No more funnels, no more pies. The path-to-purchase has changed forever. It has become digital, social, multi-sensory and multi-dimensional. It has broken free from the shackles of time and space. We used to think that the world was “flat,” and that all roads led to a transaction. But to achieve loyalty in today’s world, we need to rethink the linear purchase funnel and its string of individual tactics and see our world as a continuous infinity loop, with purchase action at its core and storytelling at its heart.

We all know that shoppers don’t think about channels or marketing disciplines. They are driven by wants and needs for themselves or for others. Their path is always “on” — when and where they want it. They don’t need to be within proximity of a store to morph into shoppers and buyers. Like computers or smartphones, they are just in “sleep mode,” and the right stimulus can instantly awaken their shopper senses and purchase actions.

Any touchpoint in their journey could moonlight as a selling point, and they can be motivated to act regardless of where they are whilst delivering a real benefit for doing so — beyond the transaction. The rationale behind this is simple: The people we sell products to have changed and we need to change with them or be left on the shelf. Consequently, we can no longer think of marketing disciplines as sole operators within a specific time and place delivering stand-alone objectives: Advertising for love me; digital for engage with me; experiential for experience me; customer relationship management for have a relationship with me; and shopper marketing for buy me.

On the infinite path to loyalty, everything blends into one story, with no borders: harmoniously creating true fusion between the physical and virtual; between the people who manufacture brands and those who shop and consume them; between bought media and earned media; between retailers’ own marketing and those of their suppliers.

Kraft’s Wheat Thins campaign is a great example of this. People’s real tweets about their love for Wheat Thins was the basis of an experiential road-show campaign that unexpectedly rewarded them in the real world with a year’s supply of Wheat Thins. This provided rich content for the television commercial, which looped back again to more user-generated tweets.

Beyond what’s on offer on the shelf, shoppers want to buy stories — lasting authentic experiences and content that transcend the intrinsic promise of the product or service. When their world becomes the backdrop to the story, they are motivated to get more deeply involved, and more important, be incentivized to purchase and remain emotionally connected to the experience well beyond the time it was activated.

If we want our shoppers to stay with us for the long haul, we need to treat them as participants and not just spectators. Open the doors, let them in and get to know them. Dazzle them, humanize the brand and be social in the true sense of the word. They have better things to do, so we need to use their time wisely whilst giving them a reason to smile along the way, and feel good about their emotional and monetary investment in our brands.

One creatively impactful way of doing so is to turn their physical world into playgrounds, encouraging them to participate, purchase and pass on the experience in one continuous loop. New Balance achieved this with a real-time race to redeem virtual batons for big prizes at their flagship store (see sidebar).

Across the globe, North Face didn’t just sell its gear, it sold the experience of exploration to young Chinese adults, encouraging them to explore China and mark their territory by planting virtual red flags that reached the retail stores and beyond. What’s great about these examples is that they created multi-dimensional stories that mobilized people to act again and again, whilst connecting the store space, their social space and the brand space into one story, rather than activate multiple channel tactics. It’s the story that invites them to learn about us and us to learn about them.

It’s the story that creates lasting experiences, making our shoppers the heroes for buying our brands, and through the experience gaining content that is share-worthy. This, in turn, impacts other shoppers’ infinity paths, collectively creating new communities and an endless chain of purchase triggers.

The infinity loop, unlike the linear purchase funnel, doesn’t just carry one shopper’s “day in a life.” It also considers the impact of the moment-of-experience, post-transaction, as a key chapter that can encourage our shopper to come back again and mobilize others to come in. Rather than just having the “end” in mind, we must always be mindful of what will motivate them to return — or even become part of our sales force.

Doing this effectively, and creating infinite purchase loops, requires the creative collaboration of multi-disciplinary experts, including experiential, promotional, digital, public relations and customer relationship management. It also takes into consideration how the brand story, shopper behavior and retailer values can all seamlessly connect into one unified story that continuously moves people to goods and goods to people.

So beautifully complex — and yet dynamic — is the craftsmanship of infinite loyalty. Big ideas can come from everywhere and they don’t necessary have to be funneled from a television commercial and end at the store shelf.