| A refreshed metaphor for marketing |
| McKinsey Classics | April 2018 |
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| Marketing in a multichannel world |
| Marketers aim to reach consumers at those moments, or touchpoints, that have the greatest impact on their purchase decisions. In the past, the discipline conceived those touchpoints through the metaphor of a funnel. At its wide end, consumers contemplating a purchase were thought to start with many brands in mind—an “initial consideration set” implanted largely by conventional advertising. Marketing messages continued to reach consumers as they moved through the funnel, steadily reducing that number. Eventually, they emerged into the light, at the funnel’s thin end, having chosen the one brand they would buy. |
| But today we are living in a very different kind of marketing milieu: consumers are continually bombarded by product information from various sources, particularly other consumers, so they know vastly more than they did in the past. Marketers therefore need a better way to navigate a commercial environment that is a lot less linear and more complex than the funnel metaphor would suggest. Learn to reach consumers in the right place at the right time with the right message: read our 2009 classic “The consumer decision journey,” which explains a widely influential alternative metaphor explaining what marketers do. |
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