Designing a Buyer Journey Beyond the Funnel

By David Ronald

We marketers have traditionally relied on the funnel as the dominant metaphor for understanding buying behavior.

Awareness leads to consideration, which leads to conversion, which leads to loyalty.

It’s linear, clean, and comforting.

And increasingly wrong.  

These days, buyer journeys no longer resemble funnels – they look more like dynamic ecosystems: nonlinear, self-directed, and heavily influenced by forces outside a brand’s direct control. 

Why the Funnel Broke

The funnel assumes marketers guide buyers step by step.  

In reality, however, buyers assemble their own journeys – they jump between channels, seek peer validation, ignore carefully orchestrated campaigns, and often arrive at decisions before sales or marketing even know they exist.  

Several forces have accelerated this shift in my opinion:

• Information abundance – buyers educate themselves through communities, review sites, social media, and private networks.
• Trust decentralization – brand messaging competes with influencers, employees, customers, and even AI-generated summaries.
• Asynchronous engagement – buyers interact on their own timelines, not marketing’s campaign calendars.

As a result, linear models have collapsed under the weight of real buyer behavior. 

The Journey as an Ecosystem

A more accurate way to think about your buyers’ journeys is as living ecosystems.  

These ecosystems include:

• Owned touchpoints – website, product experience, email, events.
• Earned influence – reviews, analyst opinions, word-of-mouth, community discussions.
• Shared environments – partner content, marketplaces, platforms, and integrations.
• Invisible moments – silent research, internal conversations, AI-mediated discovery.

Buyers move fluidly across this ecosystem, often revisiting stages, skipping others entirely, or making decisions in parallel rather than sequence.

What This Means for Marketers

Shifting from funnels to ecosystems requires more than new language – it demands new operating models.

• First, stop forcing alignment to stages. Instead of asking, “What stage is this buyer in?”, ask, “What problem are they trying to solve right now?” Context matters more than position.
• Second, map influence, not just touchpoints. The most impactful moments may never appear in your CRM. Understanding which voices, communities, and content shape decisions is more valuable than tracking clicks alone.
• Third, design for adaptability. Journeys should respond dynamically to buyer signals, not lock prospects into predefined paths. This is where AI-driven orchestration can help—but only if guided by human strategy and guardrails.
• Finally, measure momentum, not milestones. Progress is no longer about advancing stages; it’s about reducing friction, increasing confidence, and sustaining engagement over time.

Ultimately, success comes from building systems that adapt to real buyer behavior rather than forcing buyers to adapt to our models.

Conclusion

Organizations that embrace ecosystem thinking gain a critical advantage…  

Relevance.  

They meet buyers where they actually are, not where models say they should be.  

The most effective marketers will be ecosystem designers, architects of trust, relevance, and momentum across an ever-expanding landscape of influence.  

The funnel had a good run, but the future belongs to those who understand journeys as they truly are: dynamic, decentralized, and deeply human.  

Thanks for reading – I hope you found this blog post useful.  

Are you interested in discussing how to design your buyers’ journeys? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you