The funnel doesn’t track individuals. It tracks the market.
Critique 3: Tech has completely flattened the funnel
The third critique is the most modern and, superficially, the most persuasive. New communications technologies can apparently take a consumer from total ignorance to completed purchase in a single step. A well-targeted TikTok ad with a “shop now” link collapses the funnel. Why plan across stages when you can just convert?
This argument confuses tactics with diagnosis. The funnel’s job is not to dictate which tool you use. It’s to show you where your market actually sits before you choose one.
If you don’t know where it sits, you can’t choose the right tactic. The funnel contains customers, not tactics.
Critique 4: The funnel ignores the post-sale relationship
A fourth critique is that the funnel ignores what happens after the sale. The classic funnel just ends at conversion and abandons the relationship.
But the funnel is extendable. Any serious practitioner builds loyalty and advocacy stages onto the bottom and tracks movement there just as rigorously as above the purchase line.
And a proper custom funnel extends into the customer experience, reflecting the moment consumers first visit your website or engage with your product, and everything that follows.
This critique is less a reason to abandon the funnel and more a reminder not to use a generic, truncated version of it.
Critique 5: The funnel is just pitch deck decor
The fifth critique comes from Roach himself. The funnel has become a sales tool used by platforms and media agencies to organize their pitch decks. Upper funnel? That’s our premium video. Lower funnel? That’s our retargeting product. The funnel, in this reading, is less a planning framework and more a menu for vendors selling you things.
The funnel’s ubiquity has made it dangerously easy to misuse. But the answer is to own the framework rather than surrendering it. The funnel should drive your marketing strategy, not emerge from your media agency’s proposal.
This is why the funnel matters most, and why Amazon’s AI team reached for it first: One of the most consistent failures in marketing is the inability to set specific, measurable marketing objectives—not just financial targets.
It’s my go-to method for assessing the quality of a marketing plan and the marketer behind it: Show me your objectives.
The funnel gives you the scaffolding to do it properly. If your awareness sits at 40% and your main competitor is at 65%, you have an awareness problem. Your objective is clear, your metric is clear, your priority is clear.
If awareness is strong but consideration is lagging, the problem and the prescription both shift. Smart marketing objectives that specify a metric, a magnitude, and a timeframe are almost impossible to set without funnel data.
Too many marketing plans are built on vague aspirations (“increase brand love”) or empty financial targets (“grow B2B sales”) that say nothing about what needs to be done.
Funnel metrics connect strategy to execution and tell you clearly whether you got there after execution is complete.
