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11.8.2011 | John Avery

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Marketing used to be so tidy. Buy some media, print some brochures, maybe follow up with an email, and then make the sale. Advertisers just had to follow the principles of the purchase funnel, and they herded consumers through it for decades. For years, we’ve known that things were changing, and marketing consultants like Forrester and McKinsey have been developing next-gen funnels in an attempt to make sense of it all.

Three of the 1,350,000 image results when you Google “Purchase Funnel”

Your basic purchase funnel is the first shown below. The next is Forrester’s. I’m not smart enough to understand this one. Last is the McKinsey funnel. This one makes the most sense to me, as my thoughts here are primarily focused on the gathering and shopping portion of the process.

Marketing used to be a great business for control freaks, but no longer. Consumers just run free, in search of information, confirmation or damnation of a company’s products and services. As marketers, we’ve always known consumers were in charge, but now they know it.

It’s changing the way we think about marketing in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago. Recently, we were given the assignment to figure out how sports bloggers in the Midwest could interact with Verizon products in a way that was relevant to the bloggers’ followers. Coming up with a list of suggestions was a new kind of marketing challenge. What would a sports blogger want to do with the product? Would the bloggers’ followers be interested and engaged in the content? We landed on a list of suggestions we’ll be sharing with the bloggers, so we’ll see what happens next.

This is just one example of how to wrangle the free-range consumer. They go wherever they want whenever they want. They talk to their friends on Facebook, search Twitter, read blogs, and basically search out as much information about products and services that is NOT generated by the marketer as they can find. If marketers are smart, consumers will eventually opt in to their messages, but only if they’re delivered where they want it. What else would you expect from our free-range friends?

It all ladders up to a new way to market, and I don’t think it’s a fad. It’s a dimension of social media that forever changes where and how consumers make purchase decisions. Trying to corral them just won’t work anymore.