Funnels Are Broken. This Is How Real Buyers Move Today
For decades, marketers have clung to the funnel model as a comforting illusion – a tidy visual metaphor promising predictability and control. Awareness leads to interest. Interest becomes desire. Desire triggers action. But here’s the truth: the funnel is no longer fit for purpose. It oversimplifies buyer behaviour into neat stages that rarely hold up under scrutiny.
If your analytics dashboard doesn’t reflect the clean path your strategy expects, that’s not because your execution is poor. It’s because the audience doesn’t move that way anymore.
The modern buyer journey is chaotic. Noisy. Selective. And increasingly, it’s shaped by forces beyond your control, especially the growing influence of artificial intelligence.
How AI Changed Everything?
AI is increasingly shaping the buyer journey and it’s only going to get more influential.
Whether it’s a consumer using ChatGPT to shortlist holiday destinations or a procurement officer prompting Claude to compare vendor whitepapers, decision-making today often begins with machine-generated filtering. These tools are collapsing the awareness stage and giving people synthetic confidence early in the process. That means your brand is being judged (or dismissed) before you even have a chance to make a traditional “first impression.”
Search isn’t dead, but its shape is changing. And if your content isn’t conversational, credible, or context-rich, it won’t pass the algorithmic sniff test — regardless of how many ads you run.
Circular Marketing embraces this new dynamic. It doesn’t assume control. It builds presence in multiple directions — performance, content, and events — so your brand becomes discoverable, not pushy.
The B2B Buyer Journey: More Complex Than Ever
In B2B, buying committees are larger, timelines are longer, and decisions are less emotional — but no less human. What’s changed is how those humans operate.
Today, a B2B buyer might:
• Encounter your brand during a conference roundtable.
• Google your founder’s name after reading a byline in a trade journal.
• Bookmark your blog on content strategy and return three months later.
• Get your case study forwarded internally after a procurement meeting.
• Click a retargeted ad out of curiosity, not urgency.
This journey doesn’t follow a line of intent. It spins, loops, and overlaps. Each stakeholder may enter at a different moment with a different concern. What they need is consistency, not conversion pressure.
Circular Marketing is uniquely suited to this context. It doesn’t rely on linear nurture tracks, but rather ensures your brand is present at multiple touchpoints (and that those touchpoints build trust rather than rush decisions). Whether a prospect enters through a paid campaign or watches your CEO speak at an event, they find value. And that value builds the credibility required to unify a fractured committee into a collective “yes.”
The B2C Buyer Journey: Faster, but No Less Messy
In B2C, speed disguises complexity. Yes, some buyers make snap decisions, but only after long stretches of ambient exposure. What looks like a sudden impulse is often the result of months of social media impressions, influencer validation, peer reviews, and retargeting.
A modern B2C journey might begin on Instagram, wind through Reddit, pause for a TikTok comparison video, continue via a product demo on YouTube, and conclude weeks later via a discount code email. At no point does the buyer feel like they’re “progressing through a funnel.” They’re following curiosity, convenience, and credibility, none of which respect your campaign calendar.
Add AI again, and the mix gets murkier. Consumers can now use voice assistants or chatbots to summarise product options, read review summaries, or generate feature comparisons on the fly. If you’re not in the results, you’re not even in the running.
This is where Circular Marketing’s strength lies: it doesn’t demand entry at a specific point. It builds a connected system where each element — be it a performance ad, blog post, or event appearance — serves as a meaningful entry or re-entry point. The buyer chooses their own adventure. You just ensure there’s always something relevant when they arrive.
Why Funnels Can’t Survive This Shift?
Funnels are a legacy tool from a time when marketers controlled the message. In today’s landscape, the audience controls the journey. Funnels presume movement in one direction. Real buyers move laterally, diagonally, and sometimes backwards.
They forget you. Then remember you. Then ignore you. Then convert… but only after you’ve stopped measuring their “intent.”
That’s not failure. That’s reality. And Circular Marketing accounts for it by ensuring that value is always present, no matter where someone drops in.
The Circular Advantage
The Circular Marketing Model™ doesn’t promise control. It promises presence. It ensures that whether someone engages through a performance channel, a piece of content, or an event, they get value. That value builds trust. And trust, not traffic, is what makes buyers come back.
It’s a system that accepts unpredictability as a feature, not a flaw.
Stop Managing Stages. Start Engineering Trust.
Funnels were useful when information was scarce and attention was linear. Neither of those things are true anymore. What’s needed now isn’t more lead scoring. It’s more strategic empathy.
If your marketing model only works when buyers behave predictably, it’s the model that needs replacing, not your audience.
Let them move freely. Just be there when it matters.
Iskren Lilov
iskren@lilov.com
Marketing and communications expert specialising in strategic consultancy and sustainable brand building. Author of the Circular Marketing Model™ that offers a paradigm shift for marketers in the age of AI, replacing the classic understanding of the funnel with a sustainable circular model.
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