Consumers ditch the funnel as behavior gets more fluid

The consumer journey bounces around so much these days that the marketing funnel should be made of rubber. According to the MiQ Sigma report “From Funnel to Flexibility,” 86% of people switch digital activities at least once an hour, and 42% say their path to purchase is random.

That kind of behavior makes the funnel an unreliable planning model. It also compresses timelines, with some purchases happening in as little as 10 minutes, limiting how much influence staged campaigns can have.

What replaces the funnel is a set of overlapping behaviors. People move between watching, browsing, and buying in quick bursts, often within the same session, which means intent forms and resolves faster than most campaigns are built to handle.

That shift changes how marketing needs to be structured. Instead of planning around sequences, they must identify moments of intent and ensure campaigns can respond when those moments occur, even if they last only a few seconds.

Exposure and action can be close to simultaneous

The compression is easy to see in the data. Within a 30-minute window, large portions of consumers are watching, browsing, and buying, and they move between those states rather than progressing through them.

That has direct implications for media planning. Instead of spacing messages across stages, the priority becomes coverage and responsiveness when activity spikes.

Device behavior reinforces this pattern. The report shows that 91% of consumers use a second device while watching TV, which means exposure and action can happen almost at the same time.

That changes how channels work together. A single impression can trigger immediate cross-channel behavior, so campaigns need to be coordinated across platforms instead of managed in isolation.

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Be present wherever interest begins

Social platforms expand where demand can start. More than 50% of consumers use them for multiple purposes on the same day, and that figure rises above 80% among younger audiences, creating more entry points into the decision process.

That makes discovery less predictable and more distributed. Brands are no longer guiding entry into the funnel. They are competing to be present wherever interest begins.

AI accelerates the next step in that process. Over 45% of consumers use AI tools to compare products, summarize reviews, and get recommendations, which reduces the time between evaluation and decision.

That has implications for creative and content. Messaging needs to be clear and structured enough to be interpreted and surfaced by AI systems as part of the decision process.

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Speed and flexibility are required

Measurement is also affected. When interactions occur across channels simultaneously, stage-based attribution models become less reliable and harder to apply. That means using models that focus on signals and outcomes rather than steps. It also requires better integration across data, media, and analytics systems.

Execution becomes the limiting factor. When decisions are made quickly, delays in launching campaigns or updating creative reduce the likelihood of influencing the outcome.

The shift is practical. Marketing performs better when it is built to respond to behavior as it happens, rather than trying to guide it along a predefined path.

The full report can be found here. (Registration required)