The Future of Marketing: 3 Connection Techniques You Need to Master

The Evolution of the Funnel and Earned Authority

The future of marketing will not be won at the top of a funnel, because the traditional, linear funnel is dead. Today's consumers, led by Gen Z, control their own discovery. They no longer go looking for polished corporate adverts; they encounter information dynamically, through social discovery and algorithmic feeds.

The internet, meanwhile, is suffering from ambient chaos: content overload, AI-generated slop and constant digital noise. Traditional SEO is losing ground as tools like ChatGPT change how people find answers. The new currency of digital visibility is earned authority. To appear in AI-generated answers, or simply to cut through the social noise, a brand must be consistently cited by trusted human filters: niche newsletter writers, Reddit threads, expert articles. The brands that win from here will be the ones that disrupt expectations, build compounding trust through serialised content, and blend digital and physical experiences seamlessly. Those are the three techniques worth mastering, so let us take them in turn.

Breaking the Mould: Absurdity and Schema Incongruity

In a world flooded with digital pollution, consumers have built mental shields to block out traditional advertising. To get past those shields, brands are increasingly turning to absurdist marketing.

As we put it in Marketing Wins, "genuinely creative marketing ideas can capture attention, generate buzz, and create a lasting impression", and that creative spark is the necessary foundation before you can drive anyone towards the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT). Absurdity executes this timeless principle by leveraging schema incongruity. When an advert uses surrealism, hyperbole or anthropomorphism, as Skittles' bizarre, reality-bending commercials do, it presents information the viewer's existing mental model cannot file neatly away. That moment of confusion briefly disarms the cognitive defences, and the resolution lands as pleasure, building positive associations with the brand.

For Gen Z, this chaotic, lo-fi, "brain rot" humour has become cultural currency; we unpack that audience properly in our Gen Z marketing guide. The actionable strategy? Stop striving for corporate perfection. Trade polished billboards for unhinged, highly shareable micro-content that invites fans to participate and remix the joke.

The Era of Owned Episodic Content and Merchant Entertainers

Sporadic social posts are no longer enough. Brands need to behave like media companies, creating always-on, serialised video or audio series: a branded podcast, a YouTube show, a recurring format an audience can subscribe to.

This shift to episodic storytelling builds compounding engagement. By using retargeting and sequential videos, you repeatedly expose your audience to your narrative, fuelling the know, like, trust loop. Viewers come back for the story, which lets the brand control the message and position itself as a trusted industry authority. We have written before about why podcasting is such a powerful awareness channel, and the same compounding logic applies to any owned series.

That trust is also fuelling the rise of the merchant entertainer. The buying journey has collapsed into a single step: shop while you watch. Creators and brand hosts are no longer just driving awareness; they are the digital storefront. Marketers should treat their authentic content creators as a vital sales team, repurposing long-form episodic content into bite-sized shorts to drive social commerce.

This is the technique we give an entire chapter to. In Chapter 8 of Marketing Wins, Creating a Branded Video Series, we walk through how to plan, produce and sustain an owned series of your own, so the always-on model described here becomes a repeatable process rather than a leap of faith.

The Omnichannel Reality

The most advanced digital strategies still need a physical footprint. The future of marketing is omnichannel: blending the convenience of digital media with tangible offline engagement, like taking a viral TikTok campaign and tying it to an immersive, real-world pop-up event in a local community. The screen starts the relationship; the physical moment makes it memorable.

Is your brand playing it too safe? Tell us how you plan to break the mould using #MarketingWins on LinkedIn or X.

These techniques may look futuristic, but the principles underneath them, human psychology, strategic planning and creative awareness, are timeless. Marketing Wins is the blueprint for mastering those foundations, and the foundations are exactly what the next era of tools will be built on.