Would you funnel your gran?

Would you funnel your gran?

What about your best friend? Or even that bloke on the street?

Personally, I don’t want to funnel anyone.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve banded around funnels as much as the next marketeer.

But I never really liked the term, it always made me kind of uneasy.

Language shapes the way we think. And a funnel sounds like you’re shaking them down, a kind of winnowing process.

It assumes we are here to get people where we want them to go. To push people in a certain direction. When our job is really to give people lots of options and let them decide.

The people who buy our products, or campaign, or give, or volunteer aren’t here to serve our ends.

If all someone does is sign one petition (that is part of a meaningful advocacy strategy – but that’s one for another time) and they come away understanding they’ve been a small part of a change for good, then that is wonderful. Well done us!

So what’s a better word?

Entrepreneur Daniel Priestley, whose ideas and writing I really like, uses ‘ascending transaction model’.

This sounds like every crap marketing jargony name ever, but I like the idea of something that goes upwards.

It sounds like more of a choice. They’re not just fated to plop downwards, unable to resist our gravitational pull.

Rather, they’re invited to travel with us up a kind of spiral staircase of value, where they enjoy good things that are good for them.

Some are content eating hors d’oeuvres in the atrium.

Whereas others are hungry for more. They want to head up to the main course, or maybe even get an expensive bottle of wine.

I wouldn’t funnel my nan, but I would encourage her to head upstairs if it meant she got something worthwhile when she got there.

So there you have it. A spiral staircase of value. I bet Seth Godin steals the term and makes another zillion pounds off it. Sometimes I think I’d like to funnel him.