint slides :).

[DA]

Jonathan,
The folks at places like Harley-Davidson can probably answer your questions about community better than I can.

Tim,
Thanks, I know this is far from thought through—but I think there is something to thinking in cycles vs. a funnel.

Valeria,
I'm long overdue for a visit. I will stop by and say ciao

John,
I agree 100%. This kind of thinking would probably not replace the Funnel. But may represent a complimentary way of how consumers move from awareness to something deeper. The point is that it's through awareness and in some cases participation.

[Dan Neely]

David, I agree, this new model based around customer interaction/engagement rather than a communication is becoming increasingly important. Rather than just measuring engagement and the stages of the spiral/circle, companies should be working to better enable/foster these stages of consumer behavior. Any company with a strong brand affinity should be focused on switching to this model where the community will ultimately own the brand. The car companies would be a great example, Jeep has rich engagement from the geer heads but the level of direct participation, conversation and affinity could all be helped with the community approach.

[John Dodds]

The funnel (in whatever form) is redundant because it assumes that the name of the game is still pushing stuff through it.

[Brandon Murphy]

David,

I think this is very smart. And I think your stages of interaction, engagement, participation, conversation and affinity are right on. Perhaps a more simple way of looking at it is just turning the funnel upside down and applying your stages to it. I wrote a complimentary post on my blog about this. However I looked at the stages as ways people build friendships with brands on a social level. It's not too different from your spiral, but just takes the typical concept of the funnel and flips it, which is what the web2.0 world and the world of conversation has done to marketing...right?

http://thecword.typepad.com/thecword/2007/08/turn-the-funnel.html

[Bob Warfield]

What if the real problem is that we're trying to represent a multi-dimensional process using only one dimension, and so it changes behavior chaotically and in mysterious ways?

It wouldn't be the first time someone over simplified behavior, saw a theory work for a little while, and then got surprised later.

Lately I've written about how Personality Traits can affect people's choices for how they like to interact with the Web 2.0:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/08/29/web-20-personality-types/

It could be that the diversity of the web enables so many more ways to reach people that we're finding it takes a separate "funnel" lifecycle for more than one personality type. Some will be very linear, and hence the funnel is ideal. Others prefer to jump around (these are your Twitter lovers!) in much less predictable ways.

We're talking about Learning and Communication Patterns here, and they have a distinct role to play in shaping our Marketing and Sales processes.

Cheers!

BW