Marketing.

The framework

1. 01

   The funnel is an instrument, not a theory.

   Keep it, and keep it for one job: counting. Define the stages so that any given person can be placed in exactly one of them, count them the same way every month, and read where the largest fall sits. What the drawing can't tell you is what to do about that fall, because its narrowing shape describes your measurement rather than your buyer's mind. Treat it as an instrument panel — useful, literal and completely silent on intent — and the long argument about whether the funnel is dead stops mattering to you.

2. 02

   Nobody owns the middle.

   Somebody owns the top of the picture and somebody owns the bottom. The stretch between them — the comparison page, the review sites, what a peer says when asked — belongs to nobody in particular, which is exactly why it is the cheapest ground on the map. Yesterday's frame closed the set at the start; Court's fieldwork found it reopens here, and the names that get added come from sources you don't own. This morning's job is narrower. Walk that stretch of your own journey, list what a buyer meets that you did not write, and put a name against each item. Most of the list comes back blank.

3. 03

   The loop after the sale.

   In the journey a purchase isn't a finish line, it's an input, and it feeds two things: whether that buyer comes back, and what they say to the next buyer during their active evaluation. That makes onboarding, the first month, and the moment something goes wrong into media you're already paying for, whether or not you're measuring them as such. Most companies hand the whole of it to operations, stop counting it as marketing, then buy the same attention back later at full price through advertising.

4. 04

   Are you counting one thing and planning another?

   The practical failure is a single diagram asked to do both jobs. Keep them as separate artefacts. The count holds fixed stages, volumes and conversion rates, reviewed monthly and changed rarely so the series stays comparable. The journey holds what the buyer is doing, reading and asking at each point, and who owns what they meet there — rewritten whenever it stops matching reality. Collapse them onto one slide and planning follows whichever numbers are biggest, so the middle loses every time, because that is exactly where the counts are thinnest.