I have an itch against funnels.
I think we use them too often to make the world unnecessarily simple, and by that abstracting ourselves away from the customer or just embracing a reality that simply does not exist.
Sure the AIDA model at some altitude of abstraction works, everything does, but does it connect us to our customers maturity journey or experience?
My point-of-view is that it detaches us from what is happening in their lives that leads them to needs where we can contribute with our value propositions.
Example: If your goal is to bring people from interest to desire (left funnel above) — what is your value proposition? It doesn’t make any sense because the funnel on the left is all about you, it’s not about the customer.
The model on the right (above) is also a funnel, but it tries to (and it’s conceptual) articulate which experiences the patient goes through from healthy to death in terms of COVID. And the team could understand the different contexts of each step, what the needs and the influences are and how they can offer value to ease the pain or extract the patient from the rest of the funnel.
What I don’t understand is why we don’t use digital to make complex models like the funnel for COVID, which is a representation of a complex reality in a format that makes it actionable for the team.
But instead use digital to promote simplified version of reality that mirror us, instead of our customers.
Is digital pulling us further away from our customers instead of towards them.
