Established model
AIDA
E. St. Elmo Lewis · 1898
Attention, interest, desire, action — the oldest description of the path from stranger to buyer.
Its place in the frameworkMarket Core›Customer Journey
What it does
More than a century old and still the underlying shape of most funnels drawn today. Its value now is diagnostic rather than descriptive: naming which step is failing is a far more useful question than asking why sales are down, and the four stages are enough structure to ask it.
- Reach for it when
- As a first cut at where a journey is losing people, before anything more elaborate is built.
- Where it stops
- It describes a linear path that almost nobody walks. Real journeys loop, pause for months and involve several people, and a funnel drawn this way makes that invisible.
E. St. Elmo Lewis, described in trade press from 1898; formalised in early advertising literature.
Why it sits at Customer Journey
The path from unaware to bought: what the stages actually are, where people stop, what moves them on, and how much of that can honestly be attributed.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- The buying stagesResearch on non-linear buying behaviour and the messy middle of consideration, against the classical linear funnel.
- Drop-offConversion analysis and the constraint logic of improving the largest loss rather than the most visible one.
- What moves people forwardBuyer-interview practice, and the trigger and switching research on what actually starts and completes a purchase.
- AttributionAttribution modelling and the incrementality critique: correlation with conversion is not evidence of contribution.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Customer Journey lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Omni CoreThis object ends at the purchase; the experience afterwards is designed in the Omni Core.
- Marketing ChannelsAttribution findings are what channel budget decisions should rest on.
- Business CoreThe pains and gains behind a stage transition are analysed in the value proposition.
- Data CoreJourney measurement requires instrumentation designed for it rather than assembled afterwards.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Customer Journey too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The consumer decision journeyBuying is a loop, not a funnel: people add options as they go, and the loyalty loop after purchase is where the next sale is decided.
- See, think, do, careGroup audiences by how close they are to intent, and judge each stage by a measure that belongs to it.
Elsewhere in Market Core
- PESTEL analysis
- SWOT analysis
- TAM, SAM and SOM
- The five forces
- Strategic group mapping
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- Segmentation, targeting, positioning
- Personas
- The marketing mix
- Marketing mix modelling
- The content marketing matrix
- STEPPS
- The 70:20:10 content mix
- Distribution intensity
- SPIN selling
- The product life cycle
- Disruptive innovation
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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