What a Festival can teach us about Marketing

THERE IS NO FUNNEL! :)

This weekend, I found myself caught in a glorious tangle of experiences. On Saturday, I watched the UEFA Champions League Final between PSG and Inter Milan, a match that at times felt more like an arcade game than a game of football. And then on Sunday, I spent the afternoon at Pub in the Park, a sun-drenched festival of roasted lamb, swirling music, and laughter that echoed across the grass. Somewhere in the gaps between it all, I read Grace Kite’s piece on the “pizza funnel” a catchy metaphor that promises to boil marketing down to two simple ingredients.

It struck me how neatly these moments captured the essence of marketing itself. The final in Munich was thrilling but messy, full of high-stakes transitions that made me think of how consumers live, constantly shifting between moods, needs, and distractions. Pub in the Park, meanwhile, is one of my happy places (a big thing for an introvert!) a beautiful, swirling ecosystem of food, mood and memory. And yet, the funnel narrative offers a tidy, linear promise that feels comforting but ultimately hollow. Real life, like marketing, doesn’t work that way.

At the festival, there was no forced journey or bucketing of people from awareness to purchase. People wandered and drifted, guided not by a funnel but by a carefully curated environment of possibility. It didn’t impose artificial order, but it did competently guide people through the chaos to deliver winning experiences, offering myriad category entry points across food, music, and conviviality that nested together like a harmonious orchestra. This is the marketer’s first lesson: success comes not from imposing neat stages but from orchestrating complexity with intelligence and flair.

It’s easy to see why Grace’s pizza funnel resonates. Marketers are under pressure, and clarity is a rare and valuable thing. Her article is clear and succinct, exactly what senior stakeholders might want to see: like a margherita pizza, marketing reduced to two core ingredients: in-market and out-of-market.

However anyone who’s wandered the winding streets of Naples in search of Da Michele’s legendary slices knows that pizza is never that simple. The real craft of a great pizza lies in the details: the 24-hour fermentation of the dough, the intense heat of a wood-fired oven, the careful balance of basil, oil, and sea salt. Even the humble margherita’s tomato sauce is a lesson in precision, sweet San Marzano tomatoes, simmered low and slow with garlic and olive oil. It’s not just tomato and cheese, it’s a carefully composed harmony of craft, environment, and human skill. Reducing it to two ingredients misses the soul of the dish entirely, just as reducing marketing to a binary model misses the richness of the work we do.

Watching the Champions League Final made that clearer still. On paper, the job of a football manager is simple: score when you have the ball, stop the other team scoring when they have it. True in principle, useless in practice. The real craft lies in the transitional phases, how you lose the ball or the risks you are willing to take to score, how you regain it, how you exploit the smallest opening in the mess. So it is in marketing. Consumers live in a state of perpetual transition. They’re not passive players to be shuttled down neat slides, they’re drifting, shifting, influenced by everything from a friend’s comment to a new song on the radio. The real work is to be there, at the right moment, in the right way, to shape the game as it unfolds.

This is why the two-stage pizza funnel misses the mark as a guide to practice. Because marketing isn’t just about two states of mind, it’s about driving growth in ways that reflect the complexity of real life. We broaden the mix and range of what we sell, improving the price people are willing to pay by building brand meaning and relevance. We increase the volume sold by driving mental, physical, and algorithmic availability. These aren’t two ingredients, they’re a system of actions and effects, crafted in the swirl of real life.

MG OMD’s recent Belonging in Britain report reinforces this truth. It found that 65% of people belong to at least one community, and on average, to more than three. These communities aren’t static, they’re trusted, shifting spaces where identity and belonging live. 96% trust the opinions of their peers in these groups, and this trust shapes behaviour in ways no funnel can capture. Jonathon Haidt’s work on the Social Intuitionist model illustrates this trait perfectly. Marketing will be successful when it helps companies to meet people in those communities and moments, authentically, consistently, and with a craft that respects their complexity.

So let’s come back to Pub in the Park, with Jay Rayner’s piano notes in the air and Jack Savoretti’s voice closing out the night. No one there was following a neat journey. They were wandering, drifting, creating meaning in the swirl of life. Yet behind the festival’s magic was a deliberate design, a human craft that understood people’s moods and layered choices.

The real danger isn’t that the pizza funnel is too simple (successful simplicity should be celebrated), it’s that it’s too neat to be true. Marketing is not about pushing or bucketing people down steps; it’s about crafting the conditions for choice, showing up with authenticity and intelligence when the moment calls. It’s about understanding the craft behind a perfect pizza, or a final in Munich, or a festival in the sun, and having the skill to guide that beautiful mess into something that endures. That is no small challenge, but it is the only honest one.