Centrifuge: the New Marketing Funnel?
A web search for “marketing funnel” will suggest that the concept has been declared dead many times over. Still, I have yet to see a consensus on its replacement. The most popular alternative (at least as far as Google is concerned) comes from Forrester’s Brian Haven. If anything, it illustrates how difficult it is to adapt a funnel metaphor to the reality of marketing. Complexity aside (and I think that’s the point) it doesn’t even look like a funnel.
Part of the confusion is that we’ve been using the funnel so long that we’ve forgotten where it came from. The anachronistically named E. St. Elmo Lewis designed it in 1898 as a four-level sales tool. The narrowing width emphasized hierarchy – each stage must be preceded by another – and suggests that success means not losing a single customer along the way. (After all, a funnel is used to prevent spillage.) Now, does this sound like modern marketing?
I don’t mean to get carried away. We use ROYGBIV as a mnemonic but not the name of the color spectrum. And although everyone seems to have a different explanation for why the marketing process has the shape of a funnel, it has certainly proved itself as a model mnemonic.
That said, the funnel becomes problematic when we start using it as a metaphor. If my client expects zero “spillage” they are not going to understand a recommendation to stop targeting after eight impressions. If they are committed to a hierarchical marketing process, our path to conversion reports have no meaning.
In reality, the marketing funnel is messy. There are well more than four layers. Some are interchangeable. In some you only have a vague sense of movement, while in others you are overloaded with data. And potential customers are moving in all directions, falling out the top, and leaking through the middle.
I’ve been thinking about what a better metaphor for marketing might be. My favorite so far is a centrifuge. Start with an indeterminate mass, apply some “marketing spin” (sorry), wait a bit, and slowly some people — your customers — will rise to the surface.
Have a better idea? Leave it in the comments.
Bryan Melmed | Manager, Product Planning
It’s a nice metaphor, but you’re not discussing a centrifuge correctly. Things don’t “rise to the top” of a centrifuge; heavier things are forced to the sides. If you centrifuge a blood sample, the red blood cells end up on the outside and the plasma on the inside. Thus, the metaphor breaks down.
But there is a related metaphor that may work. A washing machine’s spin cycle is a centrifuge. The water is mobile and therefore forced out of the clothes through the holes in the tub. (This is in contrast to a blood centrifuge which has no holes in the test tube to let the plasma escape.) What you’re left with are damp clothes instead of wet ones. So…
Add soap (content, messaging) to the laundry (market). Wash (have the conversation), rinse (moderate the conversation), and spin (get to the cleaned leads). Repeat.
Quite right. I didn’t describe that as well as I could.
Still, I still think the metaphor works if you replace “rise to the surface” with something more accurate. Isn’t marketing about separating the wheat from the chaff? (Am I allowed to explain one metaphor with another?)
I like yours as well — although the “laundry” would have to be filthy to justify all the “soap”! Maybe there’s a happy medium somewhere.
Bryan
Great article! I like the analogy.
Loving the Funnel
Hi Bryan, thanks for writing this article and getting our thoughts flowing.
The funnel is great because it allows us to understand where different types of marketing fits into a general understanding of the purchase process. The funnel also illustrates reach which is key for marketers. While not correct, there is little doubt that the funnel is also useful to guide marketers to think strategically about where opportunities fit in.
The laundry metaphor might be closer to reality, which is great, but I have a hard time using my underwear to explain/understand how marketing channels work together, which is the whole point for me. Simplicity always wins