21/12/2025
If you walk into any marketing meeting in the world, you will likely see a familiar triangle drawn on the whiteboard: The Funnel.
It’s a comforting image.
It suggests that if we just pour enough people into the top (Awareness), gravity will naturally pull them down through Consideration and straight into a Purchase.
It implies that the customer journey is linear, logical, and inevitable.
❌ But 'the funnel' is a comfortable lie.
Real human beings do not slide down a frictionless chute.
They scramble, they stall, and they backtrack.
In 2026, if you are building your strategy around a linear path, you are optimizing for a reality that doesn't exist.
The space between the first trigger and the final purchase is the "Messy Middle."
It isn’t a straight line; it is an infinite loop of two distinct modes:
👉 Exploration: The customer expands their options (e.g., “What software solves this problem?”).
👉 Evaluation: The customer narrows their options (e.g., “Is Tool A better than Tool B?”).
A buyer might loop through these phases dozens of times.
They might read a review, get distracted, ask a friend, forget about it for a month, see an ad, and then go back to researching a completely different competitor.
When you treat marketing like a funnel, you obsess over "pushing" people to the next stage.
You send aggressive "Buy Now" communications to people who are still in the Exploration phase.
You treat hesitation as a conversion failure rather than a natural part of the process.
👉 The result?
You become annoying, not helpful.
Instead of trying to force customers down a chute, successful brands today aim to occupy the orbit.
They create high-value content that answers questions, solves problems, and entertains without demanding an immediate transaction.
They accept that the journey is chaotic.
If you can be the most helpful resource during the chaos of the "Messy Middle," you won't need to push.
When the customer is finally ready to buy, you’ll be the only logical choice left standing.