The Funnel Isn’t Broken, It’s Not Enough

For years, marketers relied on a simple model: awareness leads to interest, interest leads to action. The funnel was clean, predictable, and linear.

But that world no longer exists.

Today’s audiences don’t move in straight lines. They scroll, skip, search, engage, disappear, re-engage, and convert when it suits them, sometimes days, weeks, or months later. Often, the touchpoint that sparks action isn’t even the one the marketers have planned for. This is nonlinear marketing, and for brands across Qatar, the region, and beyond, adapting to it is no longer optional.

From Funnels to Feedback Loops

The traditional marketing funnel assumes that consumers move from awareness to action in a single, directional flow. But in reality, most people don’t follow that path. According to McKinsey & Company , the majority of consumers engage with brands across three or more channels before making a purchase. That includes everything from social and search to influencer content, in-store experiences, and messaging platforms.

Rather than a straight line, engagement now looks more like a loop: where people discover, drop off, re-encounter, and revisit a brand multiple times before deciding. What matters isn’t just where they start, but how many times they’re meaningfully touched before they convert. HubSpot ’s 2024 report echoes this shift, noting that omnichannel strategies now outperform single-channel campaigns by more than 250% in conversion effectiveness. The key driver isn’t reach, it’s consistency and presence, across the entire loop.

As Harvard Business Review notes, in today’s attention economy, it’s no longer the funnel shape that matters, it’s the brand’s ability to remain relevant and recognizable as attention fragments across platforms.

Nonlinear Marketing in the Gulf

In the Gulf, and particularly in Qatar, this evolution is already playing out. Brands are moving away from traditional media-heavy campaigns and leaning into influencer partnerships, experiential activations, and community-led storytelling. In the retail and real estate sectors, micro-influencers and immersive brand experiences are building stronger audience relationships than conventional ads. Meanwhile, government-led campaigns are becoming more interactive, using storytelling, events, and digital touchpoints that allow audiences to participate, not just observe.

Deloitte highlights that in the Middle East, the traditional marketing funnel is being replaced by nonlinear, customer-centric journeys, where consumers engage with brands across multiple touchpoints in a non-sequential manner, necessitating adaptive, experience-led strategies. Moreover, Deloitte’s research indicates that today’s customers are more loyal to ‘experiences’ than to brands, products, or companies.

Why This Matters for Comms Agencies

At Pin&Notch, we see this shift not as a disruption, but as a necessary adjustment to how people behave. Communications today must account for a nonlinear audience journey, where attention is earned gradually, and credibility is built over time. Our role isn’t to push messages through a funnel. It’s to create signals that stay consistent across platforms, build trust at every touchpoint, and show up wherever the audience already is.

In this kind of landscape, PR becomes more than media relations. It becomes the connective tissue across a brand’s many voices and moments. It keeps tone, timing, and positioning aligned: even when the audience is coming and going from different angles. It ensures that the same message resonates whether it’s heard through a tweet, a podcast, a panel event, a newsletter, a long-form article, or found through an SEO-optimised search result.

What Brands Should Be Thinking About

What brands need now is a mindset shift. Relevance is no longer about big awareness campaigns. It’s about being present in the moments that matter, repeatedly. Content needs to be built to recirculate, not expire. Messaging must adapt to audience context, not fixed funnels. Measurement should focus on return engagement and emotional traction — not just first-click conversions. And most importantly, brand voice must remain strong and clear, even as formats and channels change.

Final Thought

The funnel isn’t broken, it’s just no longer the whole picture. Audiences don’t convert once; they connect in cycles. They revisit, pause, and stay loyal to brands that feel present, purposeful, and familiar across time. For communications professionals, the challenge now is to build strategies not just to be seen, but to be remembered – wherever in the loop that connection begins.