Gen Z vs. The Funnel

It was built for a world of limited channels and linear journeys. A time when people discovered products in TV ads, browsed them in catalogues, bought them in-store. Attention was scarce and channels of message distribution more limited, so controlling it was everything. It made sense to imagine stages and plan campaigns that moved people through them. But the internet didn’t just add more channels. It changed the shape of attention itself.

We don’t live in a world of scarcity anymore. We live in a world of surplus, surrounded by an abundance of content, choice, and signals competing for space in our heads.

And Gen Z? They didn’t adapt to that shift, but, instead, were raised in it.

They don’t move neatly through brand journeys. They follow curiosity, culture, and each other, in unpredictable, non-linear ways that no funnel diagram can truly capture.

If Gen Z has exposed the limits of the funnel, the obvious question is: what replaces it? Obviously, brands still need to earn attention, build trust, and drive action. Spoilers: that part hasn’t changed.

What’s changed is the shape of influence itself. It’s no longer a straight path you can engineer step by step. It’s something far more fluid and social. Perhaps it’s best imagined as a spider’s web of various signals, associations, and cultural cues that accumulate over time.Discovery today isn’t a campaign with a beginning and an end. It’s ambient and always on, likely happening in places brands don’t fully control. 

People don’t move predictably from awareness to conversion. They notice something in passing. They see it again in a friend’s story. They hear about it in conversation. They forget. They remember. They finally buy because enough of those moments stacked up to make it feel inevitable.

From the outside, it sounds messy and tangled. But I think it’s a good summary of the marketing-world we now live in. It's a network of influence.

And one of the most powerful forces shaping those networks is creators. But not as simple Ad channels. Increasingly, creators are functioning as cultural nodes and tastemakers. They have this rare ability to broker public trust and are barometers of quality. A positive endorsement from someone like MKBHD can transform the fortunes of a tech company. And, as we have seen, a critical review has the power to effectively end a company's chances of success. 

They don’t just deliver brand messages, but instead contextualise them. They grant brands relevance by weaving them into the aesthetics, stories, and values their audience cares about. When a creator uses a product in a casual Instagram story, mentions it offhand in a YouTube vlog, or includes it in a TikTok haul, it doesn’t feel like marketing pushing someone down a funnel. It feels like life. It’s not persuasion in the traditional sense because it’s based on the principles of association and alignment. It’s about being seen in the right spaces, in the right company, with the right vibe so that audiences feel less like they’re being sold to and more like they’re joining something.

That’s the shift brands need to understand. If the funnel was about moving people through stages, this new model is about saturating the cultural spaces they inhabit with enough authentic signals that buying becomes the natural next step.

There are countless creators here that could be used as a case-study to articulate the above in a real-life setting. The Sidemen, Mr Beast are a few of the countless examples that could be used. But let’s take a moment to focus on Emma Chamberlain, and her Chamberlain Coffee.

Chamberlain didn’t launch her brand with a perfectly optimised funnel strategy (or at least I don’t think that was the case. Sadly, Emma wasn’t available to provide comment!)  in a pitch deck. She built it on cultural capital. It wasn’t about promising the world’s best beans or fastest shipping. It was about something far more powerful: alignment.

The sense that if you get it, you’re part of something. That alignment isn’t delivered through one clever ad, but through a constellation of messages and clever creative messaging that compounds over time.

It’s the unpolished TikToks of Emma making coffee in her kitchen, inviting you in without trying too hard. The pinterest boards full of cafe-core aesthetics that tap into a shared visual language. Instagram posts that feel personal, almost confessional, less ad than diary entry. The pop-up collaborations that give the brand a sense of scarcity and real-world texture.

No single touchpoint that screams buy now. But together? They make the purchase feel less like a transaction and more like joining a club you’re glad to have found.

The problem with the funnel isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s more that the reality of the world we inhabit is a lot messier and far more complicated. It’s a bit random, defies logic, and highly nuanced. By contrast, the funnel provides structure, organisation, and a simple evolution of decisions that on the surface seem logical. 

But in today’s world, Gen Z doesn’t want to be walked through a rational case for your product. They want affiliation. They want to see themselves reflected in the brands they choose, and, sadly, that kind of affinity can’t be A/B tested into existence.

It’s earned. Slowly. Through consistency, relevance, and a deep understanding of the cultural spaces your audience inhabits.

Maybe it’s time to stop forcing people through stages. What if we started designing for cultural relevance instead of linear conversion?

What would it mean to:

• Seed brand signals in the places people already spend their time?
• Partner with creators who expand your brand’s meaning in authentic, unscripted ways?
• Optimise for discovery that’s ambient and continuous rather than one-and-done?
• Prioritise being present over being persuasive?
  
  

Because Gen Z doesn’t move predictably from ad to checkout. They swirl. They bounce. They explore. They forget and remember. They take their time and then randomly act at 2am on impulse. Except, it’s not really an impulse because they’ve been exposed to multiple marketing touchpoints already. The outcome is ironically the same, the journey taken, though, radically different. 

Funnels are tidy. But the world we live in isn’t. And that’s precisely the point.

The real problem with the funnel isn’t just that it feels outdated in a digital world. It’s that it was always the wrong metaphor. It suggests we can map behaviour in stages, push the right messages at the right time, and reliably move people toward purchase like pieces on a board. 

But people don’t want to be moved. They want to find things in their own way. To discover a brand in the middle of a conversation. To see it reflected by someone they trust. To recognise it in a visual language they already understand. They want to choose in ways that feel personal and self-directed.

It might look messy. Unpredictable. Hard to track. However, it’s authentically human for all of those reasons. Maybe the real failure isn’t that the funnel no longer works, but that it ever pretended to describe how people actually make decisions. I don’t think buying has ever been purely logical. It’s always been part social, emotional, and cultural.

And that’s why the better metaphor isn’t a funnel at all, instead it’s a loop. Something continuous, recursive, and self-reinforcing. A pattern of encounters, impressions, and messages that builds over time. Not a single path we design, but an ecosystem we participate in.

That doesn’t mean marketing has lost its power. It simply means its role has changed. Maybe it’s time to let go of the idea that our job is to engineer conversions through perfect, optimised stages. Maybe it’s time to see our real task more honestly: earning a place in culture.

Not shepherding people through a funnel, but creating enough meaning, relevance, and alignment that choosing us feels like their idea. Not controlling the journey, but sustaining the loop. Not shouting for attention, but being worth returning to, again and again.

Gen Z broke the funnel. And maybe that’s the best thing they could have done for us.

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