Lyndall Spooner.
Lyndall Spooner, Founder and CEO, 5D
Every marketer is familiar with the traditional brand funnel. Many organisations still rely on a simplified version – aware, consider, prefer or choose – to track marketing effectiveness and guide investment decisions.
And most marketers will also be familiar with Byron Sharp’s argument: brands grow by increasing mental availability across the whole market, because a large share of revenue comes from light and infrequent buyers.
But there is a problem.
The traditional brand funnel, first conceived in 1898, no longer reflects how people actually discover, choose and stay with brands today. In a world of algorithms, search, and recommendations, the funnel is increasingly disconnected from reality.
It isn’t that it’s wrong, rather that it’s incomplete.
And yet we keep using it, largely because, until now, there hasn’t been a better alternative.
A model built for a different era
The traditional brand funnel was designed for a world dominated by mass communication. Awareness was built through newspapers, posters and billboards. Commercial radio didn’t arrive until the 1920s, television followed in the 1950s, the internet in the 1990s, and social media in the early 2000s.
Each new channel increased opportunities to broadcast brand messages and build broad awareness. But something else changed along the way.
Today, people don’t rely solely on mass advertising to discover brands. They find them through word of mouth, referrals, SEO, targeted algorithms, social feeds, marketplaces – and increasingly through generative engines and GEO.
Many modern brands have grown rapidly without investing heavily in traditional brand advertising at all. Think Zara, Krispy Kreme, TikTok, Tesla, Nudie, Aesop and Who Gives A Crap. Customers often encounter these brands at the moment of need, with little or no prior awareness, and still choose them.
In other words, we no longer need to be aware of a brand before we enter a path to purchase. Salience is no longer a prerequisite for choice.
The funnel’s biggest blind spot
Despite all of this, the traditional brand funnel still ignores the most important question: what happens after the choice is made?
Once someone chooses a brand, they don’t reset back to the top of the funnel. Their relationship with that brand fundamentally changes.
After the first choice, the customer experiences the brand directly. And in many categories, this experience is not a one-off event.
In services industries including banking, insurance, telecommunications, energy and video and audio streaming, customers aren’t choosing a brand for a single purchase. They are choosing an ongoing relationship, often locked in by contracts or switching costs, and they experience the brand repeatedly over time.
The post-choice experience is where additional growth is either unlocked or quietly destroyed. The traditional funnel treats customers and non-customers as essentially the same: it assumes you only have one pathway to grow your brand.
From funnel to relationship
This is where the customer relationship model comes in. Rather than viewing growth purely through the lens of general brand awareness and consideration, the customer relationship model recognises that the most meaningful transition is from non-customer to customer, and that everything changes once that transition occurs.
There are three distinct phases in the customer relationship model, and three distinct opportunities to drive growth.
Phase one is what we recognise as the top of the traditional brand funnel, where typically mass marketing is used to build general market brand awareness and consideration.
Phase two represents the real-world active path to purchase, where consumers undertake a disrupted pathway and a brand can be found through recommendations, reviews, search engines, and so on. Brands that were never in the traditional brand consideration set now enter the funnel and can achieve a higher brand acquisition win rate than brands that rely on having the greatest awareness.
Phase three covers the deepening of the customer relationship where customers can strengthen that relationship with ongoing or habitual purchasing of the original product or service by engaging with additional products and services.
At every stage of the customer relationship model, we know what proportion of the market sits there, and we can define distinct strategies to move people forward.
Unlike the traditional funnel, this model measures effectiveness to drive growth from one phase to the next. Your entire growth strategy is not resting on your market level brand awareness and consideration. It also acknowledges that a first-time customer is not to be treated the same as a long-term customer.
Why this changes how we grow brands
The customer relationship model shifts the emphasis from how widely a brand is seen and heard to how effectively it engages active consumers and grows and strengthens its customer base.
Once we have a customer’s contact details – through a contract, account or loyalty program – we gain the ability to actively manage the relationship. Growth is no longer driven solely by mass advertising, but by personalised communications, experience design and value creation over time.
Every stage of the customer relationship model is an opportunity to increase lifetime customer value. And every stage requires different strategies.
Winning someone for the first time is not the same as getting them to stay. Consideration, in this context, becomes deeper and more meaningful. The reasons people choose a brand evolve as the relationship matures – from functional reassurance, to trust, habit, emotional connection and commitment.
The customer relationship model recognises there is value in having a distinct customer acquisition strategy and a distinct customer retention strategy. Previously it has been marketing’s responsibility to drive acquisition and the customer experience team’s responsibility to drive retention – this model demonstrates it requires an all of business focus to drive and optimise growth.
A more customer-centred measure of effectiveness
Most importantly, the customer relationship model is inherently more customer focused. Rather than measuring success purely from the brand’s point of view, it reflects how customers actually experience brands, that is, as relationships that develop over time, not isolated decisions.
Customer commitment and relationship depth are among the clearest indicators we have of emotional connection and the very thing marketers say they are trying to build.
In a world where choice is increasingly shaped by technology and growth depends as much on retention and advocacy as acquisition, the funnel is no longer enough. It’s time to replace it with a model built for how brands really grow today.