There's a post doing the rounds about how the traditional marketing funnel is dead, replaced by something called the "marketing playground."

Based on Google's research into how people actually buy, customers don't move neatly from ad to landing page to offer to sale anymore.

Instead, they bounce around. They see your YouTube video here, then a social post there, a review, a live event, your website, all random, all chaotic, all building trust at their own pace until they get in touch when they're ready.

It's a good description. I just don't think it's a new behaviour.

Customers have NEVER moved neatly, from ad to landing page to offer to sale. It's a myth.

This is what marketing has always done, with different tools.

Customers needing multiple touch points before they buy isn't a 2026 phenomenon. It's what direct mail was doing decades before the internet existed, a leaflet here, a follow-up letter there, a catalogue, a phone call, all chipping away at trust until someone was ready to buy.

Online re-marketing has been running the exact same playbook for years, just with pixels and ad platforms instead of envelopes and stamps.

What's actually changed isn't buying behaviour. It's the environment and the tools.

The "playground" feels chaotic because there are now a hundred more places for a customer to bump into you, not because customers have fundamentally rewired how they come to trust a business, or how they come to a buying decision.

The average customer is indecisive and risk averse. They have always needed multiple nudges before converting, the nudges just used to come through the letterbox.

And that's just the ones who DO convert. The vast majority don't.

What has genuinely changed though, is saturation and fatigue.

Where I think there's real substance is this: tech has lowered the barrier to entry so far that everyone is now playing the same game, and most are doing it badly.

Every business is chasing the same attention in the same feeds, and usually doing it badly. Hype, sensationalism, clickbait. Many are putting out offers and lead magnets that simply don't align or resonate with their market, that's if they've even thought about target market at all.

Let me tell you from experience: you REALLY think about these things when you have to shell out a few hundred quid in print and pay to get it through thousands of letterboxes.

That makes you focus.

When you can throw up dozens of posts on social media, send 'free' emails, you give it less thought, and the lazy, easy way to grab attention becomes click bait headlines and outlandish promises.

The result is customers who are jaded. Good marketing and good offers have customers salivating, not jaded.

They've been offered enough mediocre PDFs in exchange for their email, followed by enough generic spam, that they become desensitised.

That's not a new buying psychology. That's market fatigue from too many businesses doing the same thing badly.

Why the playground framing is still useful, even if it's not revolutionary.

Here's where I'll give credit.

Thinking in terms of a playground rather than a corridor is a genuinely useful mental shift for how you build content, even if the underlying customer behaviour isn't new.

If you're still treating every piece of content as step two of a rigid three-step funnel or sequence, you're going to get frustrated when customers don't behave like that, because most of them never did.

Building standalone pieces of value that someone can land on randomly and still get something from, that's just good practice regardless of what you call the model.

But don't mistake a better way of describing the journey for a fundamentally different journey. The mechanics haven't changed.

People still need to see you, trust you, and be offered the right thing at the right time, via the right message (and sometimes, via the right media) before they'll buy.

The bit that actually matters.

Whether you call it a funnel, a playground, or whatever, none of it replaces the fundamentals.

Offer the right person the right solution, and it mostly doesn't matter how you sell it. Multiple touch points, content that stands on its own, re-marketing that catches people when they drift, all of that works.

It worked through the post, it worked through email, and it works through whatever platform comes next.

The tools will keep changing. The names for the model will keep changing. The thing that actually moves a sale, relevance, won't ever change.