• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • About
  • Digital Innovation
  • RentZen Platform
  • Experience
  • Résumé
  • Interests

Kristin Maranki

Master of Science – Digital Innovation in Marketing

Fox School of Business
  • View @KristinMaranki’s profile on Twitter
  • View kristinmaranki’s profile on Instagram
  • View kristinmaranki’s profile on LinkedIn
  • About
  • Digital Innovation
  • RentZen Platform
  • Experience
  • Résumé
  • Interests

It’s Not a Funnel, It’s a Loop

June 11, 2017 By Kristin Maranki Leave a Comment

It costs at least 5x as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. That’s one reason winning back familiar customers has become a top marketing priority.

Rusty Warner, a Forrester analyst cited in CIO, explains that digital marketers are placing less emphasis on filling the top of the funnel with leads, and more on influencing the entire customer journey — from awareness to retention and loyalty.

Another reason for this shift in marketers’ focus from lead generation to customer lifecycle is a new understanding of a fundamental marketing process: the marketing funnel.

Evolving from a Funnel to a Journey

With a linear understanding of how prospects move through the purchase process — as though they descended through a funnel — marketers typically would focus on filling the top of the funnel with leads of varying quality. This approach emphasizes brand awareness activities, such as advertising.

traditional marketing funnel
Traditional marketing funnel

The traditional marketing funnel doesn’t take into account the experience customers have when using the product they’ve purchased. It also doesn’t account for the experience — or the decisions — of a repeat customer.

Enter the consumer decision journey.

Consumer decision journey
Consumer decision journey. Source: McKinsey Quarterly. http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-consumer-decision-journey

While initial steps in this process are similar to those at the top of the traditional marketing funnel, the loyalty loop incorporates new steps — and a new orientation — that add greater context to the customer’s journey.

The Loop that Never Ends

Rather than a linear funnel with an endpoint at loyalty, the consumer decision journey depicts the purchase process as a continuous loop. The loop includes the post-purchase step, and implies that consumers decide whether a product they’ve purchased meets their expectations and warrants another purchase. The cycle repeats each time a purchase need is triggered.

Loyalty is not automatic after purchase. It depends on a positive post-purchase experience. While marketers know this intuitively, failing to depict the post-purchase phase in the marketing funnel hinders a deeper understanding of the customer journey.

The way marketers understand the buying process influences how we approach customers — the interactions we imagine, the content we design, and the touch points we create.

“The practice of marketing has moved from a primary focus on brand awareness and lead generation to the convergence of acquisition and retention capabilities across the entire customer lifecycle,” says Sharon Goldman.

By understanding that the buying process is more of a loop than a funnel, marketers can more effectively influence both prospects and existing customers.

It can be useful to think of the consumer decision journey as a process improvement in marketing as a discipline.

Share:

  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Digital Innovation Tagged With: consumer decision journey, customer journey, marketing funnel, process improvement

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

About

  • About
  • Experience
  • Interests
  • RentZen Platform
  • Résumé

Recent Posts

  • Trust Me: I’m from Amazon
  • NBC Breaks News on Snapchat
  • The Man Behind the (Darth Vader) Mask
  • Best Back-to-School Branded Content 2017
  • Product Development at MediSys: A Study in Power
  • Time + Scope > Money
  • It’s Not a Funnel, It’s a Loop
  • User Experience and the Value of Human-Centered Design

Tags

84 Lumber Airbnb Audi augmented reality B2B marketing behavioral marketing big data branding brand loyalty brand management brands and politics consumer decision journey content marketing customer experience customer relationships data data-driven marketing design process digital branding digital innovation digital marketing disruptive innovation e-commerce ecommerce Facebook fail fast human-centered design IDEO IT Lady Gaga Lyft personalization PR product development project management purchase funnel social media social strategy Super Bowl 2017 systems thinking Taco Bell technology usability user experience value chain
My Tweets

Copyright © 2022 · Kristin Maranki
Disclaimer: The information included in e-portfolios are posted and maintained by the applicable student. Temple University makes no representation as to the accuracy or currency of this information.

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.