The Funnel is a myth, it always was
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) (2025) surveyed 2,000+ marketers and identified that people don't move through stages - they loop across four behaviours simultaneously.
Unlike the rigid, sequential approach of the funnel, the BCG Influence Map recognises that they occur across the entire journey, often overlapping and influencing multiple stages simultaneously.
Intent signals appear in all four. And Nielsen and Shotton show us why the funnel model fails in the first place - it assumes identity and stage are stable and predictable, and the evidence says neither is.
BCG's 2025 model splits the modern journey into four behaviours — streaming, scrolling, searching, shopping.
Group them properly and you get two systems, each with its own scorecard.
Streaming and scrolling are habit. Low effort, ambient, repeated — people aren't deciding, they're just present. That's System 1: Wood and Rünger's exposure-builds-habit loop, triggered by context rather than thought. Measure it with recall, attention, consideration lift.
Searching and shopping are intent. Deliberate, System 2 switched on — someone's made a decision, so conversion rate, CPA and ROAS actually mean something here.
The waste happens when you judge one with the other's scorecard. Score a streaming campaign on ROAS and it looks like it's failing, because it was never built to convert on the spot — that's Goodhart's Law, the measure becoming the target. Kite and Roach call the result the performance plateau: optimise everything to short-term conversion, and growth stalls because the habit-building work feeding the funnel gets starved.
Think with Google shows why that work matters: 63% of consumers are open to buying a brand they've never heard of. The consideration window is always open — streaming and scrolling aren't a warm-up, they're where most of the opportunity lives.
So match the scorecard to the system. Recall and consideration for habit. Conversion and ROAS for intent. Mix the two and you'll cut the budget that was working while funding the metric that was never the point.
Streaming + Scrolling = brand recall, attention, consideration lift.
Searching + Shopping = conversion rate, CPA, ROAS.