• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 18, 2014

The spread of mobility and myriad connected devices have forced marketers to redefine what they consider the purchase funnel or customer journey. A panel at the Mobile Insider conference including representatives of companies including Dell, Blue Cross and Blue Shield and GroupM, confirmed that mobile has made it much harder to figure out how and why consumers are making decisions.

Jesse Wolfersberger, director of consumer insights, GroupM, declared the funnel “dead” because of the mobile and other pathways people take along the way to purchase. Instead of analyzing behavior by activity, he said the agency now tries to segment by people, or audience. He also said new attribution models have to be created to account for mobile, which in turn calls for having “smart math people” within an organization focused on the problem.

Tasha Kuebitz, a media marketing manager at Provide Commerce, said mobile has forced the company to focus much more on cross-device attribution, turning to outside partners for help tracking activity in the “cookie-less” environment of devices.