Customer Experience: From the Linear Funnel to Google and BCG Behavioral Science-Based Frameworks
- Silvia Cottone
- Aug 6
- 4 min read
Explore how customer experience strategies are evolving — from the traditional marketing funnel to Google and Boston Consulting Group behavioral science-based frameworks like the Messy Middle and Influence Maps.
In today’s dynamic business landscape, offering an innovative product or service is no longer enough to guarantee success. As marketers, we must go deeper into the intricate world of consumer decision-making to truly connect and resonate with our target audience. Understanding how and why individuals choose one option over another is not a mere academic pursuit; it is the fundamental compass guiding effective marketing strategies.
Changes in consumer expectations now demand faster, more personalized, and competitive services. As consumer ‘attention span continues to decrease, it is more difficult for brands to reach and interact with them. Brands must find ways to create meaningful customer experiences, and it is critical to understand how consumer decision making has evolved to continue to discover new opportunities for growth.
Behavioral science — the study of how psychological, emotional, cultural, and social factors influence decision-making — offers marketers powerful tools to better understand and shape consumer behavior. It changes the perspective on how we should see the journey that our customers take to purchase our product, our service, our brand.
The evolution of consumer decision-making process led companies like Google and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) towards shifting the focus from the traditional linear funnel to creating more dynamic frameworks that explore modern consumer´s behaviors, drivers, and barriers.
Let´s explore them together!
The Traditional Linear Funnel
For too long we have relied on the “funnel” metaphor to understand our customers' touchpoints. Customers start with several brands in mind and systematically narrow them down to a final choice. Their relationship with both the manufacturer and the retailer ends there.
The linear funnel is a model that depicts the consumer journey as an upside-down triangle divided into sequential stages [1]:
1. Awareness: People become aware of a problem that they want to solve.
2. Consideration: Prospects start looking into different products or services that can solve their problem.
3. Conversion: Prospects find a solution they like and become paying customers.
4. Loyalty: Customers continue to use the solution and recommend that product or service to other people.
Marketing funnels are important because they help you understand where prospects are in their buying journey so you can deliver the right message at the right time. However, it oversimplifies the consumer journey and doesn't account for the non-linear, complex paths consumers often take. Nowadays, customers evaluate a changing range of options and often interact with the brand through social media, even before and after a purchase. Therefore, we need to adapt. This knowledge is the indispensable starting point for any marketer aiming to navigate the complexities of today's market and build meaningful, lasting connections with their audience.
The insights gleaned from understanding consumer decision-making, particularly when informed by fields like behavioral science, allows us to explore beyond rudimentary tactics and towards sophisticated strategies that truly resonate with the human element.
The Messy Middle
First introduced by Google in 2020, the Messy Middle Framework emerged from research into how consumers manage the overload of information and options when shopping online and offline [2].
This model replaces the traditional funnel with a more realistic view: consumers loop between exploration (expanding options) and evaluation (narrowing them down), using cognitive shortcuts to make decisions. It is flexible and responsive to the customer’s needs and reflects the fact that each customer is on their own unique journey.
Understanding this non-linear journey helps marketers design strategies that align with real behavior, creating seamless, relevant, and engaging customer experiences.
Influence Maps
In recent research, the BCG introduced Influence Maps — a framework to navigate today’s highly dynamic and fragmented customer journey across multiple channels and devices [4]. It visualizes where and how consumer behaviors like searching, scrolling, streaming, and shopping occur and interact at all stages of the decision-making process.
Influence Maps offer marketers a fresh perspective on how consumers make purchasing decisions by focusing on the behavioral drivers that shape each journey. By leveraging consumer insights and AI, marketers can build maps tailored to their most relevant segments, helping them identify the four key behavioral types and understand which behaviors have the greatest impact at different stages. These insights enable brands to prioritize their investments more effectively, while designing targeted media and creative strategies that deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Conclusion
To stay competitive, marketers must move beyond the outdated linear funnel and adopt behavioral science-based frameworks that reflect how people truly make decisions today. These frameworks are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. The "Influence Map" helps identify where consumers are getting information and who they trust, while the "Messy Middle" describes how they process that information and make choices. By combining insights from the Messy Middle and Influence Maps, brands can build smarter, more effective customer experiences — grounded in real behavior, not assumptions.
Want to transform your marketing strategy? Start by mapping your customers’ real behaviors — and meet them in the messy middle.
Silvia Cottone
Behavioral Science Consultant & Worldwide Speaker
[1] Semrush (2025). The Marketing Funnel: What It Is and How It Works. Link.
[2] Think with Google. (2020). How People Decide What To Buy Lies in The ‘Messy Middle’ of the Purchase Journey. Link.
[3] Think with Google. (2020). Decoding Decisions: Making Sense of the Messy Middle. Link.
[4] Think with Google (2025). Mapping Today´s Customer Journey With BCG´s Derek Rodenhausen. Link.
Comments