“Trust is the one thing that changes everything. It’s not a nice-to-have; it’s a hard-edged economic driver. When trust goes down, speed goes down and cost goes up. When trust goes up, speed goes up and cost goes down.”
— Stephen M.R. Covey, Author of The Speed of Trust
The marketing industry has operated on a flawed premise.
For nearly a century, it has operated as if trust can be bought and attention can replace integrity. It built systems designed to treat humans as the “output” of an extraction-based funnel. People became customers became objects to be captured, segmented, squeezed, and converted.
However, the architecture is failing. Expectations for transparency and trust have become a core buying threshold. 86% of Americans say transparency from businesses is the most important factor in making a decision (Source-PDF: SproutSocial). Meanwhile, 81% of consumers say they first need to trust a brand to do what is right (Source: Edelman Trust Barometer). Brand loyalty is plummeting to historic lows. True brand loyalty dropped to 29% in 2025 (Source: SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index 2025).
Institutional trust is eroding. Human society is literally drowning in output: billions of hours of video, millions of posts, tweets, searches, and uploads happen every day, and more than 400 million terabytes of new digital data are produced on the internet daily — a scale of information creation that eclipses anything in human history.
The digital “maze” of marketing has become so loud and disconnected that consumers are no longer responding to the squeeze.
Tools aren’t the problem; it’s the mindset. To understand how to fix it, we have to look at the evolution of the marketing mix itself. We’ll trace the models that brought us here (McCarthy’s Industrial Pipe and Godin’s Purple Cow) to understand why the final pivot is no longer about what you sell, but who you are.
Phase 1: The Industrial Pipe (The 4 Ps)
In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy codified the management framework that would rule business schools for sixty years: the 4 Ps of Marketing.
At the time, it was the hallmark of marketing thinking for the Industrial Age. It provided a clear decision-making framework for moving mass-produced goods to a mass market.
- Product: Creating a viable offering that satisfies a market want.
- Price: Determining the cost strategy (skimming, penetration, etc.) to capture value.
- Place: Logistics and distribution of getting the product to the shelf.
- Promotion: Advertising and PR “shouts” to inform consumers that the product exists.
The Flaw: The Extraction Model
While effective for moving units, the 4 Ps model is fundamentally transactional. It views the market as a resource to be mined. It operates like a “Pipe”: you manufacture a product, set the price, put it in a place, and use promotion to push it through to a passive audience.
The primary driver here is Extraction. The goal is to maximize efficiency in moving the commodity from A (Business) to B (Consumer). But as the internet democratized information, the consumer stopped being passive. The pipe got clogged.
The pipe worked when scarcity and distribution were the problem. Today it’s a liability. The funnel assumes one-way motion and short attention spans: manufacture, push, convert, forget. That might move units, but it also trains organizations to treat customers as outputs instead of oxygen. And when the oxygen runs thin, the engine stalls.
For a full takedown of the funnel, read the piece: “The Marketing Funnel is Dead.” It goes deeper into the real work we can do, not the usual funnel lipstick.
“The funnel is a broken metaphor. It implies that customers are an output—that once they buy, they fall out the bottom. In reality, your existing customers are the fuel that powers your growth. If you don’t solve for them, the engine stalls.”
— Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder & CTO of HubSpot
Phase 2: The Attention Filter (The 5th P)
By 2003, the year I graduated highschool, the “Pipe” was fully institutionalized. The average consumer was hit with hundreds of ads a day. The growing “shouts” of Promotion kept growing and being ignored. Even as a pastor, I was taught the marketing funnel as a tool for evangelism (c.f. The Purpose Driven Church), a term now in the collective consciousness of marketers worldwide.
Enter Seth Godin‘s legendary book Purple Cow. Godin popularized the 5th P: Remarkability.
Godin argued that the old rule of “create safe, ordinary products and combine them with great marketing” was dead. In a world of boring “brown cows” (commodities), the only way to survive was to be a Purple Cow. You had to be worth talking about.
The Mechanism of the 5th P Godin’s model wasn’t about shouting louder (Promotion); it was about baking marketing into the product itself. After creating a remarkable product (the Purple Cow), successful businesses, and thus, marketers;
- Milk the Cow: Extract value from the remarkable thing while it’s fresh.
- Spread “Sneezers”: Focus on the innovators and early adopters who will spread the virus of your idea.
- Reinvest: Take profits and put them back into creating the next remarkable thing.
This shifted the economy from Transaction to Attention. With social media and cell phones, it worked brilliantly for two decades. But in 2026, we face a new problem that Godin’s model didn’t anticipate.
The Crisis: The Commoditization of “Remarkable”
In the age of Generative AI, “remarkability” is becoming one of many commodities.
AI models can generate a thousand “remarkable” headlines, images, and hooks in seconds. Experts estimate that 90% of online content could be synthetically generated by 2026 (Source: Europol Innovation Lab Report). They can simulate wit, creativity, and shock value at scale, while losing the soul of humanity.
