Are you managing the funnel or are you stuck in it?

One of my favourite stories for marketers is the one about the blind men and the elephant.

The story goes that a group of blind men are walking cautiously along a dusty path, when they find their way blocked by a huge obstacle.

“It’s a ginormous snake with a snuffly mouth,” says one of the men, who is holding the trunk.

“No,” says another, “it’s like a dinosaur, with vast limbs and a body as tall as a house,” as he struggles to wrap his arms around one of the legs.

“Impossible, it must be some sort of flightless bird,” says a third man, as he feels the vast leathery ears.

“Nonsense, it is surely the relative of a bull,” says another, nearly skewering himself on a tusk.

Laughing, a young child climbs down from the branch of a tree beside the road, where he has been watching.

“Oh! You men would do well to listen to one another, rather than being so sure of yourselves! What you have found is an elephant, large in body, with huge ears which they use to cool themselves, an agile trunk for foraging, sensing and breathing, and large tusks for digging and fighting!”

Over the years I’ve used it as a context setter in workshops, slide decks and meetings as a means of getting people to see the bigger picture, and broaden their own perspective.

I thought of it the other day, while reflecting on all the assorted versions of ‘funnels’ which marketers have used over the years.

If you’re expecting an article on the marketer’s funnel, then prepare to be disappointed. I’ve written one of those already, and have nothing to add which hasn’t already been written. (And if you are looking for a good read on this, then Grace Kite’s recent article is one of the best yet.)

Instead, this is a reflection on what would happen if we looked at the marketers looking at all the funnels, through the eyes of the child in the tree.

Rather than looking at the funnel, what happens if we start looking at the people who are using it? A funnel full of marketers.

Where marketers want to get to

Before anything else, to head off the LinkedIn haters, let’s quickly accept that this is purely a thought exercise rather than any attempt at a formal model.

The concept is built from experience and anecdotes rather than hard data, and its purpose is purely to throw a little light into the discussion about what it takes to make brilliant marketing a reality today. In short, come with me on a mental exercise…

The endgame, the bottom of this funnel, where marketing know-how is put into action, is the place all businesses would like their marketers to be. Knowledgeable, skilful experts, working in a respected function, which is holistically driving business results. Vanishingly few marketers get to this stage of the funnel; we’ll come back to why at the end of the tour.

At the top of the funnel is the massive market of people engaged in marketing activities. Even if my quick-and-dirty ‘deep research’ results are only half-accurate, there are upwards of 3 million marketers in the world, and more than 7 million people in roles adjacent to marketing.

Heck, even if there were only a million of each it’s still a huge number.

It’s vast. It includes people with ‘marketing’ in their title as well as all those people who are engaged in ‘4P’ marketing activities but who don’t fit neatly into the marketing function. For example, the R&D teams responsible for the P of product, and the finance and commercial planning teams responsible for the Ps of price and place.

The endgame, the bottom of this funnel, where marketing know-how is put into action, is the place all businesses would like their marketers to be.

Lamentably, a huge amount of space in this universe is taken up by people who say an enormous amount about marketing but really have no idea what they’re talking about.

You’ve seen the memes, the infographics and the hot takes, but the best illustration of this I’ve seen comes from consultant Mats Georgson, who has – quite literally – illustrated the ‘Cabinet of Horror CMOs’ (recreated here with permission, and thanks).

There’s Bargain Billy, who treats price as the only P; and Pyromania Pam, who starts social media wildfires with provocative stunts, then wastes weeks firefighting the backlash.

Most of us will have come across an Advertising Adrian, who believes marketing is equal to advertising; or have our own versions of Viral Vincent, who thinks anything that makes people engage is a success, irrespective of the direction of sales.

Sure, these archetypes are a bit tongue-in-cheek, but they’re also reflective of what we’ve all seen: the people who talk about advertising and marketing interchangeably, who tell you that anything new and shiny means all the other stuff is dead, and who wouldn’t be able to tell you how brands grow even if a big red book called How Brands Grow hit them in the face.

Between this huge universe of ‘everymarketers’ and the small but utopian world of genuine marketing delivery, lie the stages of our conceptual ‘Marketers Funnel’.

The four steps in marketers’ development

In homage to funnelling errors of the past, for the stages of this conceptual model I’ve borrowed the AIDA acronym from Elias St Elmo Lewis’s original, and now defunct, 1898 model.

The top of funnel, A, consists of those who are ‘aware’ that marketing is a function that takes some skill to get right, but have little support, access or time available to develop those skills.

For one reason or another, marketing is full of bright and brilliant people with little or no training in marketing who are out there giving it their best shot without much support. MagicWorks put the figure of marketers worldwide who have had no formal training at 60% to 75%, depending on which country they are in.

