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Flip the Funnel

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Flip the Funnel

How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

Wiley,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

It’s time to revamp your marketing strategy: Spend less time and money on acquiring customers and more on keeping them.

Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Companies traditionally use the mass media to market their products and services, spending much of their budgets on hit-or-miss communications. They hope their messages will somehow penetrate the media din and reach a sufficient number of receptive prospects who will go out and buy their goods. Without a strategy for retaining clients, firms repeat this expensive process again and again. Marketing consultant Joseph Jaffe says this is completely backward. Instead, companies should focus on enhancing the experiences of their existing clients, converting them into engaged, enthusiastic advocates who will provide powerful, credible word-of-mouth advertising. Although many of Jaffe’s ideas are a bit commonplace – his general hypothesis outlines how customer retention is more advantageous than customer acquisition – getAbstract finds that his book presents a logical, cogent case, backed up by many colorful examples. Despite the book’s repetition and visually messy layout, marketing executives are sure to benefit from its thoughtful, lively dissection of traditional marketing.

Summary

The Funnel Is Flawed

Think of the traditional marketing process as a funnel through which information flows in four stages: “awareness, interest, desire and action” (AIDA). The wide end of the funnel is the awareness stage, where companies spend most of their marketing budgets on advertising to gain notice from a broad group of consumers. As the funnel narrows, it filters the pool of perspective buyers and the interest stage becomes important. However, creating and maintaining an appeal to cynical or apathetic consumers amid today’s frenzied media climate is a challenge. The next phase of the funnel metaphor is desire, where some consumers make a conscious decision to purchase your offering. Making this breakthrough is tough in a world where thousands of secret sauces hotly contend with each other, but creating “intent to purchase is 95% of the battle won.” After desire comes action. In this phase, consumers will buy your product, as long as they aren’t distracted by the garish displays for thousands of other products on the shelves or by some Twitter post in the online world. The funnel is flawed. The main reasons are:

  • It’s obsolete – The funnel depicts...

About the Author

Joseph Jaffe is the president of Crayon, a consulting firm that assists clients with their social media and new media strategies. Jaffe also hosts Jaffe Juice TV, a web video show on marketing, and publishes Jaffe Juice, a marketing blog and audio podcast.

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