When everyone has the tools to be a Purple Cow, the field is just full of mooing.
Attention is no longer the differentiator. It’s cheap. The only thing that remains scarce, and therefore valuable, is Integrity.
“Stop trying to be amazing and start being useful. I don’t mean this in a ‘Trojan Horse’ way where you pretend to be useful but are actually pitching. I mean a genuine, ‘how can we actually help you?’ way. Helpfulness is the new sales.”
— Jay Baer, Author of Youtility
Phase 3: The Prime Mover (The 6th P)
The final evolution of the marketing mix is the 6th P: People.
This isn’t a return to “the customer is always right” or “influencer personas,” but to the Human Nexus, where two or more people experience something “more true” together. People are both the ends and the means of business.
The 6th P governs and grounds the other five. Marketing is not a separate layer of gimmicks you add to a business; it’s a natural extension of the business itself. As someone once said, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” Marketing, done right, helps humanity, not exploits it.
The Evolution of Modern Marketing:
- The 4 Ps: Focused on the Transaction (Extraction).
- The Purple Cow: Focused on Attention (Noise).
- The 6th P (People): Focused on Integrity (Service).
88% of consumers say authenticity is a key factor when deciding which brands to support (Source: Stackla Post-Pandemic Consumer Report), so just be authentic. While AI can simulate a “Need” (through data) and a “What” (through content generation), it can never possess a “Why.” That and relationships are the human-only territory that makes the 6th P un-hackable.
The Human Nexus: Marketing as Connected Reputation Graphs
“Markets are conversations. There is no such thing as a ‘target market.’ There are only people, and they are talking to each other. If you are not in the conversation, you are not in the market.”
— The Cluetrain Manifesto (Rick Levine, et al.)
If we stop viewing marketing as a funnel (extraction) and start viewing it as a web (connection), the strategy changes entirely.
Whether digital or IRL, your business exists as a Reputation Graph. This is a web of relational connections between you, your team, your vendors, and your customers. This is your “Sphere of Influence.”
Why This is “AI-Proof”
Consumers now trust their peers and scientists equally (74%), while trust in CEOs and government leaders has plummeted (Source: 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer). Modern AI search systems (like Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT, or Perplexity) are now designed to map this web. They aren’t just counting keywords anymore; they are looking for “Brandlinks” and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust).
92% of consumers trust earned media (reviews/word-of-mouth) above all other forms of advertising (Source: Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Report). Intentionally giving away your EEAT, authentically with others, will gravitate the algorithms to you rather than making you a victim of them. You are already doing what AI is searching for.
The algorithms scour the web for digital proof that a human network is real, active, and trustworthy, looking for the one thing AI cannot fake: Human Consistency.
“86% of Americans say transparency from businesses is more important than ever before.”
Source: Sprout Social / HBR Analysis
Trust is Minted at the Nexus
Trust doesn’t happen when you shout at a crowd (4 Ps) or when you shock them (5th P). It happens at the intersection of a Genuine Question and a Trustworthy Answer. Websites that demonstrate clear first-hand experience (the extra “E” proving human trust already exists) see greater visibility stability during algorithm updates (Source: Moz Analysis on Google E-E-A-T).
When your proprietary Why (your core belief) aligns with a customer’s actual Need (their problem), you erase the gap between the business and the message. That connection is the only currency AI cannot counterfeit. AI isn’t creating these trust signals; it is simply mapping the ones that already exist in the real world. AI will always need data and humans to both give it data and to use its output.
We need not be slaves to the machines in our pockets or the ones on the other end.
The “Damage Control” Warning
The reason the “Funnel” feels like a rat race is that most businesses are using marketing to cover up a lack of alignment.
If your What (the product/service) is disconnected from your How and Why (your integrity), you aren’t marketing. You are performing Damage Control. You are spending money to convince people you are something you are not. That system is fragile. It breaks the moment the ads stop running or the algorithm changes. So, make sure ad spend is not tax you pay for a lack of integrity.
“AI can create content, but it cannot create connection. In a world of infinite noise, the most valuable resource is no longer attention—it is trust. And trust is a human-to-human protocol.”
— Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
Conclusion: Authentic Marketing Serves—Not Subtracts
The 6th P demands a new standard: Relational Integrity.
True marketing shouldn’t feel like an extraction. It shouldn’t subtract time, patience, or trust from your audience. It should be an act of service.
When you center your strategy on People, you build a system that is anti-fragile. You stop trying to “capture” leads and start fueling an engine that serves humans.
Erase the gap between what you do and how you market it. Stop building funnels. Slow the rat race. Start serving.
“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”
— Craig Davis, former CCO of J. Walter Thompson
Stigma Marketing & Development is a consultancy dedicated to erasing the gap between business and marketing. We build authentic marketing engines rooted in systems thinking and relational integrity.