Whatever the actual number, by market or category, the top of the Marketers Funnel is full of people who have ‘marketing’ in their job title or job description, but not in their skills or experience.

The middle of the funnel – I for ‘interest’ and D for ‘desire’ – is as messy as it is in every other funnel. There are the people who are interested enough to start reading and learning for themselves. Marketers who have a copy of the aforementioned ‘big red book’, like a bit of Ritson and Roach, know that ‘the long and short of it’ has a specific meaning in this world, and are intrigued by the people who enjoy disagreeing with everyone on this list.

Those with enough desire for excellence might become the roughly 25% of people who either have some formal training in marketing – and there are great options available – or who end up working in a business with a strong ‘academy’ of marketing and learning. Or they might end up learning for themselves.

This might sound blasphemous, but I do actually believe that it is possible to become a kick-ass marketer without having to do any formal training, it’s just much more difficult and would take much more time. There is so much counterintelligence out there, it would take impressive levels of diligence and practice – not to mention a gloriously open mind – to get to a rounded understanding.

At the stage when you might really be able to put it into action, all the marketing knowledge in the world is worthless if you can’t bring an organisation with you on the journey.

In any case, at this stage Pandora’s box of marketing is ajar, if not fully open, and people start noticing just how full of nonsense their LinkedIn feed is.

To hand the mic to Georgson again, they can spot One Book Bob, who doesn’t worry about complexities and nuances – he’s read one book and he’s sticking to it. They flinch instinctively when they hear from Incoherent Ingrid, who speaks a lot but as though the sentences are put into a blender and reassembled randomly.

The fallacy of the brand-versus-performance debate raises the eyebrows even higher and they realise just how few people can define what marketing is, let alone tell you how brands actually work.

Paradoxically, in learning a little, they realise how much more there is to learn, and how little we really know. At this stage, they start wrangling with what it really takes to turn good marketing theory into robust marketing strategy, and then into practical marketing execution. It is at that moment, that they get close to reaching the bottom of the funnel, or get lucky and work for a leader who has got there themselves.

Those are the marketers who put A for ‘action’, into action. The marketers who, with their top-job enlightenment, also get that from now on most of their work is going to take place away from the marketing coalface.

At the stage when you might finally be able to put it into action, all the marketing knowledge in the world is worthless if you can’t bring an organisation with you on the journey.

Marketers who get the chance to put ‘A into Action’ need more than just great marketing knowledge. They need the abundant leadership and relationship skills to know that most of the impact of marketing is delivered outside of the marketing function.

They need the resilience and tolerance to take their time over strategy, bring teams with them in that process, and endlessly stick to their guns in the face of people who think they know the answer but who might well be stuck at the top of the funnel.

They have the humility to realise that they cannot do it on their own, that it’s not all about them, and that frankly, it’s not really all about brands and marketing either. It’s about people.

The human touch

It’s people at the top who know that the ‘top’ is a word on a piece of paper, and means nothing if all the other names in, around and under the top don’t want to be there.

It’s people who work out what needs to happen for businesses to succeed and who make it their business to help everybody else get it.

It’s people who realise that every time they speak like a corporate machine, one more crack appears in the organisation’s soul.

It’s people who remove words and directives and policies and replace them with human energy and the unstoppable momentum which comes from people feeling like they belong.

It’s people who realise that telling people stuff is infinitely less effective than making them feel things.

Marketing, brands and the people who work on them can support all of those things. Done well, by brilliant marketers, they provide context and clarity, rooted in the world of the customer who hands over the money that makes their world go round.

They provide inspiration and motivation, using brands and creativity to deliver strategic simplicity, and brilliant results for customers outside the business as well as people working inside an organisation.

To return to the story about the elephant, the marketers who make it to the bottom of the funnel are – ironically – the people who are able to stand back and see all the angles of the animal in front of them, and use their marketing know-how to help everybody see things more clearly.

In a fast moving and confusing world, so much attention in businesses is focused on the tusk, trunk ears and legs of the elephant; the day to day, business as usual, nitty-gritty details. They make it work, but looking at them in isolation won’t really tell you what’s going on.

In that world, the most valuable thing is to climb down from the tree, and offer a fresh perspective.

In that world, if there’s an elephant in the room, hopefully there’s a marketer who can help everyone to see it.

Johnny Corbett is an independent marketing specialist who has worked in leadership roles for large corporate businesses, startups and agencies. He has collaborated widely across sectors including food and drink, technology, financial and professional services, politics and the public sector and he is the Chief Strategy Officer for Brand & Culture consultancy, Glow.