AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. That is a model that is used in marketing to describe the potential journey a customer might go through before purchasing a product or service. The AIDA model helps organizations focus their efforts when optimizing their marketing activities based on the customers’ journeys.
The mission of an advertisement is to attract a reader, so that he will look at the advertisement and start to read it; then to interest him, so that he will continue to read it; then to convince him, so that when he has read it he will believe it. If an advertisement contains these three qualities of success, it is a successful
advertisement.
From this first draft, other advertising pioneers, from Joseph Addison Richards to Fred Macey, Frank Hutchinson Dukesmith, and others.
Indeed if today in sales we like to call it a funnel, and it looks something like that:
Back then it was called a scale, and it seemed something like that:
Source: dragon360.com
Until the acronym AIDA was finally used in 1921, in a publication called Printers Ink, wherein “How to Write a Sales-Making Letter” by C.P. Russell explained:
An easy way to remember this formula is to call in the “law of association,” which is the old reliable among memory aids. It is to be noted that, reading downward, the first letters of these words spell the opera “Aida.” When you start a letter, then, say “Aida” to yourself and you won’t go far wrong, at least as far as the form of your letter is concerned.
The message was clear. For an advertising message to work out, it had to “lift” a certain weight of the potential customer’s attention and interest before it could become a sale.
Therefore, the AIDA model was supposed to give a clear framework to advertisers on how to carry the interest of a potential customer to become a sale.
Thus, the AIDA model was the progenitor of the sales funnel.
What makes up a basic AIDA model? Primarily four phases:
Attention
Interest
Desire
Action
Let’s look at each of them.
Attention
Since the dome of mass media, advertisers have fought for the conquest of a scarce asset: people’s attention. Any good salesperson knows this is the first step to take before it would be even possible to introduce the perspective of a sale.
Advertisers first, and marketers, later on, have learned how to grab the attention of potential customers, before they could be presented with the option of completing a sale.
InterestÂ
In the AIDA model, the second step or phase is interest. A salesperson knows that before a sale could be closed, attention must be kept, by understanding what motivates the other part. Maintaining the level of interest in the prospect is another critical step in the AIDA model.
DesireÂ
Once attention is captured, and interest is maintained, the salesperson has to generate excitement. This phase is critical, as the salesperson has to be able to bridge the gap between action and interest before it could close a deal.
Action
That is when the transaction gets completed, and the sale happens. The salespeople can trigger action by using several psychological levers, like scarcity, price, or else.
Does AIDA still make sense today?
The problem with the AIDA model is that it assumes we live in a linear world, where people take deliberate steps before completing a transaction.
This is true for all types of models that academic or practitioners use. However, the world is way more unpredictable, and the path people take before they become customers is hard to define in most cases.
On the other hand, a model should have a specific function – I argue – which is allowing the focus to whoever is using it. In short, practitioners should never fool themselves to believe that the world follows the model she uses.
But, she should use an AIDA model, to focus the effort on specific actions, to improve efficacy. In addition, the AIDA model might be not only unrealistic in many circumstances but also not appropriate for certain forms of selling.
To overcome some of the significant drawbacks of the AIDA model (such as not taking into account what happens after the sale) a few variations of the AIDA model have sprouted up.
Some of them are the AIDCAS (where satisfaction and confidence are added to the AIDA MODEL); or the CAB (cognition, affect, and behavior) Model which is the psychological equivalent of the AIDA model.
Whatever sales model you decide to pick, it is essential to remark that they help salespeople and marketers to focus their effort!
AIDA model examples
What are some real-world examples of the AIDA model in action? Let’s take a look.
The Coca-Cola Company
Coca-Cola follows a business strategy (implemented since 2006) where through its operating arm – the Bottling Investment Group – it invests initially in bottling partners’ operations. As they take off, Coca-Cola divests its equity stakes, and it establishes a franchising model, as long-term growth and distributionstrategy.
Marketers at The Coca-Cola Company are masters at utilizing the AIDA model to the company’s financial advantage. Below is a general overview of how this is achieved:
Attention
While the Coca-Cola brand is one of the most recognized in the world, the company nevertheless promotes its products across a variety of online and offline mediums such as social media, cinemas, sports games, events, and billboards.
In fact, Coca-Cola spends around $4 billion each year to attract the attention of consumers.
Interest
As consumers shift toward healthier drink options, Coca-Cola espouses the benefits of beverages such as Coke Zero and Diet Coke by highlighting their ingredients.
The company likes to point out that its low-calorie drinks do not come at the expense of the great taste consumers expect.
Desire
Once Coca-Cola has a consumer interested in its products, it may for example outline that they can continue to drink it without putting on weight.
Many marketing campaigns show casual, young, trendy consumers drinking Coca-Cola beverages and having fun with their friends.
These consumers embody the company’s core brand values and resonate with that innate human need to fit in.
Action
In its “Share a Coke” campaign, the company featured a powerful call to action urging consumers to purchase a drink and share their good times with friends and family on social media.
The call to action was short, punchy, memorable, and most importantly, convincing.
Lincoln
Lincoln is a luxury vehicle division of American automaker Ford. In this second example, let’s dissect one of its recent marketing campaigns in terms of the AIDA model:
Attention
In a 2019 ad campaign for the Lincoln Nautilus, the company worked with Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey.
The actor, who makes regular appearances in Lincoln promotions, immediately catches the attention of consumers as he starts to tell a story to friends seated around a pool.
Suspenseful music plays in the background.
Interest
Consumers are sucked into watching the advertisement as the combination of McConaughey, the music, and the cinematography results in a production quality that is more reminiscent of a movie trailer.
Desire
As the social gathering comes to an end, McConaughey passes a pool table on the way to his car.
Footage of him playing trick shots is interspliced with driving the Nautilus as its numerous features are listed on the instrument panel.
None of these features are explained in any detail, with the sequence simply ending with the tagline “Technology that helps put you in control”.
As McConaughey plays the white ball in an arc around the 8-ball, viewers are presented with a metaphor for the Nautilus’s ability to evade obstacles in the roadway and return to its original path.
Action
Lincoln then introduces the Lincoln Nautilus and its Co-Pilot360 package.
This package consists of a suite of driver-assist features that ties the promotional campaign together and encourages consumers to either visit the Lincoln website or one of its dealerships.
Other business tools and frameworks
Over the decades several business tools have been used and developed by practitioners to enable deliberate decision-making processes within an organization.
Let’s explore some other tools you might leverage on at a strategic level.
A business model is a framework for finding a systematic way to unlock long-term value for an organization while delivering value to customers and capturing value through monetization strategies. A business model is a holistic framework to understand, design, and test your business assumptions in the marketplace.
You can use the Ansoff Matrix as a strategic framework to understand what growthstrategy is more suited based on the market context. Developed by mathematician and business manager Igor Ansoff, it assumes a growthstrategy can be derived by whether the market is new or existing, and the product is new or existing.
In the FourWeekMBA growth matrix, you can apply growth for existing customers by tackling the same problems (gain mode). Or by tackling existing problems, for new customers (expand mode). Or by tackling new problems for existing customers (extend mode). Or perhaps by tackling the whole new problems for new customers (reinvent mode).
A one-page business plan is a simple tool to clear your mind. It focuses on three questions: What core problem am I solving? Who are my potential key customers? Where do I find them? It helps define the problem, profile the key customer, and find the key distribution channel.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables us to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
A SWOT Analysis is a framework used for evaluating the business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It can aid in identifying the problematic areas of your business so that you can maximize your opportunities. It will also alert you to the challenges your organization might face in the future.
The PESTEL analysis is a framework that can help marketers assess whether macro-economic factors are affecting an organization. This is a critical step that helps organizations identify potential threats and weaknesses that can be used in other frameworks such as SWOT or to gain a broader and better understanding of the overall marketing environment.
A comparable company analysis is a process that enables the identification of similar organizations to be used as a comparison to understand the business and financial performance of the target company. To find comparables you can look at two key profiles: the business and financial profile. From the comparable company analysis it is possible to understand the competitive landscape of the target organization.
Porter’s Five Forces is a model that helps organizations to gain a better understanding of their industries and competition. Published for the first time by Professor Michael Porter in his book “Competitive Strategy” in the 1980s. The model breaks down industries and markets by analyzing them through five forces
Is the AIDA model still relevant today?
The AIDA Model and the business tools shown in this article while a useful exercise for strategic thinking, are losing relevance nowadays.
That’s because with the advent of the digital, doing business did change its nature, and it did follow a different playbook.
The Amazon Flywheel or Amazon Virtuous Cycle is a strategy that leverages on customer experience to drive traffic to the platform and third-party sellers. That improves the selections of goods, and Amazon further improves its cost structure so it can decrease prices which spins the flywheel.
One of the ways to understand how the business world has changed is through the Amazon Flywheel Model.
In the old world, large corporations might be able to control massive resources centrally, thus preventing other businesses to enter a space. In short, by controlling and leveraging on the supply side they could keep their competitive positioning for a longer time. That implied a more linear logic of business, where it might have been easier to spot competitors.
As we moved to a digital age, bottom-up forces brought the business world to become way more unpredictable. Thus, the competition itself becoming nonlinear. Today your competitor might be coming from a place you would never expect.
That is why if you’re building a digital platform business, but also if you’re riding the wave of a large platform business (think of how many small businesses are powered by Amazon, Google, Facebook, and many other platforms) it is important to understand those businesses in terms of network effects.
Those network effects can be triggered by understanding that a competitive advantage can be created by focusing on customer experience and leveling that up.
It is important to highlight that business changes in nature as new ecosystems and mass adopted technologies become more accessible.
For instance, if you think about how coming developments like voice-enabled devices, IoT, digital twins, and others will break further the technological divide (when access to a certain technology is unevenly distributed) more and more people will be able to join in, thus enhancing this wave.
As other technologies like the Blockchain might become commercially viable to consumers, those might reshuffle again the playground and the rules of the game, thus making the nature of competition change with it!
AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. That is a model that is used in marketing to describe the potential journey a customer might go through before purchasing a product or service. The AIDA model helps organizations focus their efforts when optimizing their marketing activities based on the customers’ journeys.
Why is AIDA important?
The AIDA model helps companies prioritize their marketing activities and communication based on the different touchpoints potential customers might get to know a brand. It also helps differentiate between attention, interest, desire, and action, thus creating more effective journeys for potential customers with a repeatable process in place.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about three million business students, executives, and aspiring entrepreneurs in 2021 alone | He is also Head of Enterprise Sales for a high-tech startup, which he helped grow at a double-digit rate since the onset | In 2012 Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
