Is the AIDA model still useful?
Where the four-step model came from, how it turned into the funnel and the customer journey, and what research says about its fixed order.
Answer to the question
Is the AIDA model still useful?
Yes, the AIDA model is still useful as a checklist of jobs a message must do: earn notice, hold interest, build desire and prompt action. It is less reliable as a map of how every buyer moves, because a review of more than 250 studies and books found little support for any fixed hierarchy of effects.
Key takeaways
- A 2012 review of the model's development traces the sequence of awareness, interest, desire and action to writing from 1900 and 1925.
- In 1961 Robert Lavidge and Gary Steiner urged advertisers to start from what advertising is meant to do and to build measurement from the answer.
- Alex Schultz's Click Here turns the ladder into a funnel that places a whole audience at a stage, with a word-of-mouth loop back to the top.
- A review of more than 250 journal articles and books found little support for any hierarchy among the effects of advertising, and found that context shapes where advertising works.
- A short review of the model's history concluded that the sequence remains applicable to print, social, mobile and online advertising.
A 2012 review of how the AIDA model developed traces its four steps, attention, interest, desire and action, to writing from 1900 and 1925. The sequence has been adapted and argued over ever since, and it still opens marketing courses and agency briefs.
Whether the AIDA model is still useful depends on what a team asks it to do. In its earliest form it was a sequence for winning a buyer. Each step names a job that a message, a salesperson or a web page has to finish before the next job can work. That logic is simple enough to carry into a meeting, which is a large part of why it travelled. Accounts differ on the first word, attention in some and awareness in others, while interest, desire and action stay fixed.
Where the four steps began and how they spread
The model has been revised every time the media changed. The 2012 review of its development, by Bambang Sukma Wijaya, argued that its variables needed updating for digital communication and for marketing that starts from the consumer, and it proposed a longer sequence of stages built on the same idea. The revision extended the model and left its purpose in place. The review concluded that the sequence still applies to print, social, mobile and online advertising.
A second early landmark came in 1961, a little over sixty years ago, when Robert Lavidge and Gary Steiner urged advertisers to begin with a plainer question than which research technique to use: what is advertising meant to do? Measurement, they argued, should follow from the answer. That move from technique to purpose is what every stage model offers. If a message has a job, the job can be named, and its result can be counted.
A short review published in 2014 follows the history through three phases, early development, modern development and a digital phase, and the same four steps run through all of them. For a century, then, the AIDA model has served as a way of setting a brief, and that role has outlasted most of the media it was first applied to. A writer drafting an advertisement, a founder planning a landing page and a trainer teaching sales can all ask the same four questions in the same order, and the order reads as common sense.
How the ladder became a funnel for whole audiences
The ladder describes one buyer. The funnel describes a market. Alex Schultz, in Click Here, written for people who run digital campaigns, sets out a funnel of awareness, intention, decision and action, with a word-of-mouth loop that leads back to the top. He presents it as a way to place an audience overall, not as a path any single person follows, since people move backwards and forwards.
The funnel keeps the AIDA model's stages and changes the unit: desire becomes intention, and the count moves from one person to a share of an audience. The practical payoff is the choice of campaign, and a team can set the stage of the audience against the budget it plans to spend there. An audience that knows an offer exists but has little intention to buy needs a different message from one that has never heard of it, and the funnel makes that difference visible before money is spent.
Where a funnel counts people at each stage, the models gathered in 5 Consumer Behavior Models Every Brand Should Know ask what happens inside one choice, which is a different question. How many steps a buyer uses at all depends on the purchase: on the involvement line described in What are habitual, limited and extended decision making?, a routine repeat buy compresses the ladder to a glance, while a large unfamiliar one stretches every rung.
The top of the funnel also carries the most weight in growth evidence. The buying data behind Brand Loyalty Is Mostly Brand Size shows big brands winning mainly through more buyers, a pattern that fits the first stage of any funnel being the widest.
The four versions sit side by side in practice because each answers a different question.
| Version | Question it asks | Best use |
|---|---|---|
| Ladder | What must this message do next? | Drafting copy and pages |
| Purpose-first measurement | What is this advertising meant to do? | Setting measures |
| Funnel | Where does the audience sit overall? | Choosing a campaign |
| Journey | What do customers meet across touchpoints? | Coordinating teams |
What research says about a fixed order of effects
A review of more than 250 journal articles and books on how advertising affects consumers found little support for any hierarchy among its effects, whether beliefs and attitudes on one side or purchase and brand choice on the other. The same review found that where advertising works in the chain depends on context, including the goal of the campaign, the product category, the competition and the stage of the product in its life.
The review sorted effects into two families, intermediate effects such as beliefs and attitudes and behavioural effects such as purchase and brand choice, and described advertising as working through affect, cognition and experience. Read against that scheme, interest and desire sit with the intermediate effects and action with behaviour, so the four steps already cross the line between the two families.
That result separates two claims that are often bundled together. One is that a message has several jobs to do. The other is that the jobs always arrive in a fixed order. The review supports the first more readily than the second. A team that uses the AIDA model as a checklist loses nothing from that finding, while a team that uses it as a forecast of sequence has more to adjust.
Work on the customer journey points the same way from a different direction. Katherine Lemon and Peter Verhoef described customers who now meet a firm at many touchpoints across many channels and media, with experiences that increasingly happen in social settings, and they noted that delivering a good experience means coordinating several business functions. A single ladder cannot hold that many routes. A set of linked paths can. Their review also traced the roots of customer experience in marketing and gathered what is known about journeys and how firms manage them, which places the journey as a continuation of the stage idea and not a break from it.
Is the AIDA model still useful today?
Yes, the AIDA model works as a checklist of jobs, and less so as a map of movement. Used as four questions about a piece of communication, the AIDA model still organises a plan: does it earn notice, hold interest, build desire and make acting easy? Used as a claim about how every buyer moves, it meets the evidence above. The checklist works best when applied to one piece of communication at a time, with each step tested against what that audience actually does and not assumed. A team can keep all four questions and drop only the idea that buyers march from the first to the last.
Common questions
Is the AIDA model still useful?
Yes, as a checklist of jobs a message must do: earn notice, hold interest, build desire and prompt action. It is less reliable as a map of how every buyer moves, because a large review found little support for a fixed order of effects.
What does AIDA stand for?
Attention, interest, desire and action. Some accounts use awareness in place of attention.
Where did the AIDA model come from?
A 2012 review of the model's development attributes it to writing from 1900 and 1925.
What replaced the AIDA model?
Nothing has replaced it outright. Funnels place a whole audience at a stage, and customer journey work follows many touchpoints, but both build on the idea of stages.
Sources
Schultz, A. Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing and Advertising. Seed book; vault hub Books/Click Here.
Wijaya, B. S. (2012). The development of hierarchy of effects model in advertising. International Research Journal of Business Studies, 5(1), 73-85. doi:10.21632/irjbs.5.1.73-85 https://doi.org/10.21632/irjbs.5.1.73-85
Lavidge, R. J., & Steiner, G. A. (1961). A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness. Journal of Marketing, 25(6), 59-62. doi:10.1177/002224296102500611 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224296102500611
Vakratsas, D., & Ambler, T. (1999). How advertising works: What do we really know? Journal of Marketing, 63(1), 26-43. doi:10.1177/002224299906300103 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299906300103
Lemon, K. N., & Verhoef, P. C. (2016). Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 69-96. doi:10.1509/jm.15.0420 https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0420
Rehman, F. U., Javed, F., Nawaz, T., Ahmed, I., & Hyder, S. (2014). Some insights in the historical prospective of hierarchy of effects model: A short review. Information Management and Business Review, 6(6), 301-308. doi:10.22610/imbr.v6i6.1128 https://doi.org/10.22610/imbr.v6i6.1128