Post-funnel acquisition.

The funnel assumes a one-way journey: awareness → consideration → purchase. For modern consumer brands, that’s nonsense.

The loop

Customers discover your brand on TikTok. They compare on Reddit. They remember you three weeks later when an email lands. They buy on their phone at 11pm. Then — and this is the part the funnel misses — they become the next acquisition channel for someone in their network.

The job isn’t to push people through a funnel. It’s to build a loop: each customer acquires the next one, at a declining CAC as the loop compounds.

What this changes

If you believe in the loop, you stop optimising last-click. You start measuring incremental lift and downstream referral. You treat retention media as acquisition media. And you stop trying to attribute every dollar — because most dollars are compounding, not converting.