The funnel was never neutral: What Asia’s markets reveal about Western marketing theory

In 2007, Singapore entrepreneur Johnson Han launched two soft drinks called Anything and Whatever, which sold 3.5 million cans in the first month. The drinks became popular due to a joke-based naming concept that traveled through social networks and fan-made commercials. Western marketing theory, however, struggled to predict this phenomenon, as it was based on a flawed model of human behavior.

The funnel, a popular marketing theory, assumed rational, sequential decision-making, stable preferences, and individual actors unaffected by social context. However, decades of evidence has shown that this model is inaccurate, as demonstrated by Nobel laureates in economics who proved that people are not self-maximizing calculators.

Southeast Asia's social commerce market has grown rapidly, reaching US$47.6 billion in 2025 and projected to reach US$186.5 billion by 2030. The region's consumers largely skipped the desktop era and instead accessed the internet through mobile devices within social feeds. Consequently, 82% of consumers in Southeast Asia discover new products via social platforms, making discovery, trust, and purchase a natural part of the shopping experience.

The funnel's perception of consumers as individual decision-makers at the end of a journey is inaccurate in social markets. Instead, buying was always a social act, with consumption serving as a means to signal identity, group membership, and social position. Social platforms in Southeast Asia have transformed content, community, and commerce into one environment, making this process the default from the beginning.

Influential TikTok creators in the region have tripled their number, generating over US$1 million in sales volume, acting as trusted nodes in social networks and performing the role of knowledgeable friends at scale.

While the funnel remains functional for structuring sales pipelines, thinking about organizational stages in B2B procurement, and planning media budgets, it cannot describe how consumers actually behave in social markets. The funnel's original purpose was to represent how people might buy things if they were rational, had no friends, and made decisions sequentially without interruption.

However, Asia's digital markets have made this gap apparent, as consumers' purchasing behavior is inherently social and rooted in cultural capital and habitual dispositions.