Q:What's less use than a chocolate teapot?

For a long time, marketing funnels have been treated as a given. If you are a consumer brand, you are expected to have one. Agencies design them, platforms optimise them, dashboards report on them. The conversation is rarely about whether the funnel itself makes sense, only how well it is performing.

What tends to get lost in that process is a much more basic question. What assumptions does the funnel actually make about how people buy, and under what conditions does it genuinely work?

Because when you look closely at how funnel-based advertising behaves in the real world, particularly in categories like fashion, lifestyle, electronics, and health and beauty, the economics start to look far less convincing than the language around them suggests.

At its core, the funnel exists to compensate for weak or undefined intent. Most people at the top do not know exactly what they want, so the system relies on exposure, repetition, and gradual narrowing to push a small percentage of them toward a transaction. That narrowing is not elegant. It is purely statistical.

Industry benchmarks reflect this clearly. Average ecommerce conversion rates sit somewhere between two and three percent. In fashion and lifestyle, they are often lower. Paid social and display traffic regularly converts below one percent. In other words, well over ninety-five percent of the people you pay to reach never buy anything.

This is not a failure of creative or messaging. It is how the model is designed to work. Volume compensates for uncertainty.

And now, volume is no longer cheap.

As competition increases and platforms mature, customer acquisition costs rise. What once looked like a manageable cost per click or cost per lead starts to look very different once you factor in real conversion rates. The effective cost of acquiring an actual customer can quickly become material, particularly for brands without high margins or large balance sheets.

At that point, funnel-based advertising only really works if at least one of three things is true. Either margins are high enough to absorb inefficiency, volumes are large enough to smooth it out, or losses can be tolerated elsewhere in the business in pursuit of growth. For many independent, niche, or emerging brands, none of those conditions apply.

Return on ad spend is often used to justify the system. But this is a partial metric. It measures revenue, not profit, and it ignores fulfilment, returns, platform fees, customer support, and the simple reality that many brands are now spending a quarter or more of their revenue just to keep demand flowing. Strip away the dashboards and what you often find is not a growth engine, but a delicate equilibrium that requires constant spend to maintain.

Another issue is that reach and intent are routinely conflated. The channels that deliver the greatest reach tend to deliver the weakest buying intent. Paid social and display generate impressions and clicks, but they rarely capture people who are ready to buy. By contrast, channels like email or direct referral convert far better, not because they are more sophisticated, but because intent already exists when the interaction begins.

Funnels are, by definition, a way of manufacturing intent where it is missing. That

process is expensive, slow, and increasingly inefficient.

What is interesting is that none of this is particularly new. High-value commerce did not historically work this way. When products were configurable, customised, or considered purchases, the process began with dialogue. Clarification came before persuasion, and transactions followed understanding. Advertising replaced that relationship with exposure, at scale.

What we are seeing now feels less like a revolution and more like a correction.

There is a quieter, more rational model that starts from a different place. Instead of asking how to reach more people, it asks how to recognise intent when it already exists. When a buyer can clearly express what they want, and a merchant can respond with constraints, options, and trade-offs, most of the funnel becomes unnecessary. There is no awareness stage to manufacture, no nurturing loop to manage, no retargeting treadmill to maintain.

This is not about spending more efficiently. It is about not spending where spending is no longer required.

The deeper shift here is philosophical rather than technical. Funnels optimise for probability. Intent-driven systems optimise for certainty. For brands that already experience meaningful interaction before a sale, the funnel is often not an advantage at all. It is simply an inherited cost structure.

The uncomfortable truth is that funnels work best for those who can afford waste. For everyone else, it may finally be time to question whether the model itself still deserves to exist.