Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

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The Theory behind Flipping the Funnel

It’s time to go back to school and open up your Principles of Marketing textbooks, where you’ll read about S.T.P. (Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning), the three key roles for communication (informing, persuading, and reminding), and ultimately, the four pillars of marketing strategy: the four Ps of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

Now I’d like you to tear up those textbooks, forget those theories, and start anew with a blank sheet of paper.

Stereotypical demographics are no longer enough to paint a sufficiently rich picture of a prospective customer beyond a superficial outer layer of basic variables. Top-of-mind positioning has been replaced with top-of-page positioning (in other words, search-engine results). The advertising-biased roles of informing, persuading, and reminding are being usurped by involvement, demonstration, and empowerment. The commoditized four Ps have been updated with a new model: the six Cs of Content, Commerce, Community, Context, Customization, and Conversation (per Join the Conversation, which I’ll reprise a little later in this book).

And now it’s time to set our sights on the very foundation of consumer behavior itself: the marketing funnel, aka, A.I.D.A. (the theory, not the opera). A.I.D.A. stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. It is widely held to be the simplest and most accurate way of describing the four states or behaviors that almost all consumers experience—from being blissfully ...