The New Marketing Sieve? - MaryLee Sachs

Last week I attended a new CMO event amp8211 the North American CMO Conference amp8211held at MoMA39s Education Center in New York City It was organized by the CMO Conference organization based in Zurich and was the first of its kind to be held Stateside Previous such conferences have been held in Zurich and SingaporeOne thing that struck me was how many times speakers and delegates mentioned the demise of the traditional purchase funnel Of course this has been a subject du jour for several years One of the first 39official39 references I saw was published by Resource Interactive in November 2006 which focused on how digital millennials were changing shopping and which featured how the old purchase funnel was morphing to more of a fish shapeAt last week39s conference David Edelman coleader of the Digital Marketing Strategy group at McKinsey compared the traditional funnel to the consumer decision journey developed by McKinsey He posited that consumers live on a circular path where postpurchase experience defines the brands engaged on the next journey It is not a linear process but rather a virtual cycle cutting across paid owned shared and earned media And let this be a lesson for the continuity buffs in marketing amp8211 66 percent of consumers do research online and then get confused over discontinuities between the on and offline worlds which makes it even more important to connect the dots collaborate between silos and integrate amp8211 but that39s a whole other topic on which I39ve also written aboutI rather preferred the TNS version of the purchase funnel which was presented by Cheryl Max SVP of North American Marketing at TNS Global The quotTNS Buying Cyclequot is a chaotic set of lines connecting all sorts of things As Cheryl remarked quotIt39s not cleanquot but I found it to be an excellent example of a messy purchase funnel which is neither linear nor static Cheryl used the diagram to illustrate some of the findings of TNS39 recentlyreleased Digital Life Study the largest global study into people39s attitudes and behaviors online amp8211 based on conversations with over 72000 people in 60 countriesForrester too has written a lot about the marketing funnel Steven Noble Senior Analyst at Forrester published a white paper in October 2010 entitled quotIt39s Time To Bury The Marketing Funnel amp8211 An Empowered Report Marketers Must Embrace The Customer Life CyclequotI asked some of the academics attending the conference if the old purchase funnel was still taught in university marketing courses and while those there were engaged with MBA programs they felt sure that the traditional funnel was still included in earlier coursework if for no other reasons than to establish the nomenclature and foundationI can39t help but wonder if the traditional funnel will ever be tweaked to be both relevant again and established as a new industry standard Perhaps it should be recast as a marketing quotsievequot given the fickleness of the linear progression of the old funnelOne thing is for sure amp8211 everyone seems to be developing their own version and while the driving forces to these variations are basically the same it could become very confusingMaryLee Sachs was most recently US Chair and Worldwide Director of Consumer Marketing at WPP firm Hill ampamp Knowlton She launched her new book The Changing MO of the CMO How the Convergence of Brand and Reputation is Affecting Marketers at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on June 23 The book is available on Amazon and Barnes ampamp NobleRead all MaryLee39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at MaryLee SachsCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries

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