A basketball possession and a marketing funnel have more in common than most people assume. Both are trying to move attention deliberately from one state to another — defender’s attention, customer’s attention — using a sequence of small, real actions instead of one big hopeful gesture.
What years on a team taught me, and what I keep re-learning in marketing, is that the flashy move is rarely the smart one. A good possession is built from three or four unremarkable, well-timed actions that add up to an open shot. A good campaign is usually built the same way — unglamorous, sequenced, and boring to watch from the outside right up until it isn’t.
I’m drawn to digital marketing for the same reason I’m drawn to psychology: it’s applied human behavior with a scoreboard. You can be wrong about people quietly for a long time in most fields. In marketing, the numbers tell you fast. That feedback loop is what keeps me interested — and it’s what I’ll be writing about here, from the athlete’s side of the analogy as much as the marketer’s.