From the Funnel to the Gravity Funnel
The funnel was never wrong about the end. It was silent about the beginning. The first correction in this lineage was to stop pushing customers down a pipe and start earning the pull that brings them in. That correction had a name: the Gravity Funnel.
This essay is part of the Marketing Helix development history. It records how the thinking moved at the time, including an argument against the funnel that the model no longer makes: the funnel is kept, and the Helix describes what happens inside it. The current model is in the sixteen principles. The full record is the Model History.
In one line
The marketing funnel describes the final purchase decision but not what makes a customer arrive ready. The Gravity Funnel was the first fix: replace pushed demand with earned pull. Both are legacy steps toward the canonical Marketing Helix.
For most of a century, the marketing funnel was the default picture of how a stranger becomes a customer. Awareness at the wide top. Interest, consideration, and intent narrowing through the middle. Purchase at the spout. It was simple to draw, simple to teach, and simple to instrument: every stage became a number, and every number became a meeting. Its durability was earned. In a media environment where brands controlled exposure and customers had little independent information, the funnel approximated reality closely enough to plan against.
The funnel's quiet assumption is that the brand supplies the energy. Customers do not move on their own; they are moved: advanced from stage to stage by impressions, retargeting, sequences, and spend. Stop pushing and motion stops. This is the funnel as a pump. It is a model of applied force, and like any model of applied force, its cost scales with the work it has to do.
What the funnel never claimed to explain.
The honest limitation of the funnel is not that it models the final decision badly. At the decision itself, it remains useful: an aligned customer really does narrow, compare, and commit. The limitation is that the funnel begins its story at awareness, as if awareness were the start of the relationship.
By the time a modern customer reaches a brand's funnel, they have often already read a comparison article, scanned reviews, absorbed a friend's recommendation, and formed a quiet verdict the brand never witnessed. The decisive work happens before the funnel's top. You can optimize every stage it contains and still lose, because the variable that decided the outcome was never inside the diagram.
The funnel measures what happens at the end. It is silent about what makes a customer arrive at that end already aligned, or already opposed.
The Marketing Funnel
One entry at the wide end. Sequential stages. A narrow exit at purchase. The funnel records where a customer is in the company's process. It does not describe what is changing around the customer on the way.
Replace push with pull.
If brand-supplied force is the funnel's engine, the first real correction is to ask whether force is the right mechanism at all. Watch the brands that win without outspending anyone and a different pattern appears. They are not pushing harder. Customers arrive pre-disposed, recommend unprompted, and return without a campaign in flight. Something is drawing demand inward rather than driving it forward. The natural word for a force that pulls toward a center is gravity.
The Gravity Funnel was the name for that reframing. Keep the funnel's genuine strength, a disciplined system for converting demand at the moment of decision, but invert the assumption underneath it. Demand is not manufactured by outside pressure; it is attracted toward a center that has accumulated mass.
Superseded figurePush Versus Pull
Left: broadcast force radiates outward from the brand, spending energy to overcome inertia, and passes the customers by. Right: the customer draws aligned messages inward. The Gravity Funnel moved marketing from the left picture to the right one.
Demand falls toward earned trust.
In physics, gravity is not applied by an external agent. It is generated by the mass of the object itself. The Gravity Funnel said the same of brands: one that has earned trust generates its own field, and aligned customers fall toward it. The funnel's machinery still runs at the decision point, and it runs better when the demand reaching it is already warm.
The Gravity Funnel, developed through Digilu, was built to act on aligned demand precisely when it appears: the applied system that captures pull at the moment trust, relevance, and readiness converge.
Superseded figureDecision Gravity
The same conversion moment, seen as a well. The sheet bends around the customer at its center; a message that has earned trust is drawn closer with every turn, and one that has not drifts past. The customer is not pushed to the decision.
Why the Gravity Funnel could not be the end of the line.
The Gravity Funnel solved the right problem and exposed a deeper one. Once you name gravity as the mechanism, you owe an explanation of the gravity itself. What generates the mass? Why does one brand pull and another, with a larger budget, does not? The Gravity Funnel described the capture of pull at the decision point, but the pull had a source upstream that a funnel shape, even a gravitational one, was the wrong geometry to hold.
That is the edge this first essay leaves deliberately exposed. The correction from push to pull was real and necessary. It is also incomplete. To go further, the next step had to leave the funnel shape behind and name the attraction on its own terms. That step was Fly By Gravity.
The Gravity Funnel, answered plainly.
What is the Gravity Funnel?
The Gravity Funnel is a marketing model, developed through Digilu and documented by Mike Millett as the first step in the lineage of the Marketing Helix, that replaced the push-based marketing funnel with earned pull. Where the traditional funnel assumes a brand must push customers from stage to stage with impressions and spend, the Gravity Funnel holds that a brand which has earned trust generates its own pull, and aligned customers are drawn toward it. It kept the funnel's discipline at the moment of decision and changed the mechanism behind it from applied force to attraction.
What is the difference between the marketing funnel and the Gravity Funnel?
The marketing funnel describes the purchase decision as a series of stages a brand pushes a customer through, from awareness at the top to purchase at the bottom. The Gravity Funnel keeps that decision point but changes where the energy comes from: instead of brand-supplied force, demand falls toward a brand that has accumulated trust. The marketing funnel is a model of applied force whose cost scales with the work it has to do; the Gravity Funnel is a model of earned attraction.
Is the Gravity Funnel still a current model?
No. The Gravity Funnel is a legacy term. It was the first of three steps in the lineage of the Marketing Helix: the Gravity Funnel named the shift from push to pull, Fly By Gravity traced the pull to trust acting like mass, and the Marketing Helix, the canonical model since June 2026, added the axis of time so that aligned encounters compound. As a description of customer behavior, the Marketing Helix replaces the Gravity Funnel.
Next: naming the attraction itself.
From the Gravity Funnel to Fly By Gravity
If gravity is the mechanism, the pull has a source. Naming that source meant naming the attraction itself, separate from the act of capturing it.
Read essay two →From Fly By Gravity to the Marketing Helix
Attraction was still a snapshot. The customer is in motion and aligned encounters compound. The helix holds both. The final model.
Read essay three →