Well, it looks like Brian Haven and his cohorts at Forrester Research have done it again. And it's about time. It seems that a recent Forrester Research report entitled Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement issued August 08, 2007 took the entire industry to task. ( you can get the 17 page report by clicking here. A steal at $379.)

And I quote. "The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers' trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each of these is built from data collected from online and offline data sources. Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding."

Forrester interviewed 20 vendor and user companies for the study, including: Avenue A | Razorfish, Bazaarvoice, Biz360, BrandIntel, BzzAgent, TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony, Digitas, The Drilling Down Project, DuPont, LeapFrog, Loyalty Builders, MotiveQuest, Nike, Organic, Procter & Gamble, Publicis & Hal Riney, Reed Business, UGENmedia, Umbria, and Visible Technologies.

Here is the chart Brian used on his blog at http://www.birdahonk.com/home/ Click on it for one you can read.

It looks a lot like the lower intestinal tract and it certainly took a lot of guts to go against conventional wisdom in reference to their sacred marketing metaphor. Is this the place where I do my little smug church lady dance and sing "I Told You So. I Told You So." No, this is the place where I congratulate all of you who have been coming here week after week to hear me rant and rave about the broken this and the broken that and say, I think we are on to something here. I know IAPIA and their work on Adaptive Branding are on to something.

Of course Brian's revelation did not sit well with the powers that be, as he blogged, "I initially presented to my fellow marketing analysts an idea that suggest the funnel was dead. That didn't go over so well, which demonstrates how sacrosanct the funnel is to marketers. However, they also presented a good point that the current funnel (awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, loyalty) is meant to provide a framework for marketers to understand all buying decisions at a meta level. With that, I proposed, and published, that the funnel is more complex, not necessarily dead." So much for editorial integrity at Forrester. The shit is broken. Cop to it and move on to fix it.

Adweek's Bob Greenberg was not so conciliatory, last week. "If Forrester is right--and I believe it is--then clients and agencies need to rethink the metrics of success as well as the very work products we create to move customers through the funnel and out the other side as customers and brand evangelists.

The fact is, the role of traditional media is more limited than ever before. Our ad messages co-exist alongside thousands of other voices that consumers trust more, like their peers. In the past, marketing went deeper into the funnel, beginning with awareness and continuing into consideration and preference. But now the drivers of consideration and preference have shifted in droves to the Web and social media, confining traditional media to mere awareness drivers. This is a shift as dramatic as anything in our industry, with ramifications far and wide".

He goes on to state," I suspect the reason agencies haven't tackled consideration and preference is because they are far beyond their capabilities rather than simply outside their comfort zone. Real engagement requires entirely new teams of people--like information architects, data analysts and an army of technologists of various stripes. The traditional teams found at agencies simply do not possess the skill sets needed to tackle areas that are deeper inside the funnel, where purchase decisions increasingly take place."

I fear Todo, we are no longer in Kansas. This is where it starts to get interesting.

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