spent two hours this week discussing the intracacies of a brand’s ‘funnel’.

And it was two hours utterly wasted.

Marketers love frameworks almost as much as they love jargon. None has endured longer than AIDA, that neat little ladder from Awareness to Interest to Desire to Action. It was written in 1898 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis, a copywriter trying to codify how a salesman might persuade a housewife to buy soap or insurance. It was never intended as a scientific model of decision-making, yet it became one of marketing’s most recycled diagrams.

For decades, it offered the comfort of order. It implied that consumers could be neatly guided from ignorance to purchase through a predictable psychological sequence. That fantasy suited the industrial age, when advertising meant broadcasting and distribution meant control. It made marketing feel rational, almost mechanical.

The problem is that the world it described disappeared a long time ago. Today, people move through digital ecosystems that bear no resemblance to a funnel. They encounter brands in fragments: a TikTok clip, a friend’s recommendation, a price comparison, an old memory, an algorithmic nudge. None of this happens in sequence or in isolation.

It happens all at once.

Google’s “Messy Middle” confirmed what behavioural science had already shown: people loop endlessly between exploration and evaluation, switching tabs and contexts as they search, remember, forget, and rediscover. Decisions emerge not from a smooth path of persuasion but from the accumulation of associations stored in memory over time.

Cognitive psychology explains this even more accurately. The brain does not record events in order; it creates a web of connections that are triggered later by need or emotion. The brands that win are those that occupy more nodes in that web and are therefore easier to retrieve when a choice must be made. Byron Sharp obviously calls this mental availability, and it remains one of the few immutable laws of marketing.

So while the fundamentals of how brands grow have held firm, the delivery system around them has been completely upended. It assumes persuasion, but we now operate through recognition. It assumes control, but our messages now travel through opaque algorithms that decide what anyone sees.

We are not guiding people down a path; we are planting memories in a probabilistic field. Every exposure is a chance to create or refresh one of those memory structures. Most will fail, a few will stick, and the ones that stick will determine market share.

AIDA belongs to a world of door-to-door salesmen and factory lines. Marketing today is a networked, algorithmic, and chaotic system that obeys none of those linear rules. The science of how people choose has not changed, but the models we use to describe it are a century out of date.

If your strategy still starts with a funnel, you are solving a problem no one has anymore.

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