For decades, marketers have relied on the “funnel” to understand the path from awareness to purchase. But in 2025, the funnel has collapsed. The reality is no longer linear — it’s circular.

Customers don’t move from awareness → consideration → decision in neat stages. Instead, they loop: they discover, evaluate, purchase, review, share, and re-enter the cycle with new expectations.

What This Means for Brands

• Retention is the new acquisition. It costs up to 5x more to win a new customer than to keep an existing one. Yet too many businesses still allocate the majority of their budget to first-touch campaigns.
• Advocacy is the new advertising. A loyal customer who shares their experience on LinkedIn or WhatsApp is now more powerful than any billboard.
• Experience is the new differentiator. Products can be copied, ads can be outspent, but how a customer feels at every touchpoint is unique.

Fermata’s Perspective

At Fermata, we encourage clients to stop asking “How do we get more leads?” and instead ask:

• How do we keep the leads we already converted?
• How do we turn customers into repeat buyers and advocates?
• How do we design campaigns that feed into a loop, not a funnel?

The companies winning today aren’t those with the loudest ads, but those creating the most seamless, repeatable, and memorable customer journeys